Restaurant Reviews
More than a coffee shop
The first impression of downtown Boulder’s Saxy’s Cafe is that of your typical college town coffee shop with a ramshackle, slightly lived-in feel. But a closer look reveals more luxurious trappings epitomized by comfortable sofas and low coffee tables that give the ...
If it ain’t broke
In many ways, Boulder’s restaurant culture, with its focus on local, organic and high-quality ingredients and preparation, serves as a model for what the rest of the country could be doing to help Americans eat better. But a significant barrier to that end is that ...
An old-school diner with smart updates
Nestled in Longmont’s Prospect neighborhood, Two Dog Diner is ideally matched to its vibrant, New Urbanist residential setting...
Getting lucky in north Boulder
Sometimes hunger can sneak up on you like a pouncing cat or a stealthy ninja, and this is precisely the dilemma colleague Carin found herself in one fair weekday morning. Given that it was a tad late for breakfast, and a touch early for lunch, we figured that North ...
Southern Indian seasonings
One of my more ill-advised college misadventures involved a midnight competition with a classmate to see who could consume the most Tabasco sauce straight. While I prevailed, I learned a valuable lesson (actually one of several) in that heat for heat’s sake isn’t a ...
Can’t complain
As applied to restaurants no less than to novels or films, the adjective “critic-proof ” is usually a backhanded compliment, acknowledging the consumer savvy rather than the craftsmanship of the producer in question. There’s just no point in arguing with the easy ...
Step away from the buffet
As part of my ongoing efforts to craft a taxonomy for Chinese restaurants, I recently realized there are two main angles to categorizing these eateries. The first is assessing the formality and pricing of the place, ranging from the come-one-come-all budget dive to ...
A distinctive Indian lunch buffet
For those old enough, you may remember 1985 as a dark time, mostly because that’s when McDonald’s launched the McDLT. In today’s recycling-conscious age, the McDLT probably wouldn’t exist. For those of you unfamiliar with this environmental atrocity, this was a ...
Just in time
Finding a place at the Boulder breakfast table is often troublesome. Though it’s not necessarily a Boulder-specific problem — the truth is that, proportionately, there aren’t a lot of breakfast joints, and people like eating breakfast out. It’s cheap, it’s delicious ...
Authentic Mexican Snickers bars
Being new-ish to town, it’s always interesting to hear what longer-term Boulderites focus on when describing various restaurants. For example, the way BW editor Joel Dyer summarized Mamacita’s on University Hill: “burritos as big as your head...
A good representation
There is a lot to like about Brooklyn Deli in Longmont. It imports many of its ingredients from New York or thereabouts. It accurately offers many of the classic sandwiches you’d find in a New York deli. It has a welcoming, East Coast sense of hospitality. It sells ...
Upstairs and upscale
The Hotel Boulderado spent much of this year revamping its culinary amenities with overhauls transforming the basement-level Catacombs Bar into License No. 1, and the upstairs and upscale sitdown, Q’s, into Spruce. The, ahem, “sprucing up” was finished and launched ...


















