Restaurants

It was fun while it lasted, but the Tiki Torch Restaurant and Bar has been extinguished after less than six months. Last summer, the tiki bar/restaurant took over the former home of the Okoboji Inn at 5280 West 25th Avenue in Edgewater. But Mykel Martinez, who’d owned the legendary 15th…

Mazel Tov to Deborah Leebove, daughter of Joyce Foster (the former city councilwoman who was recently sworn in as a state senator), for reaching the finals of the Manischewitz National Cooking Competition. The Denver resident had her recipe chosen out of thousands, and is now one of six finalists for the…

A second Star is now shining in the metro area — and just in time to celebrate today’s start of the Chinese New Year.Last week, after a few delays, Heaven Star finally opened at 7600 West 120th Avenue in Broomfield. This is a second restaurant from the folks who brought…

Thanasi Foods LLC, a Boulder-based company,makes such unPC-sounding branded food products as Stubb’s and Jim Beam beef jerkys.In March, markets will start stocking its latest creation: BIGS, larger-than-average sunflower seeds (hence the name) with the flavors of Vlasic pickles, Frank’s RedHot sauce and even bacon, a miracle made possible by the…

The lovely space at 2191 Arapahoe Street is about to swallow another restaurant. On Friday, the Carrera family sent out this note:Buenos Aires Grill will be closing its doors for business as of February 16, 2009. We sincerely appreciate all the support you have given us over the years. It…

Cap’n Crunch’s Touchdown Crunch Quaker Rating: Three spoons out of four Cereal description: If you’re not Osama bin Laden, you’ll recognize the standard Cap’n Crunch design: yellowish corn and oat squares that puff with deliciousness at their center. Supplementing the main attraction just in time for Super Bowl week are…

This is awesome. No, I mean really awesome. A silver lining to this shitty economy. A perfect fusion of two things I like: free booze and dumb bar games. I’m talking about “Rock paper scissors” Mondays at Nine75 (975 Lincoln Street), the new promotion whereby customers get to challenge their…

Mark Tarbell didn’t get the doors of his new place, Mark & Isabella, open by the end of December, as he’d predicted to Jason Sheehan, but he came close. Driving through Belmar this weekend, we saw that his new Italian restaurant is up and running in the former home of…

Venue opened just a few months ago in the former home of 8 Rivers. But already on February 3, it’s offering its first wine dinner, pairing up with Fran Kysela, who was named one of the top selectors of wine by Wine Advocate. And the pairing has proved such an…

We Candy Girls do love us a good gummy candy, so the Starburst GummiBursts seemed like a promising choice. Starburst as a brand has proven to have a strong-enough flavor that it transfers itself with some success to other types of candy; the Starburst jellybeans, for example, are favorites for…

There’s nothing better than discovering a new favorite restaurant, and given the abundance of vegetarian-friendly offerings on this year’s Denver Restaurant Week menus, I think I might have a few new favorites soon. Restaurant Week runs from February 21-27 this year (some restaurants will extend it another week or so),…

The last time I was in Pulcinella, the downtown Denver outpost of a homegrown chain of Italian eateries, it was to try the special holiday cocktail — a concoction just as sweet as the restaurant’s cozy little bar area. But when I popped by last night, at prime dinner time,…

The Recovery Room, a longtime hole-in-the-wall bar at 819 Colorado Boulevard serving the east Congress Park neighborhood as well as the good doctors, nurses and health-care professionals from nearby hospitals and medical centers, has flatlined. The door is boarded up and a posted Colorado Department of Revenue sign reads: “Warning…

Yesterday, I noted that Aix’s website had gone dark — as its dining room was last Saturday night. But because 17th Avenue is such a solid restaurant neighborhood, I don’t think anyone out there thought the space would stay empty for long. I just got off the phone with Keith…

  What is it about brunch that makes it the perfect meal? Sure, it’s a blending of two meals, so that means it should be twice as good as just breakfast or lunch — but that can’t completely explain brunch’s appeal. Maybe it’s the fact that brunch makes drinking before…

Marczyk Fine Foods, an acclaimed gourmet food store, offers a list of ten meals under $10 in this week’s e-mail from the market.Why is this important? Because most of the stuff at Marczyk’s is really, really, really good. And some of it is also cheap. Keeping these tough economic times in…

The harvest season for Texas Rio Star Grapefruit — a particularly red, juicy variety — is January and February, and to mark it, TexaSweet Citrus Marketing, Inc. and Taste of the South Magazine have created a grapefruit recipe challenge. As described on the contest website, you can enter in three…

Okay, I’m not saying that the place is dead for sure, but, once again, things are looking bad for Pizzeria Mundo at 1312 17th Street. I got a tip from yet another neighborhood cruiser that the space — which has been absolutely fucked by a web of construction scaffolding that…

Tosh’s Cantina has encountered some delays moving into Marina Square — but that’s nothing compared to the problems encountered by the occupants of 3090 Downing Street, the original home of Tosh’s.Blackberries Bar & Grill, an offshoot of the successful coffee shop a few blocks down on Welton Street, lasted only…

By last year, the vacant restaurant space at 410 East Seventh Avenue was beginning to take on an odor, an invisible miasma of failure that was blamed on everything from the economy to the parking situation to the weird little jog that Seventh Avenue takes coming off Broadway — but…

I don’t know what it is with me, but lately I’ve just been loving everything. Even places that I probably shouldn’t. Even joints that have nothing whatsoever going for them except that they were there when I was hungry and/or thirsty and/or badly in need of a little whiskey and…