Sometime in 2015, there was a moment when Anthony Bourdain and Questlove sat down at the original Yardbird to feast and discuss music and Miami. The original location had opened in the city a few years earlier, and it was starting to attract some high-profile clientele.
This was before owner John Kunkel was an internationally renowned restaurateur. It was a simpler time, when he and an opening team were developing a menu based on a lot of his old family recipes.
Looking at the recently debuted Denver Yardbird, a nearly 15,000-square-foot temple to fried-bird fineries in RiNo, it’s clear something clicked. Since the opening of the original South Beach location in 2011, Kunkel’s 50 Eggs Hospitality has grown to include Wakuda, a Japanese fine-dining concept with spots in Singapore and Las Vegas; Chica, Lorena Garcia’s Latin American restaurant with an outpost in Aspen; as well as seven iterations of Yardbird. The most recent launched in Chicago and Denver.
At the latest — and largest — iteration, the massive space is broken down into the main restaurant, a colossal bar, an event space and a courtyard complete with a stage, a sizeable dancefloor and a smoker larger than most Cap Hill apartments. The primary dining room features a view of the kitchen, where a Jasper Rotisserie Oven sits prominently.
“The kitchen is like a football field back there,” Kunkel says. “I think it’s as big as our original restaurant.” The back patio is covered in murals, with an aesthetic Kunkel says was inspired by the endless array of street art covering Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. With much of the building’s original bones still in place, the property exudes industrial opulence and downtown cool.
While it’s easy to be wowed by the venue’s splendor, the real magic is still in the food. “The idea of [Yardbird] is they’re kinda the anti-chain,” says Kunkel. “We really try to find teams who can operate independently.”
Kunkel says finding a high-quality local chef is the baseline. Teams are encouraged to develop new menu items, with the best being introduced to locations across the country.
Denver is expected to have up to 15 of its own special dishes as the concept gets its regional bearings.
“I was meant for this job. This job was meant for me,” says executive chef Brent Turnipseede, a Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Austin graduate who has since refined his talents in a number of top kitchens in Colorado, including Denver’s Guard and Grace and American Elm. “There will be nothing we can’t do.”
Turnipseede says he’s excited to work with such an impressive team and the seemingly endless tools they have at their disposal. His career has been defined by dishes that nod to Southern traditions and cozy American fare while using the kind of techniques usually reserved for white table cloths, much in the same fashion as corporate executive chef Patrick Rebholz, a Charleston native who has been onsite overseeing the Denver opening.
While the dining experience is decidedly vivacious, what Kunkel describes as “polished casual,” the food itself sits squarely in the realm of the finer things. The famous deviled eggs come topped with smoked trout roe and the house-cured pork belly is joined by compressed Palisade peaches and bacon jam. The whole bird — with honey hot sauce, chilled spiced watermelon, Vermont sharp cheddar cheese waffles, bourbon maple syrup — runs about $80 and is worth every penny.
Other cultivated dishes include the Calabrian chili cavatelli with charred broccoli rabe; the grilled blackened salmon filet with olive relish, pesto and watercress; and the unmissable fried green tomato BLT, which stacks house-smoked pork belly, pimento cheese, smoky tomato jam and lemon vinaigrette over a thick slab of crunchy heirloom tomato.
The whole menu is something of a masterclass in how to make messy look ever so chic.
