Restaurant Reviews
The unique taste of Peru
Rosario sits down to lunch with her chef and her two waitresses. It’s all slush and pudgy fog this early afternoon, and I’m sitting across the empty dining room from the group when I’m waved over...
The frontier
Boulder’s strict growth boundaries make heading north on Broadway a bit of a cliffdrop, with the city ending abruptly as the street y’s into U.S. 36. But nestled right up against the edge is a restaurant that would be as at home in the urban core as it is on the ...
Truth in advertising
Aside from its distinctive flavor palettes, food has more abstract emotional appeals to the senses as well. Dessert tastes like joy. A giant chunk of meat roasted over an open flame tastes deeply, primally, invigorating, like surviving a plane crash or the thrill of ...
Cheese Importers warehouse expands to offer more than cheese
Cheese Importers’ warehouse was a huge hit from the beginning, because, well, cheese. But the bulk of the 35 years it’s been in business were spent in a literal warehouse in Longmont. It was a wonderland of cheese, though not as warm and inviting an environment as ...
Chinese-American standbys
I’ve finally taken a “If you can’t beat, join ‘em” tack to my critical assessment of local Chinese restaurants. No longer do I hold Boulder eateries to the same standard of the Bay Area joints of my youth. Why? Because for the most part, establishments around here ...
Worth it
The food at Frasca Food & Wine was so good that, at one moment, I cried. It had never happened to me before, nor should it have — the only times one should cry while eating is if they’ve been rescued by a cargo ship and offered a hot meal for the first time in ...
From one home to another
This is different. When I order takeout from the new, small Chinese shop Flower Pepper on Broadway, I’m excited not only to taste what I got, but also to find out what half of it is...
An escape to Paris
Clear winter days often put me in a Paris frame of mind. This time of year, cold, crisp air, leafless trees and wintry light give the French capital a monochromatic yet nostalgic quality. For me, this romantic appearance evokes the black and white photography of ...
A hipster visit to Boulder’s Snooze
A couple months back, I was chatting on the phone with my sister when I mentioned my fear of becoming a hipster...
Harold’s is a cut above
Attached to Longmont’s Plaza Hotel, Harold’s Restaurant & Lounge ups the ante on this town’s fine dining with retro-styled cocktails and original farm-to-table preparations. Compared to the space’s previous tenants, the bar here assumes the guise of an old school ...
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 ...
Surprising seafood
It took a while to find Café Blue in Gunbarrel. It’s hidden in a strip mall, which is in the shadow of another, bigger strip mall, which is in the shadow of a King Soopers… part of a larger strip mall. But inside those doors is a quaint, friendly cafe that serves a ...