Restaurant Reviews

When I announced plans to review The Rowdy Mermaid, Boulder’s new kombucha taproom, a co-worker swiftly warned me reading on the Internet that kombucha, a sparkling fermented tea drink with live yeast and bacteria cultures, can cause “fatal diarrhea,” to which ...

Word was the Lady in Gray wanted to meet. She’s my counterpart at our cross-town rival, the Obscura, or whatever it’s called, and she thought it would be interesting if we reviewed a place together. She made reservations at the new Pearl Street Steak Room. I got ...

For some foodies, exploring new restaurants is a sporting activity, and one of the top trophies is stumbling across a hidden gem before anyone else does. If the place is affordable, so much the better, and unique menu items score additional brownie points, although ...

Hotels are not on the average diner’s radar. But Jill’s at the St Julien in Boulder ought to be. A boutique hotel in the style Colorado does best — casually elegant — the restaurant carries this same kind of elegance, and makes it even more pleasing with the value ...

We’re taught in early language arts classes to write what we know. But in writing about food, the adage creates a paradox: When a...

One of the enduring institutions of Japanese working life is the bento. Bento means "meal in a box" and can refer to anything from a homemade aggregation of fish, rice and preserved plum to ekiben, the pre-made meals encountered in train stations. In the U.S., it's ...

When I went to school in Los Angeles, nearly a third of my meals were eaten at Cactus Taqueria, a tiny orange shack outside my apartment near Vine and Melrose. It had enough exhaust from passing traffic to function as a smokehouse, no shade, no seating, no bathroom, ...

I’ll argue that the most critical determinant of an ethnic restaurant’s success is how much it respects the source cuisine. Go to any ethnic neighborhood in a big city, and you’ll likely chance upon a family-run hole in the wall that’s wildly popular due to its ...

Poor Otis. Otis is the cartoon pig mascot of Nederland’s Wild Mountain Smokehouse & Brewery, seemingly oblivious to his likely fate as a barbecued entrée here. The sign above the front door shows him quizzically contemplating a spilled mug of beer. But more ...

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 ...

You don’t need a Wayback Machine to know that the ancient Roman forebears of today’s Italian cookbook writers embraced the bedrock principle of cooking seasonal ingredients of top quality. These scribes advised that spices and other superfluous adornment were to be ...

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 ...