After a two-year hiatus, 5280 ’s curated list of the top places to eat, drink, and be delightfully satiated along the Front Range has returned. We’re thrilled to be back at the table. Won’t you join us?
BY PATRICIA KAOWTHUMRONG & RIANE MENARDI MORRISONThirty years ago, engineers completed construction on the Glenwood Canyon stretch of Colorado’s most important east-west interstate. Today, climate change threatens that section of I-70—and anyone who travels it.
BY ROBERT SANCHEZ
Nearly five years into his tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, Colorado’s Neil Gor such has established himself as a modern textualist in the mode of Antonin Scalia. He’s also become something of a conservative wild card. Will that unpredictability extend to gay rights?
BY SPENCER CAMPBELL
19 SPORTS
Detroit: We want—nay, we deserve—your Hockeytown trademark. Plus, three fun facts about Colorado Avalanche general manager Joe Sakic.
22 POLITICS
Why Colorado’s psychedelics community is divided on next month’s mushroom measure.
24 OUTDOORS
In honor of this month’s U.S. Rowing Association–sanctioned event at Cherry Creek Reservoir, we put together a landlubber’s guide to the sport.
26 DIVERSIONS
From a brewery to a playground, these are a few of Denver’s best third places—aka physical locations where conversation with strangers is encouraged.
Inside the Orchestra is betting its first original score can tear children away from their screens.
As the local housing market cools, one interior designer turned broker shares how strategic upgrades have paid off for her sellers.
Five locally owned shops where you can buy groceries and dine.
How to make the most of Colorado’s bounty of squash.
Jose Manuel Marquez is bringing Spanish-style churros to Stanley Marketplace.
40 NEIGHBORHOOD
Olde Town Arvada’s pedestrianfriendly blocks are blossoming into a culinary hot spot.
During Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s first term in office, the role has become more prominent and more controversial.
BY SHANE MONAGHAN
The Latino Cultural Arts Center has an ambitious plan for a three-site campus focused on the Latino community’s creative contributions to the state. Can executive director Alfredo Reyes make it happen?
BY DALIAH SINGER
Five Colorado ghosts, ranked from congenial to downright evil.
Photograph by Joni Schrantz
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Letters to the editor must include your name, address, and a daytime phone number (all of which can be withheld from publication upon request). Letters may be submitted via regular mail or email (letters@5280. com). To have a restaurant considered for our Dining Guide, contact us by phone or email (dining@5280.com) to receive a submission form. We also encourage you to contact us if your experience at a restaurant differs significantly from our listing. Information for these sections should be subm itted at least six weeks before the issue’s cover date.
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Here’s something you probably don’t hear all that often: I don’t like takeout. During the height of the pandemic, I knew I should support local eateries (and I did occa sionally), but having restaurant-caliber food has always, to me, been about the theater of eating out. Cramming an exquisite, chef-prepared meal into a to-go container and eating it at the kitchen table just seems so antithetical to the experience of dining. Which is why I’m delighted—for you, and for me—that life has returned to a (relative) state of normality that has allowed us, after a two-year pause, to bring back our “25 Best Restaurants” franchise.
For the past five months, 5280 ’s tireless food team has been sitting at chef’s counters, parsing menus old and new, ordering steaks and oysters and fry bread and lentils, and trying all the desserts—at more than 70 restaurants—to bring you this lineup of the hottest places to grab a meal in and around Denver. There are some mainstays, of course—restaurants that have remained relevant for years despite changing trends and tastes. But there are also 15 spots that were not on the list in 2019, including 10 that have opened in just the past couple of years.
“Denver restaurateurs have shown remarkable grit,” says food editor Patricia Kaowthumrong. “In the face of so many ongoing challenges, they dialed up the culinary creativity and continued to make Denver’s dining scene vibrant, diverse, and, most important, delicious—which is why compiling this list was so incredibly challenging.”
I can confirm that Kaowthumrong and Riane Menardi Morrison, who was until recently 5280 ’s associate food editor (she’s now our digital strategy editor), have chosen wisely. I’ve been to 12 of the dining rooms they’ve selected, and although I’m sure all the restaurants’ takeout options are delectable, I highly recommend making plans to go out to eat. You can enjoy the leftovers at your kitchen table.
LINDSEY B. KING
Email:Twitter:lindsey@5280.com@linzbking
Maren Horjus Digital Director
5280’s new digital director may have joined the magazine in August, after working remotely as an editor at Seattle-based REI, but Horjus isn’t new to the Front Range. She’s called Boulder home since 2013.
”The Emerald City’s mountains are more dramatic, but you hardly see them because, you know, the rain.”
”I’m fairly certain they don’t let you in without a dog. (Mine: a scruffy heeler named Raider.)”
“I took the train from Durango, then hiked and skied seven miles up into the Chicago Basin to camp, slurp freeze-dried gruel, and wreck my skis on hidden rocks.”
Vegan bites and vino at Somebody People’s bar
October means it’s time for the puck to drop. With three reigning-champion hockey teams in the Mile High City, 5280.com examines what the upcoming season might look like for the Colorado Avalanche, the University of Denver Pioneers, and the East High Angels, plus how you can get in on the action.
CENTER ICE
Stone:
Detroit: We want—nay, we deserve Hockeytown—yourtrademark.
As the 1995-’96 NHL season began, the Detroit Red Wings made a curious decision. Despite not having won a Stanley Cup in 40 years, the franchise filed an application for the moniker of “Hockeytown.” Perhaps, the team thought, if it couldn’t win a title on the ice, it’d get one at the federal trademark office.
Nevertheless, Detroit seemed destined to deliver on its new appellation, cutting through the 1996 NHL playoffs—that is, until the Red Wings encountered the Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference finals. The Avs, which had relocated from Québec City before the season, beat the Motor City in six games and went on to win the Stanley Cup, igniting a bloody rivalry: Between them, the Avalanche and Red Wings won five Stanley Cups from 1996 to 2002.
The Red Wings took home three of those titles, so, yes, we admit that Detroit may have been Hockeytown at the time. But today? Listen, we know there’s not much moral height in ribbing down-on-its-luck Detroit, but the Red Wings haven’t sniffed playoff hockey since 2016, and they haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 2008. Things have gotten so bad that the franchise scrubbed the Hockeytown logo from center ice at Little Caesars Arena a few years ago.
The Avs, East High, and DU were all champs last season.
Meanwhile, the Avs, who will open their season on October 12 at home against the Chicago Blackhawks, are on a run of five consecutive playoff appearances, capped by last season’s Stanley Cup victory. In fact, hockey titles abound in the Mile High City right now: Denver is home to the NHL champion, the NCAA champion (University of Denver), and a prep national champion (Denver’s East High School). It’s the first city in history to hit that trifecta.
So, Detroit, we want your trademark. It’s only fair: First off, we have the history to support it. DU won its first national championship in 1958 and is tied for the most ever (nine) with the University of Michigan. The Denver Spurs of the Western Hockey League delivered the city its first profes sional sports championship in 1972 and were set to become an NHL team until negotiations fell apart. (We did get an NHL franchise from Kansas City, the Rockies, in the late ’70s, but like KC’s barbecue, the transplanted team never sat right with us. We sent it packing to New Jersey in 1982.)
We also have a promising future to ensure our Hockeytown status endures. Over the past several decades, youth hockey in the Mile High City has grown steadily and is now producing a stream of NHL-caliber players—such as Troy Terry, a Denver native who helped the Pioneers win an NCAA title in 2017 and is an All-Star for the Anaheim Ducks.
Perhaps the best argument, however, rests with our citizenry. Avs fans packed Ball Arena to near capacity at every game last season, and the team’s 2022 playoffs run helped revitalize downtown businesses still struggling from the pandemic by pumping millions of dollars into the local econ omy. When the Avalanche finally hoisted the greatest trophy in pro sports, accidentally dented it on Tampa Bay’s ice, and made the cross-country journey back to Denver, half a million crazed fans attended the parade.
Start packing it up, Detroit. We’ll even give you till March, when the Avs visit Little Caesars Arena for the first time this season, to say your goodbyes. And, please, don’t take the loss too hard: You’ll always be the Motor City to us.
All hail the chief executive of Hockeytown, Joe Sakic, who became the Avs’ general manager in 2014. —SPENCER CAMPBELL
20Seasons Sakic, originally from British Columbia, played in the NHL—all with the same fran chise. (Hint: It’s the Avalanche.)
Points (goals plus assists) cur rent Colorado star Nathan MacKinnon would need to score to tie Sakic’s career mark of 1,641. Sakic is the Avs’ alltime leader in points, goals, assists, and awesomeness.
3People, including Sakic, who have won Stanley Cups as players and general managers for the same fran chise. This summer, the Avs promoted Sakic to president of hockey operations.
On July 6, two political activists sat before a packed crowd inside Denver’s Mercury Cafe and prepared to give a presentation in favor of Proposition 122, known as the Natural Medicine Health Act. If passed by vot ers next month, it would establish a state-run program through which all Coloradans could legally access psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” as soon as late 2024. But the proposed measure has drawn sharp criticism from—sur prisingly—a large contingent of the local psychedelics community.
At the Mercury Cafe meeting, one of the activists, Veronica Lightning Horse Perez, felt the need to address the tension. Perez, who runs a wellness and therapy center in Littleton, detailed the intense disparagement she’s endured, especially on social media, for being one of the faces of Prop 122. “This has not been easy,” Perez told the crowd. “I am a human being doing the best I can.”
Proponents of Prop 122 point to research from New York University, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins University that indicates psilocybin has the potential to treat mental ailments such as addiction, PTSD, and depression. Prop 122 would make it legal for licensed centers to disburse the psychedelic fungi to patients under the supervision of state-approved facilitators. Essentially, it would legalize therapeutic mushroom sessions. The measure would also decriminalize other natural psychedelics, including ibogaine and mescaline, and allow Coloradans age 21 and older to legally use them in their homes—although selling the substances would still be illegal.
But Melanie Rose Rodgers, who helped lead the successful campaign to decriminalize mush rooms in Denver in 2019, fears Prop 122 could create an environment that resembles Colorado’s cannabis industry, which has been criticized for its inequities and corporate ownership. Detractors believe restricting legal psilocybin to a handful of licensed businesses is a form of gatekeeping, which could lead to scarcity and high prices, and runs counter to ways Indigenous groups have historically used these substances. “Nobody should own nature,” Rodgers says. After her and other psychedelics activists’ own initiative—which sought only to decriminalize psychedelics—failed to gain enough signatures to make the ballot, they’ve continued to voice their opposition to Prop 122.
Perez sees this opposition as unfortunate. Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies would be in charge of overseeing the therapeutic mushroom program, but Prop 122 was written to accommo date community input during the rule-making process. “You’re critical to guiding this,” Perez told the Denver gathering. “But we can’t help guide it when you’re not there, when you’re opposed, or when you’re angry. We need you.” —CHRIS WALKER
Out-of-state interests have spent more than $2.5 million to get Proposition 122 on next month’s ballot, and much of that money has come from California-based Dr. MagicBronner’sSoaps.
CEO BronnerDavid , the grandson of the Dr. Bronner, has been a
fan of psychedelics since tak ing a trip to Amsterdam in the 1990s. He believes mushrooms could help treat the mental health crisis in America and that legalizing the fungi under the supervision of the state— as outlined in Prop 122—is likely the best way to garner broad support. “Most of the psychedelically naive popu lation is not comfortable yet in a decriminalized context,” Bronner says. Instead, novices may need the reassurance that comes with being guided by a licensed professional. Bronner’s support, however, could backfire: The money being spent in support of Prop 122 has led to mistrust among opponents. Nicole Foerster of Decriminalize Nature Boulder County, for example, believes Bronner is an example of “big, out-of-state money and outof-state interests dictating local Colorado policy.”
—CW
Why Colorado’s psychedelics community is divided on next month’s mushroom measure.
Thanks to some geographic inconveniences (like, you know, a lack of water), rowing in Colorado has always faced an upstream battle to gain popularity. The Rocky Mountain Rowing Club (RMRC) hopes to change that. On October 9, the nearly 40-year-old organization will host the 5280, the first head race in the Rocky Mountain region to be sanctioned by the U.S. Rowing Association. World-class crews will dip their oars into Cherry Creek Reservoir in hopes of qualifying for prestigious East Coast competitions, including Boston’s Head of the Charles Regatta. But the 5280 is also an opportunity for Coloradans to learn more about this centuries-old sport—which is why we asked RMRC member and certified U.S. Rowing coach Peter Gozar to help us get on board with the basics.
—COURTNEY HOLDEN
Rowing as transportation started in ancient Egypt. Rowing as a sport didn’t shove off until the early 18th century, when English oarsmen began betting on who could carry passengers across the River Thames the fastest. The com petitive endeavor became popular in the eastern United States in the mid-1800s due to the region’s convenient access to water. By 1852, rowing had become the first intercollegiate sport in the United States, thanks to the blue bloods at Harvard and Yale universities.
Any rowing event can be called a regatta, but the 5280, which runs from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and is free for spectators to attend, is what’s known as a head race
Essentially time trials, head races range from three to five kilometers, though the 5280 is a touch longer at 5,280 meters (get it?). Alterna tively, a sprint race features crews competing head-to-head (so, yes, it probably should be the head race...but it’s not) over a shorter, 2,000-meter course and is what you see during the Olympics.
Rowing encompasses two disci plines: sculling and sweep rowing. In sculling, athletes (called scullers) hold one oar (called a scull) in each hand to propel the boat (also called a scull). Scullers row in singles, doubles, and quads. Sweepers use both arms to work a single oar and thus require an even number of rowers (two, four, or eight). Some sweep boats employ a coxswain, an on-water cheerleader who steers and typically displays an expert facility with bad words—to better motivate the crew.
Many rowers have shoulders even Arnold would envy, but the full motion also relies heavily on core and leg muscles because athletes brace their feet and push with their quads. Olympic-caliber rowers will average around 30 to 50 strokes per minute, which means they’ll effectively grit their way through about 300 squats during the aver age six-minute sprint race. If that sounds like your kind of workout, the RMRC offers Learn to Row courses—though the 75-person class for spring 2023 is already full.
While social media has made connect ing easier, it’s also full of partisans who are only interested in making you want to strangle your screen. So, to engender a more productive and peaceful exchange of ideas, we created a guide to help Denverites find their perfect third places (home and work are the first two). A proper third place is a physical location where conversation with your neighbors and strangers is the main activity. It needs to be neutral ground where any one can go without expecting to pay more than a modest amount. And there should be regulars—but no real social hierarchy. There are plenty of qualifying spots in Denver, as long as you know how to find them. —NICHOLAS HUNT
This South Broadway hang out puts the “craft” in craft brewery with events such as Foul-Mouthed Cross-Stitch Sundays. Spend at least $5 on snacks or brews, such as the Foggy Memory hazy IPA or the How’s Your Father ESB, and the brewery will provide you with all the materials you need for some R-rated needlework.
A $60 annual membership to this nonprofit in Denver’s Speer neighborhood gives you access to general open studio time during business hours (8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday) for painting, drawing, and more. The league’s best resource, though, may be the other artists, who often trade pointers and stories over their easels.
Better known as Turtle Park for its concrete terrapin statue, this playground in Park Hill is tiny— and that’s a good thing. Unlike massive City Park a few blocks to the west, Turtle Park’s diminu tive size encourages parents to chitchat over to-go coffee from neighboring Honey Hill Cafe as their little ones hit the slide and swings.
Stop by this Black-owned cof feehouse on East 25th Avenue at 2 p.m. on Sundays to enjoy a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony in which beans are brewed in a clay pot called a jebena. Visit at any other time to experience stimulating conversa tions: Whittier is nicknamed the Social Justice Coffee Shop due to the community activists and orga nizers who use it as a home base.
F@$K, YEAH!
LIKE MAKING THINGS?
Grandma’s House
Inside the Orchestra is betting that its first original score can tear children away from their screens.
Considering that the average classi cal music fan is older than 55, it’s not surprising that very little orchestra music is written for children. Denver’s Inside the Orchestra—the only pro fessional orchestra in the world that does kid-focused programming exclu sively—is helping to change that with A Surprise for Rabbit , the first original score in the nonprofit’s 37 seasons. “We really felt like we were the best organization to start commissioning and creating new symphonic stories for today’s audience,” executive direc tor Shelby Mattingly says. Debuting this month during a local tour, the performance encompasses more than melodies to grab your minimaestro’s attention. —SC
AN OPEN BOOK
Inside the Orchestra started the process by asking local author Denise Vega and local artists Kristina Maldonado Bad Hand and Leah Stephenson (a teenage illustrator) to create a children’s book on which the score would be based. Vega polled a focus group of fifth graders at a summer camp at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she works, to solicit ideas. The resulting story—in which Rabbit can’t find her friends, only to discover that they were planning a surprise party for her all along—was kept sim ple so as to not confuse the nonprofit’s young audience.
Emmy Award–winning composer Charles David Denler needed to balance the book’s light and dark elements. “This is a rabbit walking through a garden, not a grizzly bear,” he says. “[But] there’s a solemn aspect to this story in which Rabbit can’t find her friends.” To accomplish that balance, Denler uses bright piano and flute sounds but places them in a minor key, which suggests mel ancholy. To help engage modern children with modern attention spans, he also added numerous interactive elements. When Rabbit meets a whistling gnome, for example, Denler has the audience join the orchestra in whistling the melody.
Inside the Orchestra puts children at the center of all its performances, and that’s not a figure of speech: Its musicians encircle the audience so young listeners feel immersed in the music. The nonprofit has gone even further in A Surprise for Rabbit by enlisting dancers from Hannah Kahn Dance Company, a storyteller from Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and an actor to carry out the action just feet away from the munchkins.
at the Denver Art Museum; October 23 at Lily Gulch Recreation Center in Lit tleton; November 2 at Parker Fieldhouse in Parker; November 14 at Boettcher Concert Hall; two perfor mances each day, at 9:30 a.m. and 10:45 a.m.
Tickets: $12.50; infants under 12 months get in free; children seven and under receive a free copy of the book, A Surprise for Rabbit
Let’s be clear: Denver is still not a buyer’s market. But with interest rates rising, “gone are the days that a seller can simply put a sign in the yard and expect their home to sell,” the Denver Metro Association of Realtors declared late this past summer. Houses sat for an average of 19 days in August, a 46 percent increase over the previous month. “With this slight market shift, you need to be the coolest option in [your home’s price range],” says Kelly Reed, a broker with Milehimodern. The former interior designer has spent the past few years perfecting what she calls her mini-flip process, in which she persuades sellers to pay for “minor changes with massive impact” (think: paint, light fixtures, and staging, not kitchen counters or bathroom renos). Reed says the strategy can boost sale prices by the tens of thousands and help move properties in challenging locations—as evidenced by these case studies that demonstrate the power, and payback, of investing in a little refresh.
The Backstory: With an ideal location between Sloan’s Lake and 32nd Avenue but suburbanfeeling finishes and fixtures, this Highland home was appraised for $1,100,000 in October 2021.
The Makeover ($10,000): Because Reed didn’t have enough money to change the floors or backsplash, her mission was to distract potential buyers from them, partly with light fixtures. In addition to an “absolute ban on boob lights,” Reed insists on chandeliers: “Everyone wants a spot where they think they can entertain, even if they never do.” Reed had an electrician install a junction box (about $300) and ordered a $64, six-light, black Shgyobo candelabra from Amazon to go over the table.
The Result: The house sold early this year for $1,210,000.
The Backstory: In 2019, the homeowners listed their unstaged, taupe-heavy bun galow at $895,000 with another agent. After a month, a drop to $849,000, and no compelling offers, they took the property off the market.
The Makeover ($10,500): Reed spent a week and a half having the walls painted white—her go-to is Benja min Moore’s Frostine AF-5, a money-saver because it only requires two coats—and the earthy stone fireplace a striking deep gray (Benjamin Moore’s Graphite 1603). The contrast helped Reed achieve the modern farmhouse aes thetic that’s popular with buyers in this price range.
The Result: The home went up for sale again at $950,000 in the fall of 2021. The owners received four offers and closed at $1,015,000.
The Backstory: Reed knew this 2,474-square-foot home’s location on busy Colorado Boulevard would present a challenge, especially during this past summer’s slowdown: Nearby houses along the thoroughfare had averaged 28 days on the market over the previous year.
The Makeover ($14,500):
A full $3,000 of Reed’s bud get went to local staging company Perch to help fill the sparsely appointed property.
“People want to imagine the romance of living in a space,” Reed says—in addition to see ing the potential uses of every square foot, which is why she furnished a catch-all area next to the living room as a modish home office.
The Result: In August, the owner accepted an askingprice offer of $734,000 after just six days on the market. When that buyer backed out, more offers came in: The home went under contract in five days and eventually closed at $759,000.
As the local housing market cools, one interior designer turned broker shares how savvy upgrades have paid off for her sellers.
Fall is the perfect time to erase the damage caused by the summer sun: brown spots, age spots, rosacea, melasma. The list goes on. If you’ve got concerns, we can help. It’s literally been our forte for the last 30 years.
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Life gets busy but taking care of #1 (that’s you) should always remain a top priority.
Check out these five reasons it might be time to add a self-care moment at Denver’s premier med spa: Facial Aesthetics, to your calendar.
01You got too friendly with the sun this summer
02You’ve been giving LiftFillertoserioussomethoughtBotox,DermalorThreadlately
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Five locally owned markets where you can buy groceries and dine. —CALLIE SUMLIN
Shop: At 69-year-old Valente’s, the smell of simmering marinara sauce and the ban ter of regulars fill the air as Dino Valente (grandson of founder Fred Valente) slices customers’ everydayrelishoil-packedDell’Alpe’smakingMarzanoloadcheckeredacrosszenanddriedmicatesmokyprosciuttosage,house-madeMust-buysmortadella.includetheItaliansau18-month-ageddiparma,Scamorzaaffucheese,Pastenemafaldinepasta,lobster-stuffedfroravioli.Asyoustrollthecompactshop’sfloors,alsouponcannedSantomatoesforBologneseandextra-hot,giardinieratoupgradesandwiches.
Eat: Pull up a chair at one of the four granite tables near the front windows to devour savory cannoli dunked in marinara: The warm rectangles of yeasted dough are stuffed with mini bricks of hot Ital ian sausage and strips of roasted green pepper, a classic combo born in Denver’s Northside. DRINK
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAH BANKScheese), and ajvar (a roasted red pepper condiment)—from the Balkan Grill section of the menu.
Shop: From sliced beef ribs to pork adovada to marinated beef al pastor to head-on shrimp, the lineup at the meat counter of this 13-year-old butcher shop (which also has an Aurora location) will have you itching to throw a barbecue. Once you acquire your proteins, check the produce section for supersweet baby mangoes, guavas, and cactus pears. And don’t even think about leaving without Tortilleria Cuauhtemoc’s fresh flour tortillas, made just a few blocks north on Federal Boulevard.
Eat: Place your order for Salvadoran pupusas (we like the cheesy, refried bean versions) before you shop; they’re made to order and take at least 20 minutes. Then come back to the sectioned-off din ing space, slide into one of the plastic booths, and enjoy your meal alongside families sharing Salvadoran-style chicken tamales and massive smothered burritos.
Aurora
Shop: Whether you’re interested in crafting regional Indian dishes from scratch or taking a shortcut to the subcontinent’s vibrant flavors, the friendly cashiers at this Aurora market will help you find what you need. Stock up on tangy amchoor powder (made with unripe green mangoes) for enlivening soups and stews, protein-rich besan (a kind of chickpea flour) for pakora, golden ghee, chewy paneer cheese, and massive sacks of aromatic basmati rice. Or keep it simple with ready-made curry sauces, a rainbow of jarred chutneys, and frozen poori and paratha breads.
Eat: India’s Harvest’s Chaat Corner menu offers one of the best selections of chaat (a vast category of crunchy street foods) in Denver. Try the aloo tikki chaat: pan-fried mashed potato patties drizzled with yogurt and tamarind chutney and topped with crisp noodle bits. There is just one folding table next to the kitchen, so we recommend taking your snack to one of the many picnic areas at nearby Cherry Creek State Park.
Shop: Peruse the well-organized aisles at this nearly 20-year-old Bosnian gro cery and fill your basket with lokum (butter tea cookies), roasted and pick led heirloom shipka peppers, and fresh-baked burek (flaky spiral pies stuffed with feta or beef). In addition to Bosnian relishes, meats, desserts, and frozen foods, you’ll also find treats from across Europe, including crunchy Hungarian Chio potato crackers, juni per-inflected Polish hunter’s sausage, the Slovenian herbal soda Cockta, and creamy Danish white feta cheese.
Eat: Wander over to the sunny, plant-filled, three-year-old cafe at the east end of the space, grab a seat on one of the low-slung black couches, and enjoy a hearty plate of sujuk—spicy sausage links served with airy flatbread, onions, kajmak (a mild, spreadable
Shop: MMart has been Colorado’s only independent Korean market for almost four decades. This family-owned shop on Havana Street is considerably smaller than nearby H-Mart, but owner Augustine Lee’s curated shelves offer many items not seen at the chain. Go for staples including sea weed, dried mushrooms, kimchi, tofu, and gochugaru (chile powder) plus fiery instant ramen and snacks like whisper-thin Vanilla Mousse Korean Oreos and cheesy O!Tube chips.
Eat: MMart also houses Honey Bakery—with its heavenly sweet potato cake—and a takeaway counter serving gimbap (Korean rice rolls). Tucked into the back corner is Korean Food To-Go res taurant, from which you’ll want to procure an order of the kimchi fried rice and the spicy, potato-laden pork bone soup. The dine-in tables are even more hidden away, making you feel as though you’ve stepped away from a busy Seoul market to dine in a secluded alley.
MMart Korean Market
Form: Wrinkly, bumpy Japanese heirloom pump kins that range from blackish-green to buff orange
KABOCHA
Form: Pale or dark blue-green spheres with pumpkinlike ridges
Best For: This versatile ingredi ent adds sweet, earthy flavor to tempura,”it’sfor“It’sfriesfromeverythingstir-totacos.greatsoups;greatforsays Cody Jurbala, who owns Boulder’s Speedwell Farm & Gardens with his wife, Melissa Ogilvie. “It’s great cut superthin and roasted until it’s crispy like a chip.”
Form: Sun-colored, pill-shaped squashes with stringy interiors
—SARAH KUTAAs tomatoes and cucumbers dwindle, diverse varieties of winter squash displace warm-weather crops at farmers’ markets and grocery stores. “With the cooler nights and warm sunny days of the fall, squashes ripen into something special,”says Richard Pecoraro, founder and head farmer of Boulder’s MASA Seed Foundation, a regional seed bank and educational hub. We asked local farmers and one chef about their favorite varieties of the lateseason heroes and how to prepare them.
Best For: Farmer Alex Zeidner, who runs Fort Col lins’ Folks Farm and Seed, urges shoppers not to be intimidated by the funky ingredient’s appearance. He often roasts futsu wedges in the oven and drizzles them with garlicky yogurt and a spicy, herbladen oil. “It has a savory, almost french fry taste and texture,” he says.
Form: Spherical with a slightly pointed tip on one side and dark green armor
Best For: Paul Reilly, co-owner and executive chef of Denver’s Coperta and Apple Blossom, recommends halving the nutty, dessert-appropriate squash, scooping out the seeds, cutting it into wedges, and roasting them. Once the orange-yellowsurfacesarewell-caramelized,dressthemwithbrownsugarandbutter,maplesyrup,orhoney.
Best For: Reilly uses spaghetti squash as a substitute for pasta, pairing it with intoormeatballsbraisedtomato-workingitacreamy, vegetable-forward cacio e pepe that even his kids love. For just the right al dente texture, cut the squash horizon tally—“like a hamburger, not a hot dog,” Reilly says—before roasting it in the oven.
Form: Oblong with thin, pale yellow skin accented by dark green vertical crevices
Best For: Pecoraro likes to slice skin-on delicata in half lengthwise and scoop out the seedy innards. Then, he bakes the beauties with a little bit of water in a casserole dish until the soft flesh is golden brown. Serve the boats crowned with rice, corn, or other grains alongside fresh greens and salsa.
Form: Beige, peanut-esque squash with bright orange-yellow flesh
Best For: Often seen in soups and ravioli, butternut is also hearty enough for hot pickling, Reilly says. Peel and cut the squash into large chunks before roasting. Meanwhile, heat red wine or sherry vinegar, olive oil, honey, chopped chiles, sliced red onion, and mint leaves in a saucepan. Put the squash in a bowl; pour the hot liquid on top and toss well; then wait 15 to 20 minutes before adding the tangy topper to prepared whole grains and proteins such as salmon, beef, or duck.
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Jose Manuel Marquez is bringing Spanish-style churros to Stanley Marketplace—and giving you permission to eat them any time you like.
Most of us are familiar with churros, the churroswhatdippingbravas,fivebehindketplacepastrytheFrontera.hourlongandandshouldhowever,dessert-menuchewy-on-the-inside-but-crispy-on-the-outsidecinnamon-and-sugar-dusted,frieddoughthat’sastapleatMexicanrestaurants.JoseManuelMarquez,isonamissiontoconvinceColoradansthatchurroscanandbedevourednotjustafterdinner,butalsoasamiddaysnackforbreakfast,àlaAmericandoughnuts.“[InSpain],myfatherIwouldgodowntothechurreriaat5or6a.m.andwaitinanline,”saysMarquez,whohailsfromAndalusia’sJerezdela“You’dseethepeoplemakingthechurrosfreshandsmelloilandthechurrosfrying.”That’swhy,thispastDecember,theproopenedChurreriadeMadridinsideAurora’sStanleyMar-withpartnersLorenaandDanielCantarovici(thecoupleMariaEmpanada,whereMarquezwasakitchenmanagerforyears).Atthebrightlylitfoodstall,wherehealsosellspatatasMarquezencouragespatronstohonortheSpanishtraditionofthesweettreatsintorichmeltedchocolate.Here,weuncoversetsthegoldenfrittersatChurreriadeMadridapartfromtheyoualreadyknowandlove.
Unlike Mexican churros, which often contain butter and eggs, Marquez’s dough is vegan. “It’s just flour, water, and salt,” he says. “Very, very simple.”
The dough gets pushed into a machine imported from Val ladolid, Spain, which shapes and drops the churros into hot oil. Spanish renditions retain the familiar cylindrical star shape, but they tend to be shorter and thinner. The smaller size also makes the pastries less rigid, so they curl a bit at the ends.
sets them out to dry on a wire draining board, getting rid of the excess oil.
There’s no cinnamon involved, which is the biggest differ ence between Mexican- and Spanish-style churros. Mar quez’s traditional churros—$1 apiece or $9 for a coneful and a cup of drinking choco late for dipping—are sugared to order. Or, opt for a larger, filled churro ($3) with your choice of dulce de leche, pas try cream, or Colorado-made jam piped into the middle.
In his homeland, olive oil is often employed, but Marquez prefers to fry his sticks in sun flower oil, which isn’t as easily absorbed into the churros. After two and a half minutes, he pulls them from the fryer and BY JONI SCHRANTZ
This dark, thick goodness— made with 65 percent cacao, a little water, and a touch of sugar—is less sweet than Mex ican versions, making it even more acceptable to enjoy first thing in the morning.
Like a lot of business districts, Olde Town Arvada shut down some of its streets to cars at the onset of the pandemic to allow restaurants to expand outdoor seat
ing. Unlike other locales, this northwestern suburb of Denver made the change semipermanent in 2021, investing in more robust barriers at intersections and commissioning colorful murals on the blacktop. The improvements are already paying delicious dividends: A handful of exciting concepts have recently joined still-bustling classics such as 59-year-old German pastry oasis Rheinlander Bakery and an outpost of Denver Beer Co. Here, a guide to the area’s newest and tastiest offerings.
—JESSICA LARUSSOEst. August 2022
Perhaps taking a note from nextdoor liquor store Spirits Wine Provisions, which opened a speakeasy called the StockRoom in its backroom in 2021, threeyear-old So Radish converted a small area behind its vegan, ’80s-themed restaurant into an arcade called Secret Level. Play classic games such as Guns N’
Est. June 2022
Area foodies are flocking to this upscale, farm-to-table dinner spot. (Seriously—make a reserva tion.) The concise menu is always changing, but chef Brandon Kerr, an alum of LoHi’s dearly departed Z Cuisine, reliably weaves local produce into beau tifully plated dishes. Exhibit A: a recent Palisade stone fruit special with peaches, pluots, heirloom tomatoes, and African blue basil in an apricot broth. Larger entrées revolve around meats such as pork tenderloin, red snapper, and hanger steak, and everything pairs well with creative cocktails—the Donley Sipper deftly combines rosé and whiskey—from the bar.
Est. September 2022
Although its identity is built around hockey (Go, Avs!), Stix is bound to become a gamewatching hub for sports of all kinds, thanks to its 20 TVs, roving projector, and two bars pour ing 20 taps’ worth of brews from Colorado makers such as Woods Boss and Great Divide brewing companies and cans of Hooch Booch. Cheese curds, a French dip sandwich, and traditional Canadian poutine are inspired by stadium cuisine from around the sweater-wearing world.
Est. February 2022
Given the presence of Fuzzy’s Taco Shop, Lady Nomada, and Cochino Taco, it was fair
for Arvadans to wonder, Does Olde Town really need another Mexican restaurant? But this industrial-meets-tropical off shoot of the original location in Lafayette brings elevated options—charred beef short rib with grilled bone marrow, pork shank pibil, hamachi ceviche—in addition to, yes, more tacos. Seats on the corner patio are coveted, especially during happy hour (3 to 5 p.m.) when house margaritas are just $6.
Roses pinball and bubble hockey while nursing a vodka-infused cherry limeade and noshing on plant-based bar snacks from the shared kitchen.
ETA October 2022
When it opens, this sleek addi tion to the neighborhood will serve Detroit-style pizza and Italian fusion apps and pasta in a sprawling, newly expanded space. Up to 106 patrons will be able to enjoy the food (about two-thirds of which is vegan or vegetarian), along with spritzes, wine, and live music, over dinner in the dining room or on the patio.
Street parking in the area is limited, so consider taking RTD’s G Line to the Olde Town Arvada Station. If you drive, the adjacent four-level garage and transit hub is a convenient, free place to stash your car.
Olde Town Arvada’s pedestrian-friendly blocks are blossoming into a culinary hot spot.
During Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s first term in office, the role has become both more prominent and more controversial. Voters will now decide if they want to give her audacious approach another term.
n June 17, 2021, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold took a stand against election deniers. Then the death threats started pouring in.
Early that morning, Griswold’s office issued rules prohibiting third parties from accessing voting equip ment in the state to conduct what she called “sham audits” of election results. The announcement came as a group with no experience auditing elections was leading a review of ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona. That effort had been motivated by the false belief that the results of the 2020 election had been manipulated to prevent President Donald Trump from winning—a belief that had been promulgated by Trump himself.
In announcing the rules, Griswold noted that several coun ties in the Centennial State had been contacted by similar third-party vendors offering to perform audits, which she deemed insecure and unnecessary because the state conducts its own risk-limiting reviews. The partisan response was swift.
“This is just odd,” Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz tweeted. “Who puts out rules saying, ‘NO AUDITS ALLOWED!’ Only those with something to hide.”
In the days that followed, Griswold received a huge spike in death threats from people who believed the decision to limit outside reviews showed evidence of malfeasance. “They come in every way—text messages, email, DMs, posts on social media,” Griswold says. “They include things like, ‘What is the size of your neck? I want to know for the rope. I am going to hang you from a tree.’ ”
According to Griswold, there were so many efforts to intimi date her that the Colorado State Patrol could barely keep up with them. Indeed, the threats were so serious that Griswold advocated for a state bill, signed into law this past spring, that provides her and other election workers with extra security. Additionally, it increased penalties for people who threaten election workers. (The Colorado General Assembly passed a related bill, which Griswold also supported, that protects state elections from security breaches and other dangers.)
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“There didn’t used to be as much aware ness in the public of what the [secretary of state’s] office did and the importance of it,” says Wayne Williams, a Republican who served as Colorado’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2019. “There have always been people who have complained or had concerns about elections, but when you have a former presi dent making those complaints, it adds more visibility to it all.”
Despite the threats, Griswold, who will be 38 on October 2 and is the youngest secre tary of state in the country, hasn’t shied away from controversy. During her first term, she has defended Colorado’s voting system and called out critics and election deniers, which made her one of the most prominent election officials in the country. That approach has also led detractors—including, not surpris ingly, Pam Anderson, Griswold’s Republican opponent in the upcoming November elec tion—to deem her too partisan for a role in charge of ensuring safe and fair elections. With the continued efforts to sow doubt in the security of American elections, what had once looked to be a sleepy race for Colorado’s secretary of state is likely to garner both attention and large amounts of campaign
money—and the result could significantly impact the post going forward.
IN HER 2010 BOOK, State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process, Jocelyn Benson, the former dean of Wayne State University Law School, who was elected as Michigan’s secretary of state in 2018, wrote that for much of the 20th century, the role “was relatively unnoticed and publicly unremark able.” That began to change with the 2000 election, when then Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican, oversaw a con troversial re-count in the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore while simultaneously serving as the Florida chair woman for the Bush campaign. “At the time, many Americans seemed rather struck by the idea that, in a number of states, the secretary of state’s office is elected, it’s partisan,” says Seth Masket, the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver.
Despite increased awareness about the role, secretaries of state remained relatively obscure in the early part of the 21st century but occasionally landed in the headlines for taking stances on who could vote. In Colorado, for example, Scott Gessler, a Republican who
served as secretary of state from 2011 to 2015, advocated for a law requiring people to show proof of citizenship to vote; many Democrats said the law would disenfranchise naturalized citizens, mostly Latinos, who were less likely to have the required forms of documentation, such as a birth certificate. Gessler also sent a letter to 3,903 registered voters questioning their status to cast a ballot. Only 141 of them, less than .004 percent of the state’s then 3.5 million voters, were found to be noncitizens.
For the most part, though, secretaries of state did quiet work behind the scenes to ensure safe and fair elections. “The Colorado secretary of state’s office has generally been seen as doing a pretty good job,” Masket says. “Colorado has developed an election system over the last decade or more that is generally considered one of the best in the country—and that’s been developed by both Republican and Democratic administrations.”
The stature of the office changed dra matically in March 2020, when COVID-19 upended every aspect of our lives, including elections. To allow people to vote without fear of contracting an extremely contagious virus, many states began considering using more robust vote-by-mail balloting systems.
As momentum grew for mail-in balloting, Trump claimed, without evidence, that the prac tice was an easy target for fraud. “Suddenly,” Griswold says, “the right to vote was in peril.”
At the time, Colorado was one of five states that sent mail-in ballots to every registered voter. And as the only Democratic secretary of state from a place that offered the option to every citizen, Griswold became one of the leading experts defending the practice. She was a frequent guest on cable news programs and was regularly quoted in national media outlets, in which she discussed the nuances of signature verification and maintaining accurate data on voters’ mailing addresses. She also wasn’t afraid to confront politicians she believed were misleading the public, even going so far as to threaten to refer Trump to the Colorado Attorney General for prosecution because of his role in encouraging voter fraud.
The November 2020 election in Colo rado tallied the state’s highest voter turnout in history, with more than 86 percent of registered and active voters (close to 3.3 million people) casting ballots, and there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. But Republican claims that the election was rigged for President Joe Biden and other
Democrats continued across the country, eventually leading to the January 6 insur rection at the U.S. Capitol.
In Colorado, the effort to delegitimize the vote manifested itself most overtly on the Western Slope. In May 2021, Mesa County clerk and recorder Tina Peters allowed unau thorized people to access voting equipment and to attend a software security update. One individual made copies of the hard drives and posted photos of the machines online. A Mesa County grand jury subsequently indicted Peters on multiple charges related to the breach, and Griswold worked with county commissioners to put former Secre tary of State Williams and county treasurer Sheila Reiner in charge of the region’s 2021 and 2022 elections. “It’s pretty clear,” says Griswold, “I’ve had to address situations that no other secretary of state had to at the time.”
GRISWOLD, WHO GREW UP IN Estes Park and attended the Carey Law School at the University of Pennsylvania, did have some experience with election work before run ning for secretary of state: She served as a voter protection attorney in Colorado for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.
Still, after completing Emerge Colorado, a program that recruits and trains Democratic women who want to run for office, in 2017, her decision to seek the role was considered bold. “For someone who has never held elected office before to run for statewide office— that takes a huge leap of faith,” says Laurie Simonson, who went through Emerge with Griswold and currently serves as Leadville’s cityGriswold’sadministrator.ambition has continued to be a topic of conversation—and consternation— during her time in office. While a variety of never-before-seen factors have propelled her into the spotlight, political observers believe she has sought attention to benefit her own goals. “She sees her position as a springboard to higher office,” Eric Sondermann wrote in Colorado Politics this past January. “Her press releases are non-stop. She has a nose for divisive, polarizing issues and eagerly seizes upon them.”
In 2019, for example, Griswold decided to no longer authorize the use of state money to fund travel to Alabama after the state’s governor signed a law effectively banning all abortions. Griswold had Planned Parent hood vet the news release announcing the
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boycott—a decision she defended by argu ing that it’s appropriate to consult experts in the field. “She used her office to make her opinion known, instead of just saying it as an individual,” says Fremont County clerk and recorder Justin Grantham, a Republican who is also president-elect of the Colorado County Clerks Association. “It just feels like the office has taken on some political avenues that have nothing to do with elections or business or keeping records.” Williams, Griswold’s predecessor, agrees with Grantham’s assessment of Griswold’s 2019 announcement regarding Alabama and suggests that secretaries of state should be wary of wading into political fights, given that they hold the keys to election administration. “When I became secretary of state, I scaled back my involvement on the partisan side significantly,” says Williams, who notes he had previously served as the El Paso County co-chairman for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. “I think it is part of what people expect a secretary of state to do.”
Denver County clerk and recorder Paul López, on the other hand, says there needs to be more nuance involved with how elec tion officials can express their views. “Being political and chiming in on issues is a little different from directly supporting issues or candidates that are on the ballot,” says the Democrat. “Are you trying to directly influence things people are voting on in the election? Then there might be an issue.”
Griswold is unapologetic for how she has defended Colorado elections, even after receiving a cavalcade of death threats from election deniers. “When the right to vote is imperiled, we should say that,” she explains. And she says she doesn’t regret taking stances on other issues, such as abortion. “I think it’s important that elected officials speak out for our freedoms,” she says. “There aren’t enough women in office. I think 72 percent of Congress right now is male. They aren’t speaking
Griswoldout.” adds that she believes her age and gender shape the criticism of her. “I am the first Democratic woman to hold this position and the 10th woman to ever win statewide executive constitutional office since we were a territory,” she says. “That means my style is going to be different. How I communicate is going to be different. How I look is going to be different.” The voters of Colorado will cast their ballots on whether they like those differences this fall. m
Shane Monaghan, formerly 5280 ’s digital editor, teaches journalism at Regis Jesuit High School. Email feedback to letters@5280.com.
The Latino Cultural Arts Center has an ambitious plan for a three-site campus focused on the Latino community’s creative contributions to the state. Can executive director Alfredo Reyes make it happen?
There’s not much to look at among the single-story warehouses that sit just east of I-25 before it curves around downtown Denver. The structures are pro saic; there’s no one around. The only real sounds come from the highway and a few trucks that pass by on the street, ignoring the speed Spiderwebslimit. glimmer in the corners of the doorway to a brick building on West 12th Avenue in the La Alma Lincoln Park neighborhood. Inside, it’s dusty. Near the center of the featureless gray room stands an easel with four images: renderings of Las Bodegas (the warehouses), a proposed 14,000-square-foot community art space with a recording studio, multimedia art room, classrooms, and a cafe. The drawings are step one in building a vibrant cultural campus that ultimately will span three central Denver locations, each dedicated to showcasing and nourishing the Latino experience through arts, culture, and history.
The Latino Cultural Arts Center (LCAC) is an idea already 10 years in the making, and it could take another two decades to fully come to fruition. When it does, the nonprofit’s executive director, Alfredo Reyes, believes the sites will become a major destination for people from across the Americas. Right now, though, one needs a vivid imagination to envision what the 32-year-old in woven huarache sandals sees: a bustling venue filled with people of all ages creating art, attending workshops, and mingling at community events.
Reyes wasn’t an obvious choice to lead the protracted process required to build one of the most extensive cultural projects in Denver this century. He’s not an artist or a curator. He started but didn’t complete a doctorate in education research. And he couldn’t have explained a single thing about city zoning codes until a few years ago. What he does bring to the job, which he stepped into in April 2021, is a certain lived experience: Reyes was born in Denver. He’s bilingual. He also
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observed the lack of Latino arts and culture represented in the places he went around town. “It took a $60,000 education to learn that, as a Mexican American, I have a tradition to be proud of,” Reyes says, adding that he and other Latinos should not feel like foreigners in the cities they call home. “Unless we have a large physical presence in the middle of [Denver]—celebrating our history, celebrat ing our culture, celebrating our art—people won’t know we’re here.” Fortunately, he isn’t undertaking the massive enterprise alone.
ADRIANNA ABARCA HAD THE IDEA to build an expansive cultural hub dedicated to Latinos in Denver a decade ago. The 58-year-old grew up on the northwest side of the city, in a pocket of Mexican, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. It’s where her parents met and fell in love—Luis, a Mexican immigrant with no higher education, and Martha, an Irish American girl raised in an orphanage on Federal Boulevard.
In the early 1970s, Luis had a hunch that Mexican food would boom in popularity in the United States, so he launched a tortilla factory and opened La Fonda Mexican Restaurant, which he eventually sold. He also, presciently, realized other eateries might not have the same expertise in Mexican cuisine and would need ready-made ingredients. When Abarca was eight years old, her mom and dad founded Ready Foods in four pas tel-hued buildings across the viaduct from what’s now Empower Field at Mile High. One of Ready Foods’ earliest products: Pueblo-style green chile.
Most of the sites the LCAC will inhabit were Ready Foods’ properties.
When Ready Foods out grew its space on Old West Colfax Avenue, Abarca and her father renovated it to be able to house some of their growing art collection. Her parents began accumulating Mexican and Mexican American folk and fine art in the late 1970s. Abarca continued the tradition, and the assemblage of art and books now stands in the thousands; it will make up much of the LCAC’s Mexican Heritage Museum’s permanent collection. “I saw from the example of my parents how you can start with nothing and create something big; I saw that you have to have a vision, but you also have to be bold. You have to be fearless,” says Abarca, who is both the nonprofit’s founder and board chair.
Growing up, Abarca could never find anything written in Spanish or that was culturally relevant at the local library, and
she’s fairly certain she never learned about Mexican or Latin American history in school. Despite the fact that 29 percent of Denver’s population—and 18.7 percent of the coun try—identifies as Hispanic or Latino, there are limited cultural spaces focused on the stories of those communities. “There are less than 25 museums in the entire country dedicated to preserving Latino art,” says Victoria Paige Gonzalez, the LCAC’s marketing and digital infrastructure manager.
Today, Su Teatro Cultural and Perform ing Arts Center, Museo de las Americas, the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council, and Biennial of the Americas all call Denver home, but Latin American art and history still feel like an afterthought at many other organi zations, Abarca says. “It’s been frustrating
trying to work with the existing institutions and steer them toward acknowledging us. It takes so much energy, and I’d rather put that energy into creating something we control,” she says. “It’s essential that the stories be told in our voice and from our perspective, because history gets rewritten with a lot of inaccuracies or biases.”
Since 2017, when Abarca registered the LCAC as a nonprofit, she has been elevating Latino voices despite the lack of a physical space. The organization has hosted art exhibi tions, concerts, and events in partnership with institutions as varied as History Colorado Center and Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and opened a store, Hijos del Sol (on West Eighth Avenue), selling artisan wares handmade by Latinos. But Las Bodegas will be the LCAC’s first brick-and-mortar hub. Less than a mile to the northwest, the original strip of Ready Foods buildings will become the LCAC’s headquarters. The final piece of the trifecta will be located at West Eighth Avenue and Decatur Street, in Sun Valley. Ready Foods’ current salsa plant and other processing facilities will relocate, and
From top: Adrianna Abarca; a rendering of Las Bodegas
the structures here will eventually house a museum, artist live/work spaces, an expanded retail shop, and a professional academy for visual, culinary, and performing arts and music.
The LCAC’s sites are centrally located but separate from most of the city’s other museums and galleries. However, by erecting them at these locations, Abarca and Reyes are reconnecting the historically Mexican American neighborhoods of La Alma Lincoln Park and Sun Valley—reuniting what I-25
divided in the mid-1960s and fortifying the neighborhoods’ Latino identities even as the areas continue to change.
Countering gentrification and shifting the city toward a more equitable cultural landscape doesn’t happen quickly. It’s part of the reason Abarca chose to transfer the day-to-day operations and fundraising for the LCAC into Reyes’ capable—and more youthful—hands. “My goals and intentions have always been to share what I’ve learned
with other people, particularly younger gen erations. And to build them up and to offer them opportunities,” Abarca says. “I love that Alfredo has an understanding of what it is to be the child of immigrants.” In fact, it was his family that set Reyes on the path to leading the LCAC.
AS THE WORLD COLLECTIVELY LAMENTED the loss of millions of people to the novel coronavirus, Reyes grieved a personal sadness: the deaths of his parents. First his pops, in April 2020. Then his momma, in April 2021. They didn’t contract COVID-19, but Reyes considers them among the millions of casualties indirectly tied to a pandemic that, in the United States, disproportionately sickened and killed Black and brown people. He believes the virus and the fear that came with it hastened their deaths.
At the time of his father’s passing, Reyes was working as the LCAC’s director of opera tions and programs—a position he’d secured after being introduced to Abarca while he was earning his master’s degree in educa tional foundations, policy, and practice at the University of Colorado Boulder. In the midst of his distress, he had an idea. “I wasn’t the only one that was going through grief. There were thousands of people dying, tens of thousands, across the country,” Reyes says. “[I realized] we don’t really have the language or the strategies in our community to talk about mental health, to talk about grief, to talk about loss.” He turned to his cultural traditions instead: Día de los Muertos is a Mexican holiday that celebrates the deceased, in part by building marigold-laden ofrendas, or altars, to honor them.
The LCAC launched its ofrendas pro gram in 2020 with $15,000; the public could buy altar kits filled with pieces handmade by artisans in Denver, Mexico, and Peru and participate in a series of events designed to bring the community together to talk about grief, but also about art and health. This month, boosted by a $203,000 grant from the Car ing for Denver Foundation, the initiative is marking its third year by adding workshops and expanding its associated arts and mental health programming into Denver-area schools.
“There are very few places to learn about our history, to learn about our culture, to know how to embrace that,” says Carlos Martinez, president and CEO of the Latino Community Foundation of Colorado, which is providing technical assistance and grant funding to the LCAC. “By having those kinds of institutions in our communities, it really helps adjust the equity issue in many different ways. And it gives people a sense of belonging.”
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Even without a place to call home, Reyes and the LCAC team have been building on the success of their ofrendas program to develop that sense of community close to home and throughout the Americas. The nonprofit has brought artists from across Latin America to Denver for residencies and sent local Latino artists south to broaden their experiences. Youth are a focal point, and the LCAC is in the midst of the third iteration of its Pub lic Arts Mentoring Program. Furthermore, in September, it hosted the Viva Southwest Mariachi Festival; the nonprofit also collabo rated with Metropolitan State University of Denver, with which it shares a music rehearsal and performance space, to assemble the first All-State Youth Mariachi Ensemble.
The focus on youth is purposeful. Reyes remembers well being a teenager growing up in Denver’s Baker neighborhood, where he had to learn to be Mexican and American at the same time. He spoke Spanish at home and English at school. After being teased for wearing cowboy boots, he asked his dad to buy him a pair of Nikes, but today he says he always had a sense of pride about his heritage, even if it took years of education and travel for him to learn “to be comfortably differ ent,” he says. He wants the LCAC to be a place that reflects the broad and divergent experiences of his people and helps them feel more secure in their places in this country. “Latino history, Latino art, Latino culture,” he says, “is American history, American art, American culture.”
FROM THE ROOFTOP OF THE LCAC’s future headquarters on Old West Colfax Avenue in June, Reyes’ green-brown eyes scan the urban landscape. Meow Wolf’s neon sign glows nearby. The football stadium to his left is quiet in the offseason. The LCAC’s two other sites are visible in the distance.
“It’s motivating to be out here,” Reyes says. In his imagination, the concrete via duct to his left is covered in striking murals. The 100-year-old building below him has been remade into the LCAC’s modern main attraction with lively galleries, a Mexican heritage museum, a boutique hotel, a bus tling restaurant, and meeting spaces. His office would overlook all of it.
It’s unclear when, exactly, that vision will become reality. Back when Abarca was still laying out her dreams for the LCAC, the opening of this location was going to be the budding institution’s big reveal: the center’s showpiece in the heart of the city. But the site’s success is dependent on the LCAC team’s ability to raise more than $25 million and on the adjacent Stadium District plan, a
20-year undertaking that will see the buildout of a 58-acre, mixed-use neighborhood to Empower Field’s south.
In the midst of the pandemic, Abarca and Reyes did what most business owners did: They adapted. They turned their atten tion temporarily away from this site to Las Bodegas, which has a more approachable $4.5 million price tag. The renovated warehouse will now serve as the city’s entrée into this ambitious project. It’s been a much slower process than either Reyes or Abarca projected, but momentum is picking up. The zoning approvals came through in late winter, more than a year after they were first submitted.
How to support the Ofrendas:LCAC.The Collective Healing Power of Art Purchase handmade altar pieces or join a class or documentary screening. The kickoff event will be held at Levitt Pavilion on October 9.
Holiday Shopping at Hijos del Sol
Get a jump-start on your gift lists at the LCAC’s artisan boutique; from jewelry to pottery, all of the pieces are handmade by Latino artisans. lcac-denver.org
“LCAC is going to add to the complex ity of Denver’s cultural community,” says Heather Nielsen, the Denver Art Museum’s chief learning and engagement officer and
The LCAC launched video and in-person tours of the warehouse space in August to solicit feedback from the community. The nonprofit continues to host and collaborate on events, including a successful series of night markets under the viaduct this past summer. And U.S. Senator Michael Bennet included the LCAC on a list of 62 Colo rado projects that could receive a chunk of $82 million in federal appropriations fund ing; the various bills were working their ways through Congress at press time, but if approved, Las Bodegas would be well on its way to reaching its fundraising goals with an infusion of $2.5 million.
a co-chair of the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs, on which Reyes also sits. “How they’re thinking about the work in interdisciplinary ways is really powerful. It’s not just, We’re going to be a museum It’s actually more like: We’re going to be an incubator, and, We’re going to work across sec tors.” Nielsen is impressed that the LCAC is asking important questions about how to be a training venue for young people and how to integrate health and wellness into the work. “From my vantage point as somebody who’s been in museums for many years,” she says, “I think that is really theThefuture.”future, of course, is still a little unclear for the LCAC. Reyes brings a childlike optimism to the myriad challenges ahead, but it’s balanced, ever so slightly, by his academic practicality. He’s playing the long game. “LCAC has always been something bigger than all of us,” he says. “The mission and vision is that, 100 years from now, our history, our culture, our art, our accomplish ments will be celebrated and shared.” m
Daliah Singer is a contributing writer for 5280 Email feedback to letters@5280.com.
When it comes to navigating home buying or selling, Anne Dresser Kocur provides an elevated concierge approach and will do everything possible to ensure a positive experience for her clients. She understands the need for individualized attention, creative state-of-the-art marketing, talent, drive, resourcefulness, and brilliance to get you into your dream home! A tangible testimony to her success and proven track record is the consistent return of past clientele and personal referrals.
• #1 Individual Broker at LIV Sotheby’s International Realty
• #1 Individual Producer for Denver Metro Association of Realtors
• #1 Individual in Denver Metro Area
• Over 95% Client Repeat/Referral Rate
• 5280 Excellence Award Winner
• Years of Corporate Relocation Experience
The Denver real estate market continues to change, but Anne remains the same dedicated determined to go above and beyond to meet all real estate needs.
8000 E. Belleview Avenue, Suite 200, Greenwood Village � 303-229-6464
Denver’s Top Team is comprised of 3 award winning realtors. They help each client achieve their real estate goals by bringing unparalleled negotiation skills, a high level of integrity, deep understanding of the community, and a wealth of knowledge to the table. EQUALLY AS IMPORTANT as their expertise is the way they go BEYOND the normal expectations of a realtor by bringing a top level of service to each unique situation and by meeting every clients’ individual needs. Clients lean on them for advice and for vendors to get a full service experience, giving them a perfect fit for their lifestyle. Whether they are working with Luxury properties or first time home buyers, they give everyone the same quality service and respect. Their passion to be the BEST is proven by their clients positive experiences, testimonials and longtime friendships afterwards. With this team on your side, you will turn your dreams into reality and EXPERIENCE TOP RESULTS!
• Another EPIC Year: Top 1.5% of Realtors in Sales Production in the Nation
• Yearly Recipients of the Denver Metro Association of Realtors Excellence Awards,
• Yearly Recipients of the Denver Board of Realtors Million Dollar Round Table Awards
• Yearly Recipients of the 5280 Five Star Award
SANA WOOD | JACCI GEIGER | WENDY GLAZER 303-906-9000 | DENVERSTOPTEAM@KENTWOOD.COM
As the newly installed 2023 Chair of the Denver Metro Association of Realtors, Jessica’s role with DMAR will combine her passions for serving clients as a REALTOR®, being a subject matter expert on the real estate industry, and her love of volunteering and giving back to her community. A proud Denver native and 2nd generation REALTOR®, Jessica has been with RE/MAX Alliance for almost two decades. Her commitment to thoughtfully guiding her clients through the process of buying and selling a home has become the foundation of her business. Ensuring everyone can build generational wealth for their family is at the heart of Jessica’s approach. Her top priority is ensuring that clients are knowledgeable, confident, and have a clear understanding throughout the process of buying and selling a home.
Jessica’s clientele continues to grow through referrals from happy clients who know firsthand that she is a fierce negotiator who promotes and protects their best interests. She works in the Metro Denver area, emphasizing the South Metro area where she has lived her entire life, raised her family, and has extensive knowledge of the communities and schools. Jessica has been heavily involved in several non-profits for years and prides herself on being involved in her community and giving back. Following her love for swimming and charitable work, Jessica serves as event Co-Director of a local non-profit, Swim Across America–Denver. SAA-Denver supports cancer research at Children’s Hospital Colorado, which in its 5th year, has raised almost $1 million in total funds.
• Chair of Denver Metro Association of
• RE/MAX Hall of fame recipient
• Professional Standards Committee
• Legislative Policy Committee
As a Denver native and an established agent for over twenty years, Mary is known for her extensive knowledge of the Denver market and for being an unwavering and passionate advocate for her clients. She strives to ensure that the home buying or selling process is fun, easy, and stress-free.
Mary has consistently been a Top Producer at Kentwood Real Estate, and her business is based on more than 95% referrals from satisfied clients. Providing excellent service to buyers and sellers comes naturally for Mary because of the joy she finds in helping people through what can be such an exciting and emotional time. When it comes to fulfilling wants and needs with the perfect home for buyers and the best offer for sellers, Mary absolutely shines.
Mary firmly believes that everyone deserves excellent representation regardless of price point. However, her extensive experience in the luxury home market really sets her apart. She knows the unique challenges that can come with buying and selling in this range and how to creatively work to get a great outcome.
• Member of the Denver Metro Association of Realtors (DMAR)
• Certified Residential Specialist (CRS since 2002)
• Yearly Recipient of the 5280 Five Star Award
• Yearly Recipient of the Denver Board of Realtors Million Dollar Round Table Awards
4949 Niagara Street, Suite 400, Denver, CO 80237 � 303-886-2323
MARYJONESDENVER.COM | iM4JONES@MAC.COM
One of Denver’s Top 10 Brokers for the past eight years by the Denver Board of Realtors. As one of the leading real estate brokers in Denver, Janet Kritzer is dedicated to meeting your needs with the utmost level of sophistication and professionalism. She specializes in the luxury home market within all the neighborhoods of Cherry Hills Village. With skillful negotiation, refined sales strategies, and expansive knowledge of the area, it’s clear to see why Janet consistently ranks in the top individual sales for LIV Sotheby’s.
Call Janet to discuss how her experience will work for you and your real estate needs.
TOP 10 BROKER SINCE 2007 – DENVER METRO ASSOCIATION OF STREET JOURNAL TOP 500 AGENTS NATIONALLY PROFESSIONAL SEVEN PROFFESIONAL
Each an industry leader in her own right, Deviree Vallejo and Liz Richards together embody a world-class client experience and proven, consistent results. Not only are they at the forefront of the Denver Metro market, but they are also recognized nationally as influential authorities with a global reach. They have uncompromisingly redefined the practice of luxury with 38 years of combined experience and over a billion dollars in sales volume in the Denver Metro market. Deviree and Liz have made their mark as Denver’s premier agents, consistently ranking amongst Denver’s topproducing brokers. While both enjoy the vibrant lifestyle that Denver offers, like most Coloradans, they each cherish downtime with family and friends in the mountains. They are emphatic in their belief that Colorado elevates the experience of living. For more information or to schedule a time to discuss the current real estate market or sale of your home, please visit TheElevatedLivingGroup.com
#2 Partnership by Sales Volume & Total Transactions 2021 in Denver
Recognized by REAL TRENDS as one of “America’s Best Real Estate Professionals” for ranking amongst the Top 1% Nationwide by Transaction Sides & Sales Volume Since 2015 Voted 5 Star Professional by Denver’s home Buyers and Sellers for 11 years in a row Belleview Ave., Suite 200 Village, CO 80111
DEVIREE VALLEJO : 303-931-0097 | LIZ RICHARDS : 303-956-2962 THEELEVATEDLIVINGGROUP.COM
KENTWOOD REAL ESTATE DTCRoy and Jonathan Lopez form the Glery Ross Group at Kentwood Real Estate, a father and son team providing their clients over 50 years of real estate experience. This experience and market expertise ensure their clients receive knowledgeable guidance every step of the way. Their business is built around a client first approach, never losing sight of the personal nature of buying and selling a home.
The team’s mission, “Real Estate with a Purpose,” is the driving force behind the Glery Ross Group. Jonathan and Roy care deeply about making a difference in the lives of their clients and their community. They strive to live a life of purpose and meaning and to run a business that reflects that mission.
JONATHAN: 303-550-0802 | jonathan@kentwood.com ROY: 303-788-7800 | roy@kentwood.com
GLERYROSSGROUP.COM
Anna has a “Client-First” Philosophy allowing her to provide the very best service by putting her clients first. This means keeping herself accessible, being a good listener as well as a great communicator, and responding quickly to her clients’ needs. There are many qualities and skills that go into being an excellent real estate professional; Integrity, in-depth community/market knowledge, utilizing successful and effective marketing tools, powerful negotiation skills and high-quality professional networking, all of which are hallmarks of how Anna works. She has an amazing attention to detail and always has her clients’ best interests at the center of everything she does. She strives to take all worry off her clients’ shoulders and allows each client to feel as if they are her only client throughout the entire buying/ selling process. As a Denver native, she knows the city like the back of her hand with a vast knowledge of all the neighborhoods and their history.
Real Producers Top 5%, Denver Professionals 40 under 40, Real Estate Professional Accredited Agent with The Board of Regents Luxury Real Estate, Realtor®, Member of Denver Metro Association of Realtors, Member of National Association of Realtors
THECENTRONGROUP.COM | ACENTRON@LIVSOTHEBYSREALTY.COM
Always coming from the perspective of a lifelong real estate advisor, Kim and her team are here to guide you in this changing market regardless of your short or long term path. They’re a team of agents committed to caring for clients with solid analysis, gracious yet persistent negotiating, and innovative and common-sense problem solving. They are empowered by the financial and tech tools of Compass, but it’s the decades of deep relationships with clients and their community that helped them produce almost $100M in sales in 2021 and earn the Denver Metro Association of Realtors’ Diamond Level honor as one of the top producing teams in the metro area.
KIM KOUBA (TEAM LEAD), JODY DONLEY (FOUNDER), LAURA HUDGINS, MELINDA HOWLETT, DANELLE MORGAN, MEGAN DAVIS, TIFFANY BURKE, ASHLEY HOWLETT, JORDYNE BAILEY, TRACIE POLOSKY (TEAM OPS DIRECTOR)
JODY DONLEY, KIM KOUBA, MELINDA HOWLETT, ASHLEY HOWLETT, TIFFANY BURKE, MEGAN DAVIS, LAURA HUDGINS, MARCY EASTMAN, DANELLE MORGAN, AND DIANNA MAY
We are a husband & wife team with over 30 years of combined real estate experience who provide our clients with end-to-end expertise in complex real estate transactions, while building lifelong relationships along the way. As is the case in any great team, we bring different and complementary backgrounds and skill sets in marketing, sales, finance, and negotiation to our partnership, ensuring that each client receives the personal service, comprehensive information and professional guidance needed in the rapidly changing real estate market. A home sale or purchase is a significant milestone in anyone’s life, and we pride ourselves on making it an enjoyable, rewarding, and memorable time for each of our treasured clients. Once the purchase or sale is complete, we continue our relationships, becoming long-term trusted advisors and resource providers for anything real estate related. We welcome the opportunity to talk with you about your real estate journey.
Metro AWARDS KOUBA 303-204-8215 KIM.KOUBA@COMPASS.COM
100 Saint Paul Street, Suite 200, Denver, CO 80206 � 303-549-9815 RULEPROPERTIES.COM
Always in this changing market regardless of your short or long We’re a team of agents committed to caring for our clients with solid analysis, gracious yet persistent negotiating, and innovative and common-sense problem solving. We’re empowered by the financial and tech tools of Compass, but it’s the decades of deep relationships with clients and our community that has helped us earn the Denver Metro Association of Realtors’ Diamond Level honor as one of the top producing teams in the metro area.While I help sellers and buyers in all categories, my niches include the higher end of the market and acreage properties in the area. You can count on me for active listening, creative problem-solving, sincere enthusiasm, and discretion. I would be privileged to help you sell your home or find the property of your dreams! SOTHEBY’S INTERNATIONAL REALTY
Luxury homes and acreage properties in Douglas County
• Certified Residential Specialist
• Certified Home Luxury Marketing Specialist
• Master Certified Negotiation Expert
• Realtor of the Year 2013
• Past President Douglas Elbert Realtor Association + AWARDS
Lisa Fallon Denver, Wilcox Street, Suite 100, Castle Rock, CO 80104 � 720-881-5718
Lisa Fallon is renowned among her clients for her integrity, loyalty and professionalism. As a buyer’s and seller’s agent at Coldwell Banker Global Luxury, Lisa is committed to offering her clients the highest quality representation and professionalism along with superb customer service and individualized marketing strategies while understanding the needs of her clients. Lisa’s personable and professional character allows her to build and maintain solid relationships. Lisa is a Residential Buyer and Seller agent having the combined experience in the Luxury Market of negotiation, consultation and marketing representation to ensure the best possible outcome in all transactions. One of the most important things to her is the relationships and the trust that she builds with her clients. When you have that and great communication, every part of the process goes that much smoother.
• GRI, ABR, MRP, Smart Home, Global Luxury
• Production has consistently been in the top 3% of Coldwell Banker Agents in Colorado.
201 Columbine Street, Suite 200, Denver � 720-840-6711 LISA.FALLON@CBREALTY.COM
Kelly Ellis is an award winning real estate broker who understands today’s real estate market and how to navigate through it. Kelly strives to create successful client relationships through honesty, integrity, timely communication, strong negotiation skills, and a powerful marketing plan. She is committed to her clients and truly feels honored when they place their trust in her when buying or selling their home. Outside of her 16 year career as a real estate broker, Kelly has been married for 16 years and is a proud mother of two daughters and two rescue animals. Kelly also loves spending time outdoors in her native state of Colorado.
THEELLISTEAM.BLOGSPOT.COM ELLISTEAM@COMCAST.NET Society Global Luxury
Milena Joy 6501 E. Belleview Avenue, Suite 500, Englewood � 303-921-5420
Milena knows that changing where you live can change how you live. Adopted from Colombia and raised in Minnesota with three siblings in a one bathroom home, Milena learned early on the laws of real estate supply and demand, and likewise, the power of negotiation. Her entrepreneurial spirit and competitive nature continues to fuel her drive to consistently deliver the extraordinary results her clients deserve.
Delivering a luxury experience at every price point, Milena’s fresh approach to buying and selling homes provides unparalleled value to the client experience. She leverages her marketing, social media and advertising expertise to maximize your home’s exposure while matching highly qualified buyers and investors with homes around the world.
COLDWELL BANKER REALTY
In a market rich with realtors, Ann Kerr stands out from the pack. With just under $58 million in sales in 2021, she is proof of the power of relationships. Ann’s 20-year tenure in the industry reflects the type of staying power that can only be achieved through honesty, integrity and unrelenting authenticity. She answers phone calls and emails directly. It’s extremely important to her that she take responsibility for every detail of every transaction. Ann specializes in helping buyers and sellers with all types of residential properties—from acreage estates in the Villages, scrapes in Observatory Park to high rise condos downtown and townhouses in Cherry Creek.
• Expert in Cherry Hills Village for 30 Years
• Investment Properties
• Relocation
Amanda integrates her tenacious energy, integrity, and analytical dexterity into every real estate transaction. She loves inspiring possibilities and enthusiastically exceeding her clients’ real estate needs and desires. While always working, Amanda enjoys a mountain getaway, is an avid hockey fan (Go Avs!), loves big dogs, and has been a serial volunteer in Denver for nearly 25 years. Most importantly, she looks forward to earning the opportunity to serve your real estate needs.
A few accolades include:
• 5280Double Diamond Top Producer 2022
• 2020 #1 Producer Kentwood Cherry Creek
• 2021 Five Star Professional
• 2018 Denver Business Journal Forty Under Forty
• Certified Negotiation Expert & More!
The Neir Team South Niagara Street, Suite 400
The Neir Team is one of Denver’s top real estate teams based on sales, production and customer satisfaction. The team has numerous accolades including being named 2021 RealTrends America’s Best Real Estate Professional and is the #1 team at Kentwood City Properties. The team is comprised of Alex & Stacy Neir and Laura Fuller who share over 44 years of expertise.
“As first time home buyers from out of state, the Neir team helped us find our dream place in under a week. They were professional, knowledgable and felt like a true resource we could utilize to answer any and all questions. We will be recommending the Neir team to anyone who is looking to purchase in the Denver Area!”
– Client testimonial
1660 17th St., Ste. 100, Denver, CO 80202
ALEX | 720-935-4399
STACY | 720-280-3004 LAURA | 303-646-7443
NEIRTEAM.COM
Stephanie Lepard is an award-winning agent with robust insights into the Denver market. As someone who has received the Denver Metro Association of Realtors® Award for several years in a row, Stephanie is experienced across the Denver metro area, continuously tracking trends and activity. This allows her to advise her clients on specific properties based on her detailed knowledge of Denver’s various neighborhoods.
An ardent supporter of the Children’s Hospital of Colorado, Stephanie has served on the Development Committee and the NICU Family Advisory Council. Stephanie also has held an annual fundraiser for five years in a row, “Pumpkins with Purpose,” raising money for the Children’s Hospital Colorado720-935-5759NICU.|
4949 South Niagara Street, Suite 400 Denver, CO 303-885-474680237|stephanie@kentwood.com
Providing outstanding customer service through honest hard work is the cornerstone of my business. Effective communication, knowledge, dedication & detailed execution is what makes my transactions successful. Being diligent and problem solving without drama ensures repeat business. Treating all parties in a transition with respect and transparency makes me excel in my profession. It is no wonder that I love my job. People are why I love my job! If you buy or sell a property, you should have access to an agent that puts your needs first by offering amazing communication skills, always listening, providing education, and utilizing the latest industry tools. That’s what I offer to every client.
RE/MAX OF CHERRY CREEK
Luke Gordon, CDPE, CRS, GRI, RENE is a senior Broker/Co-Owner, and a founding member of RE/MAX of Cherry Creek. Let Luke’s knowledge of established Metro Denver neighborhoods, as well as his expertise in construction, corporate relocation, distressed property sales, marketing, valuation and finance, assist you in selling your home or finding your dream home! Put Luke’s decades of experience and negotiating skills to work for you! Knowledge and experience is why Luke Gordon is “The Name that Sells Denver.”
• Five-star Professional Award Last Ten years for Outstanding Customer Service
• Five-star Client Reviews
• Concierge Client Service
• Selling Denver’s Finest City Neighborhoods
Speak directly to the audience looking to buy or sell a home this year.
5280 ’s Realtor Profiles special advertising section delivers direct access to Denver’s affluent and educated market.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT ARI BEN 720.266.6240 OR ARI@5280.COM
PHOTOGRAPH BY
JONI SCHRANTZ
Sunday Vinyl’s PEI oysters with plum granita and cucumber mignonette
The Greenwich is motivating us to eat more vegetables, one plate of Colorado-grown tur nips, spinach, and potatoes at a time. Last summer, chef Justin Freeman moved to the Mile High City to helm the kitchen at the modern American bistro, the brainchild of fellow former New Yorker and friend Delores Tronco. Freeman brought to Denver his family and a devotion to local sourcing, which is reflected in the rotating menu. In the sleek dining room—furnished with Tronco’s collection of images by late street photographer Ricky Pow ell and other Big Apple memorabilia—build your feast with the likes of Altius Farms lettuce laced with shallot-Champagne vinaigrette and roasted carrots on a bed of lemon tahini. To satisfy your carnivorous side, turn your attention to the sized-for-sharing entrées: The 24-hour-cured roasted lemon chicken and littleneck clams in garlic-scape butter are worth saving room for. So are pastry chef Luke Miller’s contributions, particularly the Greenwich cheesecake, which is a creamy slice of heaven. $$$, 3258 Larimer St., 720-868-5006
This11-month-old LoDo steak house feels nothing like the stuffy carnivore lairs of old with its hipster-bovine decor, monstera-leaf-themed wallpaper, neon signage, and magenta and lime accents. The service is quippy, and the food is as fresh as the environs. Start with a tartare katsu sando, which stars rare beef zinged with a tangy aïoli and a soft-boiled quail egg between two pieces of Japanese milk bread, before moving on to the main affair: steak. Harder-to-find cuts like the Colorado-sourced tomahawk rib-eye and well-marbled bavette are grilled to perfection by executive chef and partner Max MacKissock. In fact, servers will encourage you to consider paying the extra $14 for a “Max-style” meal. They aren’t just upselling you: The addition of ten der alliums and a shank of roasted bone marrow to the shareable plate is worth the charge. Veggie-forward sides—such as the rainbow-hued grilled Mokum carrots dressed with mole blanco and almonds—will further brighten your spread, as will any one of the well-crafted cocktails. $$$$, 1600 15th St., 303-623-0534
No matter the season, there’s some thing magical about sipping a gin tonic from Corrida’s rooftop patio overlooking the Flatirons. The view is one of the best in Boulder, but while visitors come for the vistas, locals gather for the food. Here, executive chef Samuel McCandless delivers a suite of tapas and shareable mains from land and sea, offering a culi nary adventure through Spain. Start with a classic Mediterranean appe tizer—such as the tinned sardines drizzled with brown butter or slices of dry-aged Iberian ham—before moving on to heartier fare. Corrida’s signature steaks are produced using regenerative practices that reduce the protein’s carbon impact, and the animals are butchered later in life, resulting in a richer taste that’s less common in conventionally sourced cows. Accoutrements like Man chego-dusted broccolini round out the meal and pair beautifully with a glass of Spanish wine. Through every bite, the nearby peaks are Colo rado’s towering reminder that after this adventure ends, another always awaits. $$$$, 1023 Walnut St., Suite 400, Boulder, 303-444-1333
Caroline Glover brought national attention to the Aurora dining scene with her first James Beard Award win this past May. But before her five-year-old Stanley Marketplace spot earned the honor, she had already won over Denverites with her soulful service and simple yet elegant presentations of wood-fired eats. In the airy dining room—where a wall of windows, wooden pendant lamps, and plenty of houseplants facilitate a homey vibe— servers greet regulars by name and welcome newbies with warmth. Because everything that comes out of the kitchen looks like a must-order, you can often overhear other guests debating whether to get the dilly egg salad toast or the sweet-tomato-bejeweled house spaghetti or the juicy pork tenderloin with pan-seared squash. There’s no wrong answer—unless you decide to skip the Paris-Brest (a giant cream puff) or the pecan pie for a finale. The friendly service and unpretentious dishes are evidence that Glover hasn’t let any accolade spoil Annette’s humble appeal. $$$, Stanley Marketplace, 2501 Dallas St., Aurora, 720-710-9975
From left: Santa Maria tri-tip steak from A5; the bar at the Greenwich; Palisade peach Paris-Brest at Annette
BOULDER conversation about wholeanimal sourcing at the Front Range Hosea Rosenberg a for business north Boulder years became the first in the in-house of
In 2014, Sam and Tricia Maher left their hometown of Melbourne, Australia, and set out on a road trip across the United States to find the ideal city to open a restau rant. The couple—both longtime hospitality pros—eventually fell in love with Denver’s energetic food scene and in 2019 opened Somebody People, an eatery embodying some of their favorite things: sustainability, plant-forward fare, and uplifting party vibes (as evidenced by the space’s David Bowie–inspired artwork and regu lar DJ sets). Although meat- and dairy-free, nothing feels absent from the vegan menu, especially when ordering the Feed Me expe rience: a hearty parade of local, seasonal veggies transformed into Mediterranean-style tapas, salads, and pastas by head chef Art Burnayev and chef de cuisine Kevin Clay. Past highlights have included earthy roasted turnips with salsa verde and skordalia (mashed potato dip) as well as sweet and savory meatballs made with eggplant, cabbage, dates, and almonds. Guests are encour aged to bring their own Tupperware for takeaway (or pay $1 per compostable container), and on Sundays, the team empties the fridge to craft a $35-per-person, family-style meal using leftover ingredients—practices that show being easy on the Earth can also be delicious. $$$, 1165 S. Broadway, Unit 104, 720-502-5681
Fourteen-year-old Tocabe, co-owned by Ben Jacobs and Matthew Chandra, a member of Oklahoma’s Osage Nation, is the only brick-and-mortar restaurant in Denver where aficio nados can feast on American Indian fare. We’ve long been fans of the fast-casual eatery’s traditional plates, such as the puffy fry bread piled high with Colorado-raised bison meat, pinto beans, hominy salsa, and roasted green chiles, but a pandemic-born pivot gave us even more to love. In June 2021, Jacobs and Chandra launched an online marketplace selling meat and pantry staples sourced from Indigenous producers, including blue, white, and yellow cornmeal from Bow & Arrow, a farm owned and operated by members of the Ute Moun tain Ute Tribe in southwestern Colorado. For every two items sold, one item is donated to Native community organizations, and Tocabe matches bulk purchases with a 50 percent, in-kind donation to make nutritious, traditional foods accessible to those in need. Many of these ingredients are the same ones that grace Tocabe’s menu, so each time you dine, you’re supporting Native farmers and ranchers around the country. Whatever you order, add a cup of Iko green chile (named after Jacobs’ grandmother), a refreshing take on the beloved stew that’s simmered with tender potatoes, sweet corn kernels, and ground beef. $, 3536 W. 44th Ave., 720-524-8282; 8181 E. Arapahoe Road, Unit C, Greenwood Village, 720-485-6738
Since 2020, wife-and-husband duo Cindhura Reddy and Elliot Strathmann have leaned into eight-yearold Spuntino’s greatest charms: comforting Italian fare, expertly curated beverages, and welcoming hospitality, all delivered in a brick building replete with copper lighting, weathered wood, and a tented, string-light-adorned patio. The menu often has whispers of South Indian influences—a nod to Reddy’s roots—and shifts regularly, but a few crowd pleasers always make an appearance. The hand-rolled capellini is entangled with olive oil, jammy egg yolk, and Indian-spice-kissed preserved garlic; arancini (fried rice balls) are accented with seasonal goodness like spring onion prepared two ways; and tomatobraised pork cheeks are accompanied by creamy blue corn polenta. The charisma doesn’t end there, though. The gummy-bear-adorned Negronis and house-churned gelato sandwiches couldn’t be more delightful—in totally different ways, of course. $$$, 2639 W. 32nd Ave., 303-433-0949
The five-year-old Bindery, sur rounded by drink dens that beckon party-ready millennials and Gen Zers on LoHi’s Central Street, is a reliable morning-tonight retreat with a menu that’s as varied as the day is long. In the early hours, neighborhood dwell ers line up in the streamlined, industrial-chic space to grab Queen City Collective Coffee sippers and croissants, Portuguese tarts, and other house pastries. During the lunch rush, tables are occupied by groups of friends and colleagues connecting over Den ver-based River Bear American Meats’ smoked turkey sandwiches with herbaceous chimichurri and everysustenancedeliversWhatevercradledandnib-sprinkledsmokedplatesbleandBartendersandHampstenrollsquinoatahini-turmeric-dressedsalad.Whendinnertimearound,chef-ownerLindaFox’sexpansivebarexhibitionkitchencomealive.pourSpanishwinesmartinisgarnishedwithediflowers,whilecookscomposeofmustard-gelato-crestedrabbitpecanpie,cacao-crispyporkbellymelonsalad,andflakyhalibutbypiquillopepperbroth.timeitis,theBinderydelectablyinterestingyou’llwanttoeatday.
$$$, 1817 Central St., 303-993-2364
Unifying a variety of palate-awakening, fresh ingredients, from fragrant herbs and acidic lime to piquant chiles and sweet tamarind, is a cornerstone of Thailand’s cuisine. The team at three-year-old Daughter Thai in Highland—led by chef-owner Ounjit Hardacre, a native of the country’s Kanchanaburi province—excels at this feat, with an added touch of elegance. Many of the velvet-booth-lined bar and restaurant’s offerings are punctuated with a rainbow of gar nishes and larger-format proteins rarely found at other local Thai restaurants, which often incorporate smaller chunks of meat. Consider the chicken satay: slices of charcoal-grilled breast presented on a wooden board with a vinegar-mar inated cucumber salad and golden peanut sauce. Or look to the larb, a mound of fried soft-shell crab set on a pillow of butter lettuce and showered with mint, red onion, tomato, and fried shallots and a citrusy, roasted-rice-seasoned sauce. Also don’t miss the specials, which could include anything from moo ping (skewered nuggets of juicy pork shoulder) with sticky rice to whole lobster, prawns, and calamari nestled in a lemony curry sauce. $$$, 1700 Platte St., Suite 140, 720-667-4652
From left: Linda Hamp sten Fox of the Bindery; whole fried fish from Daughter Thai; Chez Maggy’s dining room
Los Angeles–based celebrity chef Ludo Lefebvre has always been a fan of Colorado. He skied and hunted here and often visited his wife’s mother, Margaret, who lived in Littleton. Tragedy struck in 2019 when Margaret was killed by a drunk driver; more than two years later, Lefebvre honored her memory with Chez Maggy, which opened this past February inside the Thompson Denver hotel. Here, in a high-ceilinged lobby dotted with marble-topped tables and globe-light chandeliers, Lefebvre not only serves his mother-in-law’s favorite tagliatelle Bolognese but also displays his prowess as a Michelin-starred French toque via thoughtful treatments of regional ingredients. Colorado lamb chops are doused with smoked bagna cauda (butter and anchovy sauce) and studded with local purslane. Also look for bison—one of Lefebvre’s favorite proteins—in the form of a tender tartare served on a crispy potato chip, and don’t leave without a bite of his mind-blowing, gluten-free crab cake, bound with shrimp mousse in lieu of breadcrumbs. Whatever your indulgence, pair it with a selection of French wine or bubbles, and don’t forget to raise a glass to Maggy. $$$, 1616 Market St., 720-794-9544
LODOSince Misfit Snackbar debuted in late 2019, the kitchen inside Mid dleman bar has become a cult-favorite venue for pub grub and street food elevated with unusual touches (think: nori-wrapped compressed melon). While chef-owner Bo Porytko expected to move on to other projects after his one-year lease ended at the East Colfax watering hole, the pandemic upset his plans—which led him to dive deeper into his passion for producing nostalgia-steeped cuisine with inventive techniques. Now, with the help of chef Dillon Rigolini, who joined the Misfit team last year, the menu is funkier than ever—in the best way possible. Taste the team’s creativity in achievements like the bloom ing onion okonomiyaki, a riff on the Outback Steakhouse classic with dried-apricot-infused tonkatsu sauce, fish-sauce-laced aïoli, smoky bonito flakes, and a homemade furikake seasoning composed of crushed seaweed and sesame seeds. Or dig into the Buffalo terrine nuggets, braised-then-fried chicken presented with spicy sauce, pick led celery and carrot ribbons, and blue cheese fundido. Coupled with Middleman’s esteemed cocktail list, every visit is a palate-pleasing experience. $$, 3401 E. Colfax Ave., 303-353-4207
From left: Nori-wrapped compressed melon at Misfit Snackbar; nigiri from Uchi; Jose Avila of La Diabla
Every evening, more than a dozen culinary pros bustle in perfect harmony to execute four-year-old Uchi’s 80-plusitem menu. At least six chefs, some of whom wield knives, blowtorches, and tweezers, work behind the sushi counter at any given time. They sculpt rectangles of nigiri, brush snow crab with brown butter, and slice tuna loin, yellowtail, and salmon belly (flown in from markets in Japan six days a week). Meanwhile, servers carry vessels of oak-grilled walu walu in citrusy ponzu sauce and crispy rice cakes atop smoky salsa matcha from the kitchen to packed tables. Chef-owner Tyson Cole, who also has an Austin, Texas, restaurant of the same name, is the conductor behind the well-oiled production. The attention to detail extends to excellent service and divine palate pleasers. The small plates—of which you’ll eas ily want to order five to seven for two people—will set you back between $5 and $29 each (more than your average neighborhood sushi joint). The experience, however, is one you won’t regret. $$$$, 2500 Lawrence St., 303-444-1922
Soft-shell crab snuggled between pillowy steamed buns. Bonito-flake-sprinkled fried chicken porkGochujang-slatheredkatsu.ribs.Thesearejust a few reasons Uncle is no ordinary ramen house, thanks to chef-proprietor Tommy Lee’s refusal to be known exclusively for brothy specialties. The con temporary Japanese spot, which opened in High land in 2012 and added a larger Wash Park outpost in 2019, has Pan-Asian entrées that are as entic ing as its popular slurpable offerings. Look beyond the traditional chicken, shoyu, or duck ramen styles (though those are excel lent, too) for soup-free or curry variations. The miso mazemen’s bundle of thick, chewy strands mixed with spicy miso pork, napa cab bage, and corn is a fiery, umami-packed pick, as is the veggie khao soi with hearty king trumpet mush rooms, pickled mustard greens, and red onion in a broth inspired by the famous Northern Thai curry. The rotating menus vary, which is just another part of the appeal of this uncommonly great eatery. $$, 2215 W. 32nd Ave., 303-433-3263; 95 S. Penn sylvania St., 720-638-1859
Although it was born in June 2021, La Diabla still doesn’t have an identifying sign. But chef-owner Jose Avila likes it that way. The pozoleria reminds him of the nameless taco and torta stalls his family used to operate in their hometown of Mexico City, where word would circulate through the community about which were best: “If you know, you know,” Avila says. In fact, the chef, who came to Denver in 2001, earned a James Beard nomina tion this year for El Borrego Negro, his Sundays-only pop-up in Westwood that serves whole-roasted sheep meat mostly via word of mouth and an Instagram page. While the takeoutonly concept sells out quickly every weekend, it’s the humble, dimly lit Ballpark restaurant where Avila’s heritage and skill truly shine. Visit on Thursday for two-for-one bowls of pozole and opt for a rojo, blanco, or verde caldo (broth) laden with slowroasted pork or chicken, house-nixtamalized Mexican maize, and optional avocado and chicharrones. The guisados (stews) of proteins such as pollo pibil, beef birria, and even chapulines (grasshoppers) delivered via tacos or pambazos (sandwiches made with guajillo-pepper-sauce-dipped bread) are equally as tantalizing. $, 2233 Larimer St., 720-519-1060
For six years, Comal has welcomed immigrant and refugee women into its kitchen, teaching them the skills needed to become chefs and even run cater ing businesses, food trucks, and brick-and-mortar restaurants. More than 40 women have gone through the two- to three-year-long program, and alumni like Silvia Hernandez (now the chef-owner of Silvia at Lost City, a business and social collective in Globeville) and Erika Rojas (of Prieto’s Catering) have made Denver decidedly more palatable since graduating from the incubator in 2021 and 2019, respectively. This past January, Comal welcomed five new trainees from Mexico and Venezuela, who prepare a rotating menu of popular items from their respective cultures. Expect juicy plates such as the cochinita pibil—chile-marinated pork served with soft corn tortillas, black beans, and pickled onion—or steamy tamales de rajas con queso, stuffed with Muenster, green chiles, and tomatoes. In 2023, Comal will invite five or six more trainees into the program—some from Indonesia and Africa—fostering a new batch of talent and bringing even more goodness to Denver’s communal table. $, 3455 Ringsby Court, Suite 105, 720-500-3455
LONE TREE
Park Meadows Mall was the last place we expected to find outstand ing Indian cuisine. That is, until last October, when chef Charles Mani reincar nated his Urban Village concept, the Lone Tree restaurant that closed in 2021. His new eatery— flanked by a Crate & Barrel and a southernreasonsfrompurchaseyear-round,andyoursauce.arewhoseorandsproutedingaromasdalties,oftheingscontemporaryfamiliarorangesparselygarlickyslow-simmeredstuddedroasted-butternut-squash-ouslypatronsNordstrom—invitestosopupgenerportionedplatesofcoconutcurryandlentilswithnaaninaspaceaccentedwithandwicker.ThosewithMani’srefined,culinarystylknow,however,toskipusualsuspectsinfavorlesser-knownspecialsuchaskalemoongchaat,asymphonyofandtexturesfeaturbatteredandfriedkale,lentils,freshmint,roastedcuminyogurt,theUrbanchicken,hunksofcrispybirdtossedinatomato-chileYoucanalsogrillownmarinatedmeatsvegetablesontheheatedpatioorabeautifulcakethebakerycase—freshtoventuretothesuburbs. $$, 8505
Park Meadows Center Drive, Unit 2184, Lone Tree, 720-536-8565
Wines are like people, says Sunday Vinyl sommelier Clara Klein, so it’s nice to know what you’re getting into before meeting them. Klein’s philosophy—supported by a civil engineering background that gave her the know-how to distill complex topics into digest ible material—is why the two-and-a-half-year-old wine bar and restaurant has one of most renowned and approachable bottle and glass programs in Denver. In addition to introducing guests to new sips by explaining their origins, Klein describes essences and mouthfeels with light-hearted phrases and adjectives such as “highly chuggable, yet smart, like a great beach read” and “snappy, refreshing, gets to the point.” The conversational style brings crisp energy to age-old wine-tasting practices only true oenophiles could appreciate. Klein’s crowd-pleasing ensemble of more than 350 Champagne-rosé blends, Pinot Noirs, and other varieties is backed by a chorus of fancy-but-friendly bites from chef de cuisine Charlie Brooks and vinyl-only beats that both grape geeks and novices can enjoy. $$$$, 1803 16th Street Mall., 720-738-1803
At four-year-old Safta, each bite of silky hummus and pinkpeppercorn-speckled labneh (strained yogurt) transports you to the vibrant culinary world of chef-owner Alon Shaya’s ancestors. His favorite salatim (an Israeli term for snacks and sides) is the lutenitsa, a bright roasted-pepper dip puréed with eggplant, tomato, and garlic. It reminds him of his againwe’regenerousonlypaste. Muchcoatedanddill-scentedstyleasdips,gies,makeWhileBeardatbyIsraelitheisSourcelight-floodedShaya’smother”fact,trybeforemakegrandmother,Bulgarian-IsraeliwhousedtothedishforShayahemovedtothiscoun-fromIsraelatagefour.InSaftameans“grand-inHebrew,andrestaurant,anatural-eateryinsidetheHotel&MarketHall,anenduringhomagetomatriarch.ThetraditionaldishesareinfluencedhercookingbutelevatedthehandoftheJamesAward–winningchef.youcan(andshould)amealofthefreshveg-puffypita,anddelightfultheentréesareequallyimpressive,withfamily-portionsofhoney-andwholecabbagefall-off-the-bonechickeninanumami-richchilelikeanembraceagrandmacangive,thespreadsevokejoyeagertoexperienceandagain. $$$$, the Source Hotel & Market Hall, 3330 Brighton Blvd., 720-408-2444
We appreciate Dana Rodriguez’s contributions to the culinary world so much that we don’t even care that she still can’t reveal when exactly Casa Bonita will reopen. That’s because the celebrated Mexico City–born chef’s playful brand of Latin American cuisine is readily available at her three other Denver concepts: Work & Class, Cantina Loca, and Super Mega Bien, which celebrates its four-year anniversary this year. There, Rodriguez serves small plates—roasted beets glazed with tamarind vinaigrette and cumin yogurt and cornand-cheese-stuffed arepas—on dim-sum-style carts as well as larger mains such as chicken confit drumsticks in fiery green chile and whole crispy-skinned Colorado striped bass with red curry sauce. Sit at the bustling bar, where you can sip the rose-petal-scented La Rosa, one of the restaurant’s signature gin and tonics, while peering into the open kitchen. Even when the pink palace finally turns on its fountains (sometime in 2023, Rodriguez says), Super Mega Bien will still have a place in our hearts. $$$, 1260 25th St., 720-269-4695
Behind every vessel of duck confit bathed in Thai-inspired coconut curry soup and burnt honey panna cotta at the Wolf’s Tailor is a mission to squeeze as much splendor out of Colorado’s bounty as possible. While the four-year-old fine-dining venue has always excelled at in-state sourcing and eliminating waste, it took things to the next level in late 2020 when executive chef Taylor Stark (an alum of now-closed Departure who has a love for spicy and acidic ingredients) and director of fermentation Mara King (a Hong Kong native schooled in Chinese fermentation practices) came into the pic ture. Stark’s and King’s respective expertises strengthen chef-owner Kelly Whitaker’s tasting menus of almosttoo-pretty-to-eat bites. Go for pastas, breads, and pastries made with heirloom grains ground at Whita ker’s Boulder mill; bold condiments such as miso and koji inoculated with leftover bread; and surprising ingredient combinations such as charcoal-charred, tamarind-sweet-soy-lacquered lamb neck. At summer’s end, the team preserved all it could from the harvest to stock the pantry. Now, ingredients like miso-enriched carrot and cherry-infused gochujang (Korean pepper paste) will invigorate its fall and winter creations, allowing patrons to savor warm-weather joys year-round. $$$$, 4058 Tejon St., 720-456-6705
From left: Wine and small plates at Sunday Vinyl; tapas at Super Mega Bien; a bento course from the Wolf’s TailorSummer 2020 was, by all accounts, a terrible time to open a restaurant. That didn’t stop chef-owner Amos Watts, who jumped at the chance to start the Fifth String when his friend and former colleague Justin Brunson closed LoHi’s Old Major and asked if he wanted the space. The farm-to-table restaurant celebrates local produce (some of which comes from Watts’ extensive home garden) and implements an in-house butcher program to break down whole sides of wagyu beef from Shavano Valley Ranch in Salida. The resulting menu not only includes impeccable roast beef sandwiches, hoisin-drizzled, slow-cooked beef belly, and wagyu steak carpaccio dressed with crunchy fried chiles, pine nuts, harissa aïoli, and pickled ramps, but also clever nose-to-tail creations such as the tallow bread service. For the latter’s photo-worthy presentation, the team molds rendered beef fat into an edible candle that melts into a dippable thyme- and rosemary-scented pool. If you, like Watts, have a penchant for capitalizing on great opportunities, we suggest visiting for happy hour, when many signa ture dishes are $12 or less—even on weekends. $$$$, 3316 Tejon St., Unit 102, 720-420-0622
From left: Beef offerings at the Fifth String; a pie from Redeemer Pizza; Bellota’s chile relleno
The best seat in Tavernetta’s dining room is within gawking distance of the central open kitchen, where each night, chefs and waitstaff perform a well-choreo graphed dance of prepping, plating, and serving. In addition to scents of simmering ragu, brown butter, and garlicky lemon sauce, a quiet, focused energy radiates from the cook stations. When an order is up, servers throw hand signals to indicate the number of people needed to carry plates to the table, synchronizing their delivery with a polished flourish. The result is a masterful dinner with a show, which makes tucking into the culinary marvels of James
ofmisù—anoveryou’reingredients.seed—singnel,bycornporkMaialino—aProteinandpastaouslyayoubeefmorechefAward–nominatedBeardexecutiveCodyCheethamevenspecial.Thegrass-fedcarpaccioissodelicatecancutitwiththetineoffork.Eachbiteofgener-portioned,handcraftedisperfectlyaldenteappropriatelysauced.dishes,suchasthehay-roastedbellysetatopsweetpolentaaccompaniedtangygreentomato,fen-andpickledmustardwithseasonalAfteryourmeal,encouragedtolingerawedgeofsilkytiraendingdeservingastandingovation.
$$$$, 1889 16th Street Mall, 720-605-1889
RINO
What one-year-old Redeemer lacks in size, it makes up for in fun and flavor. While the diminutive joint, tucked into the heart of RiNo, sports a concise 12-strong roster of appetizers, pies, and ice creams in a 28-seat dining room and bar, customers can find a little more space in which to enjoy their carb-loaded riches—ordered from an alleyway window—on the covered patio (open until 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 12 a.m. Friday and Saturday). Spencer White and Alex Figura of Dio Mio are behind Redeemer’s pies, which blend New York and Neapolitan styles, meaning the slices are somehow floppy and foldable yet also crispy and beautifully blistered. The crust is a brilliant showcase for specialty creations, such as the garlic-sauce-accented All the Mushrooms, the tomato pie with aged Gouda, and the Diavolo, which has sopressa, pepperoni, jalapeño, and yellow pepper enveloped by a stretchy cheese blend. Wash the yeasty goodness down with a glass of bubbles or with the Watermelon Sugar, a grown-up rendition of the vodka Red Bull that will ready you for bar-hopping shenanigans in the booze-happy neighborhood. $, 2705 Larimer St., 720-780-1379
When Manny Barella got a James Beard nomination for best emerging chef this past March, it changed his life—and his restaurant. Overnight, two-year-old Bellota got busier, and diners started coming with expecta tions rather than just appetites for fine Mexican fare, he says. To cope, Barella hired three more cooks and added more sophisticated plates. And while we loved Bellota 1.0, Bellota 2.0 is even more impressive now that the Monterrey-born chef is flexing his culinary muscles and leaning even harder into his heritage. While new dishes like the tantalizing carne asada steak with fiery pequin chile salsa exhibit his mastery of Mexican cuisine with their uses of traditional ingredients and cooking methods, Barella also knows not to mess too much with success. He’s kept some favorites on the menu, such as the heavenly shrimp taco (drizzled with butter infused with the shells), and the tender pork belly swimming in his mother’s mole verde sauce. Through all the recent changes, Barella hasn’t forgotten that with great success comes great responsibility: He’s paying it forward by mentoring members of Denver’s Hispanic Chef’s Association and guiding a new crop of talent toward its own victories. $$, the Source Hotel & Market Hall, 3350 Brighton Blvd., 720-542-3721 m
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BLAKE GORDON
hundreds of times, but this trip had her gripping her steering wheel so tightly her hands hurt. It was the night of July 29, 2021, and Bair had just left Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs, where the 39-year-old works as a parttime labor and delivery nurse. She’d been visiting a friend who’d just given birth and was late getting home. Bair called her husband, Jim, to tell him she was on her way to the family’s ranch east of the city. It had been raining off and on for more than five hours, and flooding was a real possibility. Bair hoped the interstate wasn’tLikeclosed.everyone who lives in the area, Bair knew the havoc bad weather could cause inside the 2,000-foot-deep canyon. A shutdown on I-70 could turn an easy commute into a 90-minute nightmare over two-lane, high-elevation Cottonwood Pass. Bair looked at the time on her phone: It was almost 9 p.m. She needed to get home—now.
Barely five miles into the drive, Bair was already questioning her decision to leave work. Her Volkswagen Pas sat passed semitrucks crawling along in the right lane, their distorted emer gency blinkers flashing prismatically through the raindrops that pounded herThewindshield.canyon walls reached high above the road, a rain-slickened, twotiered ribbon of highway and bridges. In the daylight, this would likely rank as one of the most beautiful drives in America. In the rain, Bair felt like a bowling ball hurtling blindly down a lane. She fixed her mind on the Hang ing Lake Tunnel, a few miles ahead. After 13 years of living on a ranch in the canyon, she knew weather often changed on the other side of the pas sage. Maybe things would get better.
She reached the west end of the tunnel about 20 minutes later. Two more miles, she thought to herself. Two more miles and she’d be back with her husband and their four kids.
When Bair exited the tunnel’s east end, sheets of water hammered her windshield. She couldn’t remember see ing rain this hard; her wipers couldn’t keep up. There were only a few head lights and brake lights in the distance. She was one of the only people on this strip of interstate.
Bair was passing a ravine in the can yon wall when her headlights caught
some movement to her left. A wave of dark sludge cascaded over the con crete barrier that divided the interstate. Bair heard herself scream. She felt a thud on her Volkswagen’s door, and the windshield went black. She was sure Glenwood Canyon was about to kill her.
THERE ARE 46,876 MILES of inter state highway in America. Among the national web of asphalt, concrete, and steel that connects us, the 66,000-foot stretch of I-70 that runs through Glen wood Canyon stands out both for its aesthetic beauty and environmental fra gility. At a time when more Americans than ever are wrestling with the con cept of climate change and its impacts on the planet, this piece of pavement has become ecological proof that something has gone terribly wrong.
This part of the highway, com pleted 30 years ago this month, was the final section of the original federal interstate system. Beyond being a neat answer at bar trivia nights, the section of highway is a linchpin in I-70’s 2,153 miles, which run from Utah to Mary land—an east-west path through the country’s midsection. Every day, more than 22,000 semitruck drivers, soc cer moms, and workaday warriors zip between Glenwood Canyon’s rock walls. They shoot across bridges, glide along side the churning Colorado River, and blast in and out of a concrete tunnel.
The canyon is a veritable what’s what of geologic history—an ency clopedia of ancient earth movements, volcanic flows, and early animal and plant life. The space the canyon occu pies today has been home to Cambrian seas, Pleistocene land formations, dinosaurs, and speeding teenagers in four-wheel drives. On a clear day, mil lions of years of Earth’s history can slip past a windshield in just 15 minutes.
The first human trails inside Glen wood Canyon were likely created by the Ute people, who began hunting there some 700 years ago. The first wagon road was carved in 1880, followed in 1902 by Taylor State Road—a narrow dirtand-rock thoroughfare that consisted of steep embankments that dropped directly down to the river. Even in the road’s primitive
state, its namesake, U.S. Senator Edward Taylor, imagined it becoming “a portion of a national boulevard stretching across the nation.”
Incremental improvements were made to the road over the next half-century, cul minating with the inclusion of newly expanded U.S. 6 in 1937. The two-lane highway provided a more reliable route to the Utah border but was still treacherous and inef ficient: Drivers often pulled off the road to take in the scenery, and head-on collisions that sent vehicles tumbling into the Colorado River were frequent and often deadly.
The section of I-70 through Glenwood Canyon is something entirely different. “As far as blending a transportation project with its natural environment, it would be hard to find something that can rival the effort we see in the canyon,” says Dianna Litvak, a senior historian for architecture and construction firm Mead & Hunt who has studied the interstate for the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). “It’s really a marvel.”
Today, that marvel is facing an imminent environmental crisis. As wildfires and severe flooding have plagued swaths of the West over the years, there may be no place where the effects have been seen as starkly as they have been in Glenwood Canyon. The changes have been swift and violent: The August 2020 Grizzly Creek fire burned in the canyon for four months, consumed an area roughly a third of the size of Denver, and caused more than $34 million in damage across one of the state’s most vulnerable ecological areas.
Seven months later, heavy rain pummeled the burn scar, sending a wave of debris across the high way that damaged Hanging Lake Tunnel, blasted holes through asphalt, and altered the Colorado River’s flow in one section. The total cost to repair the interstate so far has exceeded $110 million—or roughly one-seventh of this part of I-70’s original construction cost in today’s dollars. “It’s mind-bog gling to witness what’s happening here in such a short time,” says Ralph Trapani, the project man ager who oversaw the I-70 enterprise in the canyon over portions of two decades and lives in Glenwood Springs. In the 1980s, Trapani’s team pulled rock cores from a site on the eastern side of the canyon,
“AS FAR BLENDINGAS THETRANSPORTATIONAPROJECTWITHITSNATURALENVIRON-MENT,ITWOULDBEHARDTOFINDSOMETHINGTHATCANRIVALTHEEFFORTWESEEINCANYON.”
which provided them with a historical record of the events that changed the land’s composition over time. “There were 20,000 years in one core,” Trapani says. “In those 20,000 years, we didn’t see anything as abrupt as what’s happened in the canyon in these past two years.”
Throughout the West, costs related to climate change have increased— at times exponentially—over the past couple of decades. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that costs from catastrophic envi ronmental events (such as flooding, wildfires, and drought) alone totaled $47 billion from Colorado to California in 2021—an increase of $23.6 billion from the previous year. The total damage between 2016 and 2021 was estimated at $138.4 billion, or more than twothirds of the overall disaster costs for the previous 36 years combined.
Early this summer, I met Paul Chinowsky, an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who’d spent most of his career studying infrastructure, with an emphasis on transportation. Four years ago, he co-wrote a chapter on the impacts of rapidly changing environments on America’s major roadways as part of a project for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Chinowsky explains that the canyon’s “whiplash events” of fire and flood had clearly devastated the area, but focusing on their suddenness was missing the point. “For most people, this feels like the switch was flipped overnight, but that’s not true,” he says. In fact, the table was quietly being set for decades.
The professor drew a crude, two-dimensional rendering of the canyon wall leading down to the interstate. Under normal circumstances, Chinowsky says, rock fissures slowly freeze and thaw, a process that eases the canyon into seasonal changes. In the past 20 or so years, the cycle has been different. As weather has become more unpredictable, extreme heat and precipitation have become more commonplace. Following a cold winter snowstorm, for example, the canyon wall quickly freezes. But a rapid weather shift, fueled by climate change, can bring an equally fast thaw, followed, again, by another fast freeze, and so on and so on. “The fissures eventually expand at a rate that’s unsustainable. Then, you pile fire and severe rain on top of that, and what do you expect might happen?” Chinowsky says. The answer is the potential for severe rockfall or a major debris slide, the likes of which we are only beginning to see. “There’s catastrophic failure,” Chinowsky added. “I don’t even think we’ve seen the worst of what can happen in that canyon.”
TO SEE THINGS FOR MYSELF, I drove a winding dirt road into White River National Forest to get a better look at the origins of last year’s disaster. It was early June, and several
trails were still closed from the devasta tion. I found an open four-wheel-drive road that ran south from an abandoned campground situated far above the interstate. It had rained heavily the day before, and broken tree limbs were scat tered everywhere. I got out of my vehicle and hiked seven miles toward the 2020 wildfire’s burn scar.
I crossed a small creek and zigzagged through the burned area. Roughly two miles from Grizzly Creek, the entire for est had turned to charcoal. The damp ground looked like a burnt croissant, black and flaky. I took a step on a slope and fell. The ground peeled away, leaving a smear of brown mud in the otherwise charred earth. I looked up at the pine trees that were still standing. There were hundreds of them—barren, scorched limbs reaching 50 feet or more toward the blue Beingsky.here, I had no difficulty imag ining the events that led to the previous year’s calamity. The burned earth was about as porous as a city sidewalk, and it drained into a valley that led directly to the 2,000-foot drop-off above the interstate. The debris slide began with one raindrop that was followed by tril lions more. Gravity did the rest. Dirt and small rocks were loosened by the runoff first. Dead trees eventually were torn from the earth. One boulder gave way,
Thisfromspread,left: The Colton;Service’sNationalWeatherJeffRalphTrapanithen another; the massive rocks hurtled down the canyon wall at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour.
On that night in July 2021, Jeff Colton was working an extended shift at the National Weather Service’s Grand Junction office. The five-room brick building at the airport is the nerve center for weather tracking in western Colorado and eastern Utah. It’s also become the front line for early flood detection in some of the nation’s most ravaged wildfire areas. At around 5 p.m., Colton and another meteorologist were watching their computer screens for small storms popping up across more than 50,000 square miles of the MountainColton,West.who helps lead weatherwarning coordination and is one of the office’s incident meteorologists, was tracking a rainstorm that had developed over Glenwood Canyon. It was serious enough to warrant a flood warning—protocol that cleared trails and bike paths and gave CDOT ample notice that a bigger event might be forthcoming. A couple of hours later, though, the storm didn’t look like the deluge Colton’s colleagues had anticipated. The warning was canceled, and a third meteorologist was sent home. Colton assumed he’d settle into a typical night watching weather from the three screens on his desk.
At around 8:30 p.m., a red streak suddenly appeared on radar just north of I-70 on the eastern third of Glenwood Canyon. A few minutes later, text mes sages began blowing up Colton’s phone. The pings were automated alerts from five rain gauges in and around the Griz zly Creek burn scar. The gauges had been placed there a couple of months earlier—about the same time the National Weather Service and CDOT came up with a plan that dictated a domino weather-emergency reaction that began with hiking trail closures and ended with an I-70 shutdown.
The instigator was precipitation. Two-tenths of an inch of rain within 15 minutes and Colton would have to consider issuing a flash-flood emer gency—which would likely close the interstate. It wasn’t an easy call. The meteorologists in the Grand Junction office were schooled on the impacts of their decisions: One hour without I-70 traffic equaled $1 million in lost eco nomic output to the nation.
Colton turned his attention to Cinnamon Creek, above Hanging Lake Tunnel. In five minutes, the volume of rain there was already surpassing floodwarning levels. More texts came in—from near Dead Horse Creek to the north, then from other points around the scar. Rain on the burn area was now on track to hit six inches in one hour—seven times more than the closure threshold.
These numbers can’t be right, Colton thought. He needed to issue a flood emergency. He pulled up video from CDOT cameras near the tunnel and watched as rain pummeled the road. Colton picked up his office phone and dialed CDOT engineers at the tunnel: The section of highway through the canyon needed to be shut down immediately.
NEARLY FIVE YEARS INTO HIS TENURE ON THE U.S. SUPREME COURT, WILDMODERNHASNEILCOLORADO’SGORSUCHESTABLISHEDHIMSELFASATEXTUALISTINTHEMODEOFANTONINSCALIA.HE’SALSOBECOMESOMETHINGOFACONSERVATIVECARD.WILLTHATUNPREDICTABILITYEXTENDTOGAYRIGHTS?
Although most political observers had pre dicted that the measure would fail, members of the gay community and their allies had been quietly plotting a legal assault on the amendment. Before it went into effect, oppo nents were able to win an injunction to stay its enforcement until a lawsuit called Evans v. Romer could decide its constitutionality.
Colorado’s conservative attorney general, Gale Norton, went all in and enlisted a handful of experts to attest to Amendment 2’s morality, giving a platform to psychological testimony that falsely alleged homosexuals were more likely than heterosexuals to be child molesters.
One of the state’s most prominent allies was John Finnis, a revered philosopher of
law at England’s University of Oxford. Finnis, a bespectacled Australian, submit ted an affidavit on behalf of Amendment 2. In it, he contended that gay relationships were “deeply shameful” to people engaged in “real marriage.” Finnis was a devout Catho lic but maintained that his thinking was secular and backed by Plato and Aristotle, who, Finnis said, argued that “only conju gal activity is free from the shamefulness of instrumentalisation which is found in masturbation and in being masturbated or sodomized.” (Finnis would also equate gay sex with Despitebestiality.)Finnis’affidavit, the Denver Dis trict Court made the preliminary injunction on Amendment 2 permanent, and the Colo rado Supreme Court upheld the decision. The state appealed, and in 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case, now called Romer v. Evans. Any hope Colorado might have had that SCOTUS would rule in Amendment 2’s favor, however, evaporated roughly one minute into oral arguments, when Justice Anthony Kennedy interrupted the state solicitor. “I’ve never seen a case like this,” said Kennedy, his voice registering disbelief. “Is there any prec edent that you can cite to the court where we’ve upheld a law such as this?” Opponents of the measure immediately relaxed. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, and Amendment 2 was quashed for good.
Although the decision in Romer v. Evans was narrow—it didn’t dissolve anti-sodomy laws or legalize same-sex marriage—it was the first instance of the federal high court purposefully protecting gay rights. It also marked the beginning of Kennedy’s defense of queer liberties. He may have been appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, but the California-born justice would go on to write majority opinions that overturned bans on gay sex and federal and state bans on same-sex marriage.
This month, the U.S. Supreme Court will once again hear a case concerning gay rights from the Centennial State: A Denver-area web designer wants to advertise that she won’t build wedding websites for queer couples, but the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act won’t let her. Neither Finnis, who has largely
stepped away from academia, nor Kennedy, who retired from the court in 2018, is likely to play a direct role in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. But their shared protégé, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, will.
While Finnis was testifying in favor of Amendment 2, he was also mentoring Gor such at Oxford. Almost 20 years later, Gorsuch continued to hold his former adviser in high esteem, appearing as a speaker at the Uni versity of Notre Dame’s Finnis Conference in 2011. After his time at Oxford, Gorsuch worked under Kennedy at the Supreme Court. The two remained close enough that when Gorsuch was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in 2006, Kennedy traveled to Denver to swear him in.
So, when it comes to 303 Creative and future cases involving gay rights, which mentor will Gorsuch serve? His conservative record on the court indicates a Finnis-ian bent. However, in 2020, Gorsuch surprised
WAS THE BALLOT MEASURE THAT EARNED COLORADO THE SOBRIQUET “THE HATE STATE.” THIRTY YEARS AGO, COLORADO VOTERS PASSED AMENDMENT 2, WHICH WOULD BAR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS FROM
Clockwise from top left: Anne Gorsuch Burford with President Ronald Reagan; Justice Anthony Kennedy (right) with his former protégé; last term’s U.S. Supreme Court; Gorsuch during his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017
the EPA because the agency threatened to block Colorado’s access to federal grants until the state could control its auto emissions. As director, she worked with car manufacturers to loosen clean air restrictions.
But things soon turned sour: In 1982, Bur ford became entangled in controversy when a whistleblower accused the EPA of using its then new $1.6 billion Superfund program for political purposes. Congress subpoenaed agency documents, but, acting on the presi dent’s orders, Burford refused to hand them over. The press labeled her the Ice Queen for her obstinacy. In truth, Burford wanted to comply with Congress’ request—she told Reagan aide James Baker, “I know you’ll think I’m just a bitchy female, but I think we have to turn over these documents”—but the White House wouldn’t relent. The House voted to hold Burford in contempt of Congress, and she resigned in March 1983.
“She was loyal to the president,” Durham says. However, in her 1986 book, Are You Tough Enough?, Burford described feeling like a scape goat: “I was not the first to receive [Reagan’s] special brand of benevolent neglect, a form of conveniently looking the other way, while his staff continues to do some very dirty work.”
many by departing from the Republican ranks in Bostock v. Clayton County. He not only agreed with the majority that employ ers can’t fire workers because they’re gay, but Gorsuch also wrote the opinion. Was Bostock a signal that the justice is willing to pick up Kennedy’s mantle as the current court’s most important—and perhaps only—conservative guardian of gay rights? Or was Gorsuch’s deci sion a rainbow-hued mirage that temporarily obscured his deep red leanings?
NEIL GORSUCH COMES FROM a long line of Denver lawyers, including his grandfather, his father, and, perhaps most consequentially, his mother. At 20, Anne Gorsuch Burford became the youngest woman to be admitted to the Colorado Bar Association. She was a Fulbright scholar in India and was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in the 1970s. There, as part of a passionate group of
small-government conservatives nicknamed the House Crazies, she was instrumental in eliminating the sales tax on food and the in heritance tax, according to Steve Durham, a fellow member of the Crazies. “She was probably, intellectually, the most capable leg islator with whom I ever served,” Durham says. “She was extraordinarily intelligent, very articulate, and quite witty.”
Burford cut a glamorous figure in her fur coats, cigarette often in hand, but she was tough. The Rocky Mountain News wrote that “she could kick a bear to death with her bare feet.” Her zeal for small government caught the attention of Reagan, who in 1981 made Burford his first director of the Environ mental Protection Agency (EPA). Burford quickly got to work gutting the place; during her tenure, she reduced the agency’s budget by 22 percent and was on pace to terminate 30 percent of the staff by the end of 1983. As a state representative, Burford had sued
Burford, who died in 2004, also wrote in Are You Tough Enough? that her then 15-yearold son, Neil Gorsuch, didn’t understand why she resigned. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?” But Gorsuch didn’t nurse his grudge against the president or the Republican Party for long.
When Burford joined the EPA, Gorsuch moved from Denver to Washington, D.C., and enrolled in the elite Georgetown Prepara tory School. “The two of us were huge fans of Reagan,” Michael Trent, a Georgetown class mate and the best man at Gorsuch’s wedding, told the New York Times in 2017. “And it was because of our family upbringings.” Gorsuch continued on the conservative track at Colum bia University (writing editorials in support of the Reagan-backed, right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua) and at Harvard Law School (where he was a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative
Indicates a restaurant featured in 5280 for the first time (though not necessarily a restaurant that has just opened).
Indicates inclusion in 5280’s 2022 list of Denver’s best restaurants. These selections are at the discretion of 5280 editors and are subject to change
$$$
Boulder / Pizza Perfectly blistered Neapolitanstyle pies are the draw at Barchetta. Pair a pizza with a selection from the 14-tap self-pour beer, wine, and cocktail wall on the sunny patio. Reser vations not accepted. 1644 Walnut St., Boulder, 720-749-4751. Lunch, Dinner
AA5 $$$$
Downtown / Steak House The team behind Forget Me Not and Tap and Burger offers a refreshing chophouse experience with a stellar lineup of steaks in a hip, delightfully funky bar and dining room. Reservations accepted. 1600 15th St., 303-623-0534. Dinner
Annette $$$ Aurora / American Caroline Glover brings a warm, intimate dining experience to Stanley Marketplace. Enjoy a family-style menu featuring seasonal salads, toasts, and wood-grilled fare. Reservations accepted. Stanley Marketplace, 2501 Dallas St., Ste. 108, Aurora. 720-710-9975. Dinner
Arabesque $$ Boulder /Mediterranean Sip house-made chai tea while sampling Middle Eastern delights—such as hummus, shawarma wraps, and baba ghanoush— in this charming, sun-filled lunch spot. Reservations not accepted. 1634 Walnut St., Boulder, 720-242-8623. Breakfast, Lunch
Ash’Kara $$$
Highland /Middle Eastern Chef Daniel Asher offers a playful take on Middle Eastern cuisine at this plant-bedecked eatery. Don’t miss the silky hummus and earthy baba ghanoush. Also try the Boulder location. Reservations accepted. 2005 W. 33rd Ave., 303-537-4407. Dinner, Brunch
BBánh & Butter Bakery Café $ Aurora / Cafe Thoa Nguyen crafts French pastries inspired by her Vietnamese heritage and Asian fusion flavors at this East Colfax cafe. Go for the crêpe cakes, each made with 25 to 30 layers. Reservations not accepted. 9935 E. Colfax Ave., Aurora, 720-513-9313. Breakfast, Lunch
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Blackbelly $$$
Boulder /American Chef Hosea Rosenberg’s menu features charcuterie, small plates, and daily butcher specials. Try the crispy pig ears with red pepper jelly. Also check out the grab-and-go market next door. Reservations accepted. 1606 Conestoga St., Boulder, 303-247-1000. Dinner
$$$$
Cherry Creek /Italian Dedication to authenticity translates to the food and extensive wine menu at this elegant eatery, which is focused on the cuisines of northern Italy’s Tuscany and Piedmont regions. Reservations accepted. 3030 E. Sixth Ave., 303-393-1040. Dinner
BB.Q Chicken $$
Aurora / Korean Discover finger-licking goodness at BB.Q Chicken, a Korea-born chain serving juicy wings. Multiple locations. Reservations not accepted. 2495 S. Havana St., Unit H, Aurora, 720-882-6736. Lunch, Dinner
RiNo / Mexican Chef Manny Barella cooks elevated regional Mexican fare inspired by his Monterrey childhood inside the Source. Don’t miss the fried quesadilla de requesón. Reservations accepted. The Source, 3350 Brighton Blvd., 720-542-3721. Lunch, Dinner
LoHi / Contemporary Linda Hampsten Fox’s eatery, market, and bakery offers worldly fare inspired by her travels. Settle in for the smoked rabbit pecan pie with mustard gelato. Reservations accepted. 1817 Central St., 303-993-2364. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
CCarrera’s Tacos $ Greenwood Village / Mexican Brothers Josh and Ryan Carrera sling West Coast–style tacos and french-fry-filled burritos at this fast-casual spot in the south suburbs. Reservations not accepted. 7939 E. Arapahoe Rd., Greenwood Village, 720-689-8035. Lunch, Dinner
Chez Maggy $$$$
French /Downtown Acclaimed chef Ludo Lefebvre plates up Colorado-inspired French clas sics at this brasserie inside the Thompson Denver hotel. Don’t miss the expertly prepared escargot and the gluten-free crab cake bound with shrimp paste. Reservations accepted. 1616 Market St., 720-794-9544. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Comal Heritage Food Incubator $$ Globeville / International You’ll find an array of family recipes from Latin America at this compact but welcoming restaurant, which has a rotating menu and provides job training to immigrant and refugee women. Reservations not accepted. 3455 Ringsby Ct., Ste. 105, 303-292-0770. Lunch
Silvia Hernandez, a Comal Heritage atdishesIncubator graduate,Foodupburritobowls
Silvia, which opened inside
WhileCity lastGlobeville’s LostNovember.everythingcanbecustomized,tryabowlofmixedgreenstoppedwithCaribbeanshrimpandcurtido(pickledvegetables)drizzledwithfierypineappleandarbolchilesalsa.
Coperta
$$$
Uptown Area / Italian Tuck into comforting Italian fare at this restaurant, which celebrates the cuisine of Rome and Southern Italy. Reservations accepted. 400 E. 20th Ave., 720-749-4666. Lunch, Dinner
Corrida $$$$
Boulder /Spanish Housed on the rooftop level of the Pearl West building, this elegant Spanish steak house offers stunning Flatiron views and fabulous cocktails and wines. Splurge on the Japanese wagyu or opt for a regeneratively sourced steak. Reservations accepted. 1023 Walnut St., Ste. 400, Boulder, 303-444-1333. Dinner, Brunch
Cracovia $$ Westminster /Polish Traditional Polish dishes are on the menu at this family-owned spot. Try the placki (fried potato and onion pancakes). Reserva tions accepted. 8121 W. 94th Ave., Westminster, 303-484-9388. Lunch, Dinner
Curtis Park Delicatessen $ Deli /Five Points This neighborhood deli serves a menu of fine classic sandwiches like the Curtis, made with corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and house-made Thousand Island. Also try the Cherry Creek location. Reservations not accepted. 2532 Champa St., 303-308-5973. Lunch
Dae Gee $$
DCongress Park / Korean Enjoy bold Korean flavors at this Congress Park eatery. Order the spicy pork bulgogi or try the bibimbap. Multiple locations. Reservations not accepted. 827 Colorado Blvd., 720-639-9986. Lunch, Dinner
Daughter Thai Kitchen & Bar $$$$ Highland /Thai This upscale Thai restaurant from Ounjit Hardacre serves beautifully plated dishes and inventive cocktails with an elegant ambience to match. Try the lychee-kissed massaman curry with Colorado lamb. Reservations accepted. 1700 Platte St., Ste. 140, 720-667-4652. Lunch, Dinner
Uptown Area / Contemporary Chefs Keegan Gerhard and Lisa Bailey produce exquisite desserts and modern comfort food at this hip spot. Reservations accepted. 494 E. 19th Ave., 303-861-4710. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
D’Corazon $ Downtown / Mexican Known for its slowsimmered carnitas, here you’ll find Mexican fare at its best and refreshingly affordable $7 margaritas. Reservations not accepted. 1530 Blake St., Ste. C, 720-904-8226. Lunch, Dinner
Dio Mio $$ RiNo / Italian You can count on perfect pasta at Alexander Figura, Spencer White, and Lulu Clair’s fast-casual Italian eatery. The house-made sour dough is also heavenly. Reservations accepted. 3264 Larimer St., 303-562-1965. Dinner
Duo Restaurant $$$
Highland /Contemporary This neighborhood restaurant combines simple food and a low-key ambience with the gentle hum of patrons trading stories. The seasonal cuisine constantly surprises, and dessert is worth a visit in itself. Reservations accepted. 2413 W. 32nd Ave., 303-477-4141. Dinner, Brunch
Edge Restaurant & Bar $$$$
EDowntown / Steak House Inside the Four Seasons Hotel Denver, this eatery serves contemporary steak house fare. Order the dry-aged buffalo ribeye. Reservations accepted. 1111 14th St., 303-389-3343. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Edgewater / Italian This pizzeria has been family owned and operated for more than 50 years. Reservations accepted. 5302 W. 25th Ave., Edgewater, 303-237-3524. Lunch, Dinner
Lincoln Park / Mexican Sample traditional Mexi can food alongside top-notch margaritas at this quaint and colorful local favorite. Reservations not accepted. 722 Santa Fe Dr., 303-623-9968. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
El Taco de Mexico
$
Lincoln Park /Mexican This Denver favorite serves Mexican food with an emphasis on authenticity. Try the chile relleno burrito. Reservations not accepted. 714 Santa Fe Dr., 303-623-3926. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Elway’s $$$$
Downtown / Steak House This sleek downtown restaurant serves a bevy of classic steak house fare in upscale environs. Choose from a menu of steaks, seafood, and more. Multiple locations. Reserva tions accepted. 1881 Curtis St., 303-312-3107. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Everyday Pizza $$ Downtown / Pizza The team behind Somebody People slings vegan pies, pastas, and small bites in neon-tinged environs. Reservations accepted. 2162 Larimer St., 303-953-0631. Dinner
Reservations not accepted. 1422 Larimer St., 303-893-6505. Dinner
The Greenwich $$$
RiNo / Pizza Restaurateur Delores Tronco brings a slice of her favorite New York City neighbor hood to RiNo at the Greenwich. Don’t miss the satisfying sourdough pizzas and fresh, seasonal salads. Reservations accepted. 3258 Larimer St., 720-868-5006. Dinner
Lucina is a melting pot of incredible Latin American, Latin Caribbean, and coastal Spanish cuisine. Our food is an experience for the senses with fresh, local, and seasonal ingredients. Lucina is the choice to create bold flavors that grabs hold of a colorful, interesting life. Enjoy it with
Farow $$$
FNiwot / American At this farm-to-table restaurant, Lisa and Patrick Balcom serve contemporary Amer ican fare with ingredients sourced within 10 miles. Reservations accepted. 7916 Niwot Rd., Niwot, 303-827-3949. Breakfast, Dinner
RiNo /Mexican The first Colorado outpost of the popular Chicago spot dishes out tacos and tequila in an industrial setting. Try the citrusy pork and pineapple tacos with a green-chile-infused margarita. Reservations accepted. 2901 Larimer St., 303-317-6262. Dinner
$
HHighland Tap and Burger $$ Highland / American Pick your patty, bun, and premium toppings to build your perfect, customiz able burger and pair it with a Colorado craft beer. Multiple locations. Reservations not accepted. 2219 W. 32nd Ave., 720-287-4493. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
HiRa Cafe & Patisserie $ Aurora / Ethiopian Hiwot Solomon pairs her fromscratch desserts and Ethiopian breakfast plates with house-roasted, single-origin coffee at this cheery cafe. Reservations not accepted. 10782 E. Iliff Ave., Aurora, 720-949-1703. Breakfast
Hop Alley $$$
RiNo / Chinese From Tommy Lee of Uncle, this neighborhood hangout serves dishes rooted in the Chinese tradition with a touch of distinctive flair. Try the dan dan mian and the fiery la zi ji laced with numbing peppercorns. Reservations accepted. 3500 Larimer St., 720-379-8340. Dinner
The Fifth String $$$$
LoHi / American At the Fifth String, chef Amos Watts offers his seasonally inspired cooking along side an in-house beef butchering program. The results, such as bone marrow spaghetti, are deli cious and inventive. Reservations accepted. 3316 Tejon St., Ste. 102, 720-420-0622. Dinner
Fire Restaurant $$$$ Golden Triangle /American Located inside the Art, a Hotel, Fire Restaurant serves contemporary American dishes made with locally sourced ingredients, including a Colorado lamb chop. Reservations accepted. 1201 Broadway, 720-709-4431. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Il Porcellino Salumi $$
IBerkeley / Deli This market and deli strives to provide the highest quality, locally raised cured meats in Colorado. Pick a selection to take with you, or enjoy a fresh salumi platter or sandwich in-house. Reservations not accepted. 4334 W. 41st Ave., 303-477-3206. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Hampden / Indian This spot serves traditional fare, including flavorful dishes like tandoori chicken. Be sure to try the cinnamon bread pudding. Reservations not accepted. 8921 E. Hampden Ave., 303-755-4284. Lunch, Dinner
Glo Noodle House
G$$
West Highland / Asian Blackbelly veterans Chris Teigland and Ariana Pope bring Asian fusion fare to West Highland with Glo Noodle House. Don’t miss the shatteringly crisp karaage. Reservations accepted. 4450 W. 38th Ave., Ste. 130, 303-993-4180. Dinner
Green Russell $$ Downtown /Pub This underground cocktail bar offers a variety of small plates and libations.
Washington Virginia Vale / Middle Eastern Friendly owner Ismet Yilmaz prepares authentic Turkish pastries at this charming cafe. Also check out the University Park location. Reservations not accepted. 850 S. Monaco Pkwy., Ste. 9, 720-536-5455. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Platt Park /Japanese Ultra-fresh sushi, tender sashimi, and creative small plates are on the menu at this local Pearl Street favorite. Reservations accepted. 1487-A S. Pearl St., 303-777-0691. Lunch, Dinner
Jamaican Grille $$
JLincoln Park / Jamaican Savor an array of spiceladen Caribbean dishes like jerk chicken at this family-owned eatery. Also try the Jamaican Mini Grille and International Jerk Market in Lakewood. Reservations not accepted. 709 W. Eighth Ave., 303-623-0013. Lunch, Dinner
Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar $$$
Downtown / Seafood Enjoy sustainable seafood and a massive raw bar at this beloved outpost for oysters and shellfish. Multiple locations. Reserva tions accepted. 1539 17th St., 303-292-5767. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Jovanina’s Broken Italian $$$
Downtown /Italian This gorgeous LoDo eatery expands on traditional Italian fare by incorporating unexpected, seasonal ingredients. Reservations accepted. 1520 Blake St., 720-541-7721. Dinner
KKahlo’s Restaurant $$ Westwood / Mexican Enjoy plates of mole and enchiladas verdes in a space decorated with the art of Frida Kahlo. Reservations not accepted. 3735 Morrison Rd., 303-936-0758. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Katsu Ramen $$ Aurora / Japanese Satisfy a ramen craving with one of the traditional styles offered at this cozy spot. Try a combo meal with gyoza and a rice bowl. Reservations not accepted. 1930 S. Havana St., Aurora, 303-751-2222. Lunch, Dinner
Kinga’s Lounge $$ City Park West / Polish Pair a chilled beer with authentic Polish dishes (kielbasa, pierogi, and the cabbage stew bigos) at this low-key bar and eatery inside the Mansion on Colfax. Don’t miss the potato pancakes topped with apple sauce and sour cream. Reservations not accepted. 1509 Marion St., 303-830-6922. Lunch, Dinner
Kobe An $$$ Cherry Creek /Asian Everything is traditional at this Japanese restaurant, including the seating. The menu features Japanese favorites such as tempura, gyoza, and yakisoba. Reservations accepted. 231 Milwaukee St., 303-989-5907. Lunch, Dinner
LLa Diabla Pozole y Mezcal $$ Ballpark / Mexican James Beard Award finalist Jose Avila serves up comforting pozole and other traditional Mexican fare at this casual eatery. Don’t miss the weekend brunch for chilaquiles, huaraches, and a killer house michelada. Reservations not accepted. 2233 Larimer St., 720-519-1060. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch |
Latke Love $$
Littleton /American Steve and Tina Shander serve eclectic versions of the traditional potato cakes out of a refurbished house in the south suburbs. Look for satisfying and comforting toppings like slowbraised beef brisket with roasted carrots and gravy. Reservations not accepted. 699 W. Littleton Blvd., Littleton, 303-995-9708. Lunch, Brunch
Little Anita’s New Mexican Food $
Virginia Village / Latin American This popular neighborhood spot is known for its great New Mexican fare such as Indian tacos and huevos rancheros. The breakfast burritos are divine. Multi ple locations. Reservations not accepted. 1550 S. Colorado Blvd., #103, 303-691-3337. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Lucina Eatery & Bar $$
South Park Hill / Latin American At Lucina Eatery & Bar, enjoy bites and sips inspired by the flavors of Latin and South America, the Caribbean, and Spain in a colorful, plant-bedecked space. Reservations accepted. 2245 Kearney St., #101, 720-814-1053. Dinner
Lucy’s Burger Bar $$
Berkeley /American Belly up to the retro bar at this 1,000-square-foot burger joint for a Minneapolis-style Juicy Lucy, a cheese-filled burger with an oozing interior. Beverages produced by minority- and women-owned businesses abound. Reservations not accepted. 4018 Tennyson St., 720-379-6311. Dinner
Mango House $$
Aurora / International This immigrant- and refugee-led food hall is home to six outstanding culinary concepts: Urban Burma, Jasmine Syrian Food, Golden Sky Sushi, Odaa Ethiopian Restau rant, Rocky Mountain Sudanese Restaurant, and Nepali Mountain Kitchen. 10180 E. Colfax Ave., Aurora, 303-900-8639. Lunch, Dinner
Mercantile Dining & Provision $$$
Downtown / New American Chef Alex Seidel offers farm-to-table fare, including pasta dishes and family-style plates. Mercantile also features a marketplace of locally sourced foodstuffs. Reserva tions accepted. Union Station, 1701 Wynkoop St., Ste. 155, 720-460-3733. Lunch, Dinner
Misfit Snackbar $$
City Park / Contemporary Chef-owner Bo Porytko serves a rotating lineup of creative plates at this walk-up kitchen inside Middleman cocktail bar. Each one is an imaginative twist on familiar pub fare. Reservations not accepted. 3401 E. Colfax Ave., 303-353-4207. Dinner
Mister Oso $$$
RiNo / Latin American This casual Señor Bear spinoff offers a Latin-inspired menu featuring tacos, ceviches, and salads. Reservations accepted. 3163 Larimer St., 720-677-6454. Dinner
MMono Mono Korean Fried Chicken $$ Downtown /Korean Savor tender and crispy Korean fried chicken wings along with sides like kimchi and pickled daikon and starters like gochu jang-slathered spicy rice cakes. Also try the Congress Park location. Reservations not accepted. 1550 Blake St., 720-379-6567. Lunch, Dinner
Music City Hot Chicken $$$
Baker /American Located inside Trve Brewing Co., this spot serves fiery variations of hot chicken, including green chile, Nashville hot, and a scorching “flammable solid” (the highest heat level). Reservations not accepted. 227 Broadway, #101, 303-357-1141. Dinner
NND StreetBar $$ Downtown / Contemporary Global street food complements delicious craft beverages at Union Station’s ND StreetBar (formerly Next Door Ameri can Eatery). Multiple locations. 1701 Wynkoop St., Ste. 100, 720-460-3730. Lunch, Dinner
Ni Tuyo $$ Belcaro / Mexican Visit this casual Bonnie Brae spot for molcajetes: piping-hot stone bowls of Mexican meats and veggies stewed in chile sauce. Reserva tions not accepted. 730 S. University Blvd., 303-282-8896. Lunch, Dinner
Noble Riot $$ RiNo / American Find an eclectic mix of charcute rie boards, fried chicken, and other picnic-ready fare at this graffiti-filled, sommelier-operated natu ral wine bar. Ask for trendy pours like pét-nat and orange wines. Reservations accepted. 1336 27th St., 303-993-5330. Dinner
Noisette $$ LoHi / French Tim and Lillian Lu serve elegant renditions of home-cooked French comforts in a romantic, light-drenched space. Reservations accepted. 3254 Navajo St., Ste. 100, 720-7698103. Lunch, Dinner
Ocean Prime $$$$
ODowntown / Seafood A marriage between land and sea, this supper club offers steak house dining and fresh fish in one. Reservations accepted. 1465 Larimer St., 303-825-3663. Lunch, Dinner
Cherry Creek / American Discover wholesome, inspired meals at this restaurant, bakery, and juice bar, where you’ll find artisan sandwiches
and flatbreads, hearty soups, tasty salads, and house-made pastries. Also try the Uptown loca tion. Reservations accepted. 3390 E. First Ave., 303-955-0455. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Onefold $$$
City Park West /Contemporary This eatery does early-day dining justice. Pair the bacon fried rice with house-made bone broth, Vietnamese iced coffee, or a local IPA. Reservations not accepted. 1420 E. 18th Ave., 303-954-0877. Breakfast, Dinner, Brunch
Osteria Marco $$$
Downtown / Italian This tavern features deep-set booths and approachable eats, such as housemade mozzarella. Reservations accepted. 1453 Larimer St., 303-534-5855. Lunch, Dinner
P$$$
Downtown / Italian Grab a seat at this longstand ing exhibition kitchen and enjoy rustic northern Italian cuisine. Reservations accepted. 909 17th St., 303-296-3525. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Berkeley / Italian Enjoy quick, casual dining, includ ing wood oven pizzas, homemade pasta, gelato, and espresso. Reservations not accepted. 4401 Tennyson St., 303-561-0234. Lunch, Dinner
Washington Park / Mexican Perdida offers cuisine inspired by the Baja coast in an airy space filled with surf-town decor. Reservations accepted. 1066 S. Gaylord St., 303-529-1365. Lunch, Dinner
Whittier / Contemporary This casual, inviting farmto-table eatery produces feasts made with thoughtfully sourced ingredients, many of which are local. Reservations accepted. 2000 E. 28th Ave., 303-233-5656. Dinner
QPlatt Park / Latin American Go for arepas (Vene zuelan flatbreads) and try the La Havana, featuring pork loin, ham, and Muenster. Reservations not accepted. 1859 S. Pearl St., 720-432-4205.
RRedeemer Pizza $$$
RiNo / Pizza Spencer White and Alex Figura, the duo behind Dio Mio, bring blistered, New York City–style sourdough pizza to RiNo. Nosh on full pies in the dining room or nab a slice from the walkup window in the back. Reservations accepted. 2705 Larimer St., 720-780-1379. Dinner
Unwrap the joy of the season at Gaylord Rockies with endless hours of holiday entertainment and activities for the whole family to enjoy together. Book a room night or package to receive exclusive benefits guests.
Reggae Pot Jamaican Grill $$
Centennial /Caribbean Montego Bay native Tamara Nisbeth crafts Jamaican specialties like stewed oxtails and jerk chicken alongside sides like plantains. Reservations not accepted. 7562 S. University Blvd., Unit C , Centennial, 303-9975623. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Rewild $$$
West Highland / American Enjoy veggie-forward small plates and locally sourced mains at Nurture’s eveningtime restaurant. Also look for a stellar lineup of cocktails. Reservations accepted. 2949 Federal Blvd., 303-390-1252. Dinner
Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant $$ Downtown / Mexican Fresh, natural ingredients and unique flavors characterize this Mexican eatery. Multiple locations. Reservations accepted. 1525 Blake St., 303-623-5432. Lunch, Dinner
Sapore Prime Italian $$$
Littleton / Italian Venture to this Italian steak house in the suburbs for handcrafted pastas and locally sourced proteins. Reservations accepted. 8361 N. Rampart Range Rd., Unit B101, Littleton, 303-8626668. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Silvia at Lost City $
Globeville / Mexican Comal Heritage Food Incu bator graduate Silvia Hernandez dishes up some of the best burrito bowls in town at her first brickand-mortar restaurant. Reservations not accepted. 3459 Ringsby Ct. Lunch, Dinner
Somebody People $$
Overland /Mediterranean At this zero-waste, vegan restaurant, Sam and Tricia Maher and head chef Art Burnayev run a standout pasta program with dishes that celebrate seasonal bounty. For a sophisticated meal, try the $40 Feed Me selection. Reservations accepted. 1165 S. Broadway, Ste. 104, 720-502-5681. Dinner, Brunch
Spuntino $$$
plated dishes made with local produce. Reserva tions accepted. 7605 Grandview Ave., Arvada, 720-630-7908. Dinner
Street Feud $ Hale / International Chef-owner Merlin Vernier’s hip-hop-powered, fast-casual eatery serves up an array of globally inspired street food. Reservations not accepted. 5410 E. Colfax Ave., 303-3883383. Lunch, Dinner
Sunday Vinyl $$$$ Downtown /European This hip European-style restaurant and wine bar on the Union Station plat form offers warm hospitality and exquisite cuisine, all to the soundtrack of a vinyl-only playlist. Be sure to try the house hot dog and fresh oysters. Reserva tions accepted. 1803 16th St., 720-738-1803. Dinner, Brunch
Super Mega Bien $$$
SSafta $$$
RiNo /Mediterranean Acclaimed chef Alon Shaya brings his modern Israeli fare to Denver. Start with the creamy hummus and pillowy woodoven pita before moving on to tabbouleh salad, charred cabbage, and halloumi. Reservations accepted. The Source Hotel & Market Hall, 3330 Brighton Blvd., 720-408-2444. Lunch, Dinner
Highland /Italian Enjoy the locally sourced menu at this Italian-inspired, husband-and-wife-owned spot. Try the seasonal pasta or any dish with South ern Indian influences. Don’t miss the house-made gelato for dessert. Reservations accepted. 2639 W. 32nd Ave., 303-433-0949. Dinner
Stone Cellar Bistro $$$
Arvada / Contemporary Visit this upscale, farmto-table dinner spot in Arvada for beautifully
RiNo /Latin American Chef Dana Rodriguez offers a combo of large-format, shareable items and Pan-Latin small plates, the latter served from roving dim-sum-style carts. Try the tender braised lamb with savory grilled cactus salad. Reservations not accepted. The Ramble Hotel, 1260 25th St., 720-269-4695. Dinner
Sushi Den $$$
Platt Park / Japanese Sushi Den offers fresh, vibrant seafood flown in twice a week from Japan within a hip, lively scene. Reservations accepted. 1487 S. Pearl St., 303-777-0826. Dinner
Dr. Scott
Fresh Oysters, Prime Steaks, Salmon Sashimi, Sakura Double Bone Pork Chop… Jack’s on Pearl: an American Steakhouse with a Southern Twist.
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TTavernetta $$$$ Downtown / Italian The team behind Boulder’s Frasca Food and Wine offers the same attention to detail and hospitality at this more casual Denver restaurant. Go for dishes from across Italy and the deep wine list. Reservations accepted. 1889 16th St., 720-605-1889. Lunch, Dinner
Teocalli Cocina $$ Arvada /Mexican This industrial-meets-tropical Mexican restaurant offers elevated entrées like charred beef short rib with grilled bone marrow, pork shank pibil, and hamachi ceviche. Also try the Lafayette location. Reservations accepted. 5770 Olde Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada, 303-923-3170. Lunch, Dinner
Three Saints Revival $$ Downtown /Mediterranean Take a tour of the Mediterranean via a menu of small plates like charcuterie, flatbreads, croquettas, and crudo at this colorful eatery from restaurateur Robert Thompson of Punch Bowl Social. Reservations accepted. 1801 Wewatta St., 720-707-3500. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Tocabe, An American Indian Eatery $ Berkeley / American Feast on Indigenous fare like fry bread tacos with bison, beans, lettuce, cheese, and salsas alongside spicy potato- and corn-laden green chile stew. Also try the Greenwood Village location. Reservations not accepted. 3536 W. 44th Ave., 720-524-8282. Lunch, Dinner
Tofu House $$ Aurora / Korean This spot specializes in soups, stews, and Korean fare. Try the soft tofu soup. Reservations accepted. 2353 S. Havana St., Aurora, Unit D1, 303-751-2840. Lunch, Dinner
UUchi Denver $$$$ RiNo / Japanese James Beard Award–winning chef Tyson Cole combines unexpected flavors for his unique take on Japanese food at this restau rant with its own garden. Visit for the daily happy hour when nigiri and temaki are less than $10. Reservations accepted. 2500 Lawrence St., 303-444-1922. Dinner
Ultreia
$$$
Downtown /Spanish Chef Jennifer Jasinski brings Iberian fare to Union Station at this tapas spot. Try the lineup of pinxtos (snacks), with options such as bacon-wrapped dates. Reservations not accepted. Union Station, 1701 Wynkoop St., 303-534-1970. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Uncle $$
Speer / Asian A bustling atmosphere defines this popular, modern noodle house. The selective menu includes dishes such as Chinese-style steamed buns and, of course, noodles. Also try the Highland location. Reservations accepted. 95 S. Pennsylva nia St., 720-638-1859. Dinner
BRECKENRIDGE DISTILLERY WAS FOUNDED BY A DOCTOR-TURNED-DISTILLER WITH AN OVERWHELMING OBSESSION FOR WHISKEY.
It was never Bryan Nolt’s plan to create one of the fastest growing craft distilleries in the country, but as it turns out, his whiskey and the guest experience exploded, and for good reason.
Breckenridge Distillery was ranked as one of 2021’s top Visitor Attraction of the Year by Whisky Magazine and claimed their fourth Colorado Whiskey Distillery of the Year win at the 2021 New York Int’l Spirits Competition.
As their portfolio of awards and recognitions grow, Breckenridge Distillery continues to elevate its guest experience. In July 2021, they opened The Founders Lab, an immersive whiskey experience that takes guests on a journey through the senses. The interactive spirits lab allows guests to not only taste award-winning spirits, but the opportunity to
delve behind the scenes of spirit production.
“Our philosophy is to offer our guests a positive and rewarding experience during their visit, and to us, that's just as important as the products we make,” says Bryan Nolt, Breckenridge Distillery Founder and CEO.
In the Founders Lab, guests nerd out with Breckenridge Distillery’s distillers and become a master blender for a few magical hours. Their distillers are experts in nosing, flavor categorization and pairing substrates together to create a whole that far exceeds the expected sum of its parts. Guests will be taught to break down aggregate flavors while building a whiskey blend complete with mouth feel and finish. To top off the experience, guests get to hand bottle their creation and add a customized label.
“The Breckenridge Distillery singled-handedly
elevated (no pun intended) the craft-makers scene in Breckenridge when the distillery opened in 2008,” says Austyn Dineen a Breckenridge resident. “Like a fine bourbon, when they reimagined themselves and added an award-winning restaurant to their resume in 2016, they transformed the creative-culinary product that Breckenridge is known for today. The new Founder’s Lab is just the cherry on top of an incredible immersive adventure that guests can have on the slopes, on the trail and behind the beaker in Breckenridge year-round.”
Experience the Breckenridge Distillery. Book High-end Flights, The Blending Lab, dinner at the Breckenridge Distillery Restaurant and more.
Written by Jessie Unruh • Photo by Brent TaylorUno Mas Taqueria y Cantina $
Platt Park / Mexican This taqueria bolsters classic street tacos with contemporary ingredients. The key: smoked whole, locally raised animals, includ ing duck and pork. Try them with one of the many tequilas. Reservations accepted. 1585 S. Pearl St., 303-777-2866. Lunch, Dinner
Unravel Coffee $
Virginia Village /Cafe House-roasted beans lead to stellar espresso drinks at this Virginia Village coffee shop. Also try toasts, grain bowls, salads, and smoothies. Reservations not accepted. 1441 S. Holly St., 303-884-2380. Breakfast, Lunch
Urban Farmer $$$
Downtown / Seasonal This steak house features whole-animal butchery and an excellent charcute rie program. Reservations accepted. The Oxford Hotel, 1659 Wazee St., 303-262-6070. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Urban Village Grill $$$
Lone Tree / Indian Chef Charles Mani serves classic and contemporary dishes from regions across India. Don’t miss the Not Your Grandma’s Butter Chicken. Reservations accepted. 8505 Park Meadows Center Dr., #2184A, Lone Tree, 720-536-8565. Lunch, Dinner
VVegan Thai Co. $$ Longmont / Thai Explore Thailand with completely vegan dishes, including wok-fried noodles and delicious Thai curry dishes. Reservations accepted. 510 Third Ave., Longmont, 720-500-6920. Lunch, Dinner
Vine Street Pub & Brewery $$ City Park West / Pub This pub has two patios, 21 beers on tap, and an affordable menu of burgers, burritos, and veggie specialties like the Reuben (beer-baked tempeh stands in for corned beef). Reservations accepted. 1700 Vine St., 303-3882337. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Vital Root $ Berkeley / American Justin Cucci’s fourth eatery focuses on quick, healthy food. Grab a seat in the airy space and nosh on creative, wholesome fare such as chilled carrot-ginger soup or a veggie dosa. Reservations accepted. 3915 Tennyson St., 303-474-4131. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Voghera Ristorante & Apericena $$$ Berkeley / Italian Enjoy Italian-style tapas such as beef tartare, burrata, and pancetta-wrapped scallops at this rustic-chic Berkeley outpost. Reservations accepted. 3963 Tennyson St., 303-455-9111. Dinner, Brunch
WWater Grill $$$$ Downtown / Seafood Fresh fish, crustaceans, and raw bar offerings are flown in daily to this chic restaurant owned by California-based distributor King’s Seafood Company. Reservations accepted. 1691 Market St., 303-727-5711. Dinner
Wild Taco $
Capitol Hill / Mexican Casual, modern Mexicaninspired bites from chef Javier Sanchez (formerly of Tamayo and Osaka Ramen) are the draw at Capitol Hill’s Wild Taco. Reservations not accepted. 215 E. Seventh Ave., 303-856-7145. Dinner
Centennial / Korean This takeout and delivery spot serves Korean fried chicken wings and more. Reservations not accepted. 7530 S. University Blvd., Centennial, 303-221-9433. Lunch, Dinner
The Wolf’s Tailor $$$$
Sunnyside / Contemporary Chef Kelly Whitaker fuses Asian and Italian techniques and ingredients at this hip Sunnyside eatery. The results, such as 7X brisket braised in dashi and red wine and houseextruded mafaldine pasta with koji tomatoes, are unique and delicious. Reservations accepted.
4058 Tejon St., 720-456-6507. Dinner
Woodie Fisher Kitchen & Bar $$$ Downtown / American Visit for flatbreads, salads, and more. Try the Alamosa striped bass with romesco sauce. Reservations accepted. 1999 Chestnut Pl., St. 100, 720-643-1909. Dinner
CAP
Work & Class $$$
RiNo / American This meat-and-three concept from Dana Rodriguez offers a hybrid of American and Latin cuisine in raucous, repurposed-shippingcontainer digs. Reservations accepted. 2500 Larimer St., 303-292-0700. Dinner
Wynkoop Brewing Company $$ Downtown / Pub Enjoy freshly brewed beer and feast on pub favorites such as the hanger steak or the corn and poblano chowder at one of Denver’s original brewpubs. Reservations accepted. 1634 18th St., 303-297-2700. Lunch, Dinner
Yabby Hut $$
YLakewood / Cajun Transport yourself to the bayou at this seafood joint where you can indulge in Cajun crawfish, king crab legs, blue crab, shrimp, and clams—and then leave your mess behind on the throw-away tablecloths. Reservations not accepted. 3355 S. Yarrow St., Lakewood 303-985-0231. Lunch, Dinner
ZZocalito Latin Bistro $$$ Downtown / Latin American Find Oaxacan fare in the heart of Denver, such as pork tenderloin with red mole sauce. Reservations accepted. 999 18th St., Ste. 107, 970-920-1991. Lunch, Dinner
Xatrucho $$
XGreenwood Village / Latin American Chef Edwin Sandoval serves up dishes inspired by his Hondu ran heritage at this food stall inside Grange Hall. Try the pastelitos, which are naturally gluten-free, served with house-made salsas. Grange Hall, 6575 Greenwood Plaza Blvd., Greenwood Village. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch
Xicamiti La Taquería
$$
Golden / Mexican Munch on cooked-to-order burritos, tacos, and quesadillas made with recipes inspired by Walter Meza’s childhood in Mexico. Reservations not accepted. 715 Washington Ave., Golden, 303-215-3436. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Westminster / Indian Sample authentic Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan plates like tonguetingling chicken chile momos and comforting mulligatawny soup in a casual, neighborhood environment. Multiple locations. Reservations accepted. 9000 Yukon St., Westminster, 303-426-1976. Lunch, Dinner
YumCha $$
Downtown / Asian From Lon Symensma of ChoLon and Bistro LeRoux comes a dim sum house and noodle bar serving staples like xiao long bao and steamed pork dumplings. Reservations accepted. 1520 16th St., 720-638-8179. Lunch, Dinner
University / Chinese Stop in for Sichuan-style, dry hotpot customized to your preferences. Reserva tions not accepted. 2039 S. University Blvd., 720-542-9921. Lunch, Dinner
Zoe Ma Ma $ Downtown /Chinese This cozy counter-service spot offers Chinese and Taiwanese home-style cooking. Also try the Boulder location. Reserva tions not accepted. 1625 Wynkoop St., 303-545-6262. Lunch, Dinner
Zomo $$
Englewood / Asian Recipes inspired by Vietnam ese and Chinese cuisine abound at this cozy eatery. Reservations accepted. 3457 S. Broadway, Engle wood, 720-739-8882. Lunch, Dinner
Zorba’s $$
Congress Park / Greek Enjoy American and Greek fare at this longstanding neighborhood favorite. Reservations not accepted. 2626 E. 12th Ave., 303-321-0091. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
These listings are in no way related to advertising in 5280. If you find that a restaurant differs significantly from the information in its listing or your favorite restaurant is missing from the Dining Guide, please let us know. Write us at 5280 Publishing, Inc., 1675 Larimer St., Suite 675, Denver, CO 80202 or dining@5280.com.
“ KY OF THE YEAR”
NEARLY A YEAR later, Colton wanted to see the land before monsoon season began. We met at the I-70 exit at Grizzly Creek, and he looked up at the canyon’s rocky northern face. It had been months since he’d been here, and he hoped to see some signs of rejuvenation—namely, lush green above places where debris flows had started the previous year. Instead, he saw huge areas of brown, broken up by a patchwork of anemic green. “It’s like there’s no improvement at all,” he told me. I showed him photos of my hike above the canyon a few weeks ear lier, and he asked me to zoom in on images of the burn scar. He turned to me: “That is very, very bad.”
In and near the canyon, there was omni present concern among residents—about fire, flood, emergency management, trans portation flow, water supplies, and the funding that could potentially fix some of the environmental issues. In New Cas tle, 13 miles west of Glenwood Springs, roughly half of the community’s water sup ply comes from the Colorado River, which was still gummed up with silt and debris. New Castle recently spent nearly $2 mil lion on water filters that were supposed to last at least two years but survived only six months. (Those new filters were already on track for early replacement.)
In Glenwood Springs, things weren’t any better. This past summer, then city manager Debra Figueroa gestured to the landscape that could be seen from her office window. Glenwood Springs had long relied on snow melt from the spot she was pointing to for much of its water supply. Now, 22 months after the fire, the once-pure water resembled something from a half-flushed toilet. “It’s absolutely disgusting,” says Figueroa, who was Glenwood Springs’ city manager for six years until she left her post in July. “We’ve basically got pure water passing through mud.”
Nearly $9 million in state and federal money has been allocated to fund improve ments to the city’s water system over the past two years, and residential and com mercial water bills have recently climbed 36 percent. “We are at the forefront of climate change,” she says. “With fire and debris and our water system and our main transportation [thoroughfare] being
impacted, you name it, and we’ve seen it. This is definitely a crisis.”
Chinowsky, the former CU professor, estimates extreme storms and significant environmental changes will result in $21 billion in damage annually to major road ways nationwide. “We see fire and debris in consecutive years in Glenwood Canyon, but we’re not even close to a worst-case sce nario,” he says. “When we get to that point, and nothing significant has been done, a lot of people are going to get hurt or die.”
In March of this year, more than 100 stakeholders met in Glenwood Springs to game-plan for potential disaster scenar ios that could affect Glenwood Canyon. Among the participants were the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,
enormous marshmallows that can catch debris before it hits the road—at the termi nus of some of the canyon’s most worrisome gulches. Last fall, the department finished repairing a stretch of polyester-reinforced concrete, which is designed to be stronger and more durable than standard concrete, that had been badly damaged at Blue Gulch, where the worst of the debris slide occurred.
CDOT contractors have begun install ing rectangular, rock-filled wire cages adjacent to the interstate to contain mud and rock, and road crews upped the fre quency with which they pull fallen rocks and other debris out of culverts. CDOT has estimated that the cost for these basic reconstruction and maintenance projects will total nearly $10 million. CDOT’s
CDOT, local municipalities, police and fire departments, civil engineers, local hospitals, and even Google—which wanted input on how to improve its real-time mapping system to handle large-scale emergencies. People who attended the meeting said they came away confident about the coopera tion among the organizations. But there was also disappointment that a silver bullet solution didn’t exist to prevent future disasters on the interstate.
Following the 2021 slide, Governor Jared Polis applied for immediate federal relief, and more than $32 million has been put into repairs and improvements ($22 million from the federal government). The rehabilitation is ongoing: This summer, CDOT was plac ing super sacks—white bags that resemble
plans for Cottonwood Pass—the best alter nate route in the event of a canyon closure— are underway but still have significant municipal hurdles to clear. On top of that, Glenwood Springs was completing the design of a $53 million bridge project this fall to help ease traffic during emer gency evacuations, and city engineers were talking to CDOT about creating a series of access-line breaks along I-70 west of the city that could open and funnel traffic during a life-threatening disaster.
The fixes, however, can feel like BandAids on a terminal patient, and Figueroa often finds herself imagining the next disas ter. “I’m thinking about worst-case scenarios
Rafters on the Colorado River below I-70
all the time,” she says. Last year, as the debris slides were being cleaned up on the canyon’s eastern half, the threat of a small fire on the west end came about because of increased activity at a long-burning coal seam. Fortunately, mountain passes were untouched, and traffic was able to get out of the“Butcanyon.whatabout the next time?” Figueroa says. “What if those alternate routes are compromised and we have hundreds of people trapped on the interstate? You don’t want to think about it, but you have to. These past couple of years have shown us that the unthinkable has now become a possibility.”
TWO MILES EAST of the city, Trapani, the engineer, was waiting at the No Name rest area. He was eager to show me the interstate through his eyes, with all its triumphs and challenges. Before we got into his Audi, we climbed a concrete walkway overlooking a curve in the interstate. Trapani pointed to the inner edge, where engineers had back filled a portion of old U.S. 6 decades before. What once was an unsightly scar on the land scape now looked as natural as if it had been there for a thousand years. “We completely
changed a part of this canyon that had been absolutely ravaged” by previous construction work, he told me. Trapani has lived in Glenwood Springs for 47 years, which means he’s constantly seeing his handiwork. When we pulled onto the interstate, he pointed out individual trees that were relocated during construction. He showed me rock faces that had been blasted and then stained to look as if they’d been exposed for ages. He spotted some oak brush and remembered the day the shrubs were planted. Trapani kept his car in the far right lane, a position he was unaccustomed to on this stretch of highway. He admitted he likes traveling the canyon at high speeds, hugging turns as if he were racing in the Swiss Alps. That senti ment was reinforced by the squawks from the radar detector on his dash. Going fast, he told me, is “a great way to feel the work we did here.”
We came upon the opening for Grizzly Creek, which looked like a spillway more than anything else. The worst of the slide was still visible: Large, chunky rocks and broken tree trunks pushed down the canyon wall to the Colorado River. Trapani had recently taken a ride along the bike path that runs parallel to the inter state and marveled at how the debris had changed a portion of the river.
When he’d set foot in the canyon as project manager in 1980, there were ques tions about the geology of the place—and misconceptions about what was hidden inside the earth. His team discovered tre mendous amounts of buried talus, which created a crumbling, chalklike layer that extended more than 50 feet deep in some parts. (A slurry was pumped into the ground in places to harden it and make it suitable to anchor bridge pillars.) “Rockfall was what we thought about,” Trapani says.
See the full list of Denver Metro Area walks, locations, and times at a
During projects, it’s common for engi neers to look at 30-year weather patterns to determine future environmental impacts. That process now feels outdated. “Climate change wasn’t even part of our language then,” Trapani adds. “How do you plan for that when you didn’t even realize it was happening?” Now, this strip—his strip—of interstate was turning 30 years old. “We planned for absolutely everything that could have been considered at the time,” he says.
Take a step toward better health. Meet new people, learn about health, walk, and get fit with doctors. Free blood pressure checks, giveaways, coffee, and breakfast.
We reached Hanging Lake Tunnel. Its 1,400 yards of concrete make up the first interstate tunnel in America built without metal ribs holding up the midsection—Tra pani’s pièce de résistance. He let out a giddy yelp as his car disappeared into the concrete tube. “I would have built this thing for free,” he says. We pushed out the other end, and I thought about Autumn Bair and how she’d come out of this same tunnel and let loose a scream of fear.
Trapani was 28 when he took the project manager job. He’s now 70 with an adult son and has more time to reflect on the work he’s done over his career. On his bike trip a week earlier, he’d taken his partner to a rest area near the tunnel, for which he’d overseen the design. Not long ago, the table was buried under several feet of mud. “How the hell did this survive?” he wondered aloud. “Solid build?” his partner replied.
It was a common theme that day, Trapani says, stopping at different sections and marveling at their survival. Yes, bridge decks were significantly damaged in certain areas, but the bridge piers were unharmed. “You think of these massive boulders and trees just rumbling down the canyon wall and what would have happened if they’d wiped out those footings,” he says. Trapani came away content with the work, saying, “We did the best job we could have done. NoBackregrets.”atthe No Name rest stop, he turned off the car’s engine and sat for a moment. The I-70 job took 12 years of his life. Thirty years after its completion, he wonders what might exist here in the next 30 years. “Like they say,” Trapani says, “Mother Nature bats last.”
WHEN SHE ALLOWS herself to remem ber, Autumn Bair can still hear and feel everything from that July night: the sound of debris hitting her driver’s door; the flash of muck over the windshield; the silence that followed. She’d had to crack her door open and pull herself out. Her adrenaline surging, Bair’s fingers shook so much she couldn’t call her husband. Mud was still oozing down the canyon’s north face. Lightning flashed every 15 seconds. Bair
put her phone in her shirt and ran a mile and a half home in the rain.
Nearly a year later, Bair is on the phone talking about the lessons she learned about herself—chief among them that she would do whatever she needed to see her family again. She also learned she could manage panic, that she could make split-second deci sions and live with them. Bair told me she’d been criticized by locals, people who said she should have stayed in her car and waited for the police or fire department to help—that she unnecessarily endangered her life when she ran home with God knows what await ing her on the interstate.
She never thought about her escape that way. “It was either sit in the car and get bur ied or run toward home and maybe get hit by falling rock on the way,” Bair says. She pauses for a moment, as if she can’t believe the macabre equation that had run through her head that night: What was the better way for a mother of four to go? “I wasn’t about to be buried alive,” she says. “Get hit by a rock and maybe my death would have been quick.”
As we talked, Little Blue, her 17-yearold Volkswagen, was parked out front. Some friends from the Gypsum Fire Department
pulled it out the day after Bair abandoned the car. She and her husband watched as the men dug out the vehicle, which was buried in waist-high mud. When the fire chief told her there’d been an even worse slide a couple of miles behind this one, she cried.
The insurance company declared the Pas sat totaled, but Bair couldn’t give it up. Dried mud was caked over every square inch when it was towed back to the ranch. Nearly a year later, the car ran most of the time. When Bair took it in for a repair recently, mechanics pulled more dirt out of the engine.
The debris slide was, in fact, the second time she’d been forced to abandon Little Blue in the past two years. During the 2020 canyon fire, Bair got a call from a Garfield County deputy, telling her that flames were heading toward her house. The family had roughly 24 hours to evacuate. The interstate was closed, so Bair rushed home from the hospital via Cottonwood Pass. She made it to a point a couple of miles above her property when the road became dangerous. She abandoned the Passat and ran the rest of the way. “A familiar story,” she says today. Despite feeling like something strange and unnerving is going on in the canyon,
Bair hasn’t entertained the idea of moving. Her husband’s family came here in the early 1900s as sheepherders in cowboy country, risking their lives in the process. There’d been the Great Depression and recessions and drought. Even after all she’d been through in the past two years, Bair tried to put it in perspective. She was grateful the kids hadn’t been with her that night on the interstate; she was relieved fire hadn’t ruined everything her husband’s family had built on the ranch; and she was happy to wake up every morn ing in one of the most gorgeous settings in one of the country’s most gorgeous states.
She knew July would bring scorching temperatures. A small wildfire had recently popped up near the ranch. Although the flames were quickly extinguished, the event made Bair wonder what the rest of the summer would look like. How bad might the rain get in August? The land had never felt so fragile. “I guess that’s the life you choose when you live here,” she said. “You’re always thinking about what might happen next.” m
Robert Sanchez is 5280’s senior staff writer. Email feedback to letters@5280.com.
and libertarian legal association). He landed at Oxford in 1992 to study the philosophy of law.There, Finnis supervised Gorsuch’s doctoral thesis, and the young man, liv ing outside of the United States for the first time, remembers the experience warmly. “He was a very generous teacher, particularly generous with his red ink on my papers,” Gorsuch said during his 2017 Supreme Court confirmation hear ing. “I remember sitting next to the fire in his Oxford office, like something out of Harry Potter.” Gorsuch’s dissertation, which he completed in 2004 and turned into a book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, in 2009, concluded that, “the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”
While that reasoning seems to reflect Finnis’ interpretation of natural law, Gorsuch is more difficult to pin down than his mentor on the issue of gay rights. In a 2005 article for the National Review, Gorsuch wrote that liberals had become “addicted” to bypassing lawmak ers in their efforts to enact their social agenda, including same-sex marriage. Yet a number of gay friends and colleagues supported Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
At Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin asked the judge directly about Finnis and the influence the Oxford professor had on Gorsuch’s views on the LGBTQ community. “Senator,” Gorsuch replied, “I have tried to treat each case and each person as a person—not a ‘this kind of person,’ not a ‘that kind of person.’ A person. Equal justice under law. It is a radical promise in the history of mankind.”
“Does that refer to sexual orientation as well?” Durbin asked.
“Senator,” Gorsuch said, “the Supreme Court of the United States has held that single-sex marriage is protected by the Constitution.”Thetopicseemingly decided, Durbin pursued a new line of questioning.
AFTER CLERKING AT the Supreme Court, Gorsuch joined a private litigation firm in Washington, D.C., for a decade and then worked as a top aide in President George W.
Bush’s Justice Department before returning to the Centennial State in 2006 as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, based in Denver. By all accounts, it was a happy homecoming.
Gorsuch bought a house in a private gated community outside Niwot with an unim peded view of the foothills and a stable for the family’s horses; his two daughters would visit his home office with yellow baby chicks from the barn in tow. He taught a law ethics class at the University of Colorado Law School and, though raised Catholic, attended the progres sive St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder,
were ultimately acquitted by a jury and sued the DPD, winning a $1.8 million judgment, which the city appealed to the 10th Circuit.
“Gorsuch looked at the Denver lawyers,” says David Lane, a Denver civil rights law yer who represented the Martinezes, “and said, ‘It would behoove you to settle this case.’ ” The city took Gorsuch’s advice and settled with the family for $1.6 million. Lane appeared before Gorsuch on the 10th Cir cuit a handful of times and didn’t believe him to be overly partisan.
If Gorsuch is a zealot about anything, it’s textualism. Starting in the 20th century,
a denomination that welcomes, marries, and ordains members of the gay community.
The move to Colorado also put Gorsuch into closer contact with his beloved outdoors. Jamil Jaffer clerked for Gorsuch in 2006, and the judge welcomed the California native to the Centennial State by taking him and his co-clerk alpine sledding. They later went flyfishing, and when Jaffer couldn’t catch a fish, Gorsuch hooked one for him—although he was kind enough to let his mentee reel it in. Jaffer did much better on the slopes, even tually working his way up to black diamond runs. “But I did pull my MCL trying to keep up with him,” Jaffer says.
Jaffer’s clerkship was just as intense. A clerk’s most important duty is to work with the judge on his or her opinions, and, like Finnis, Gorsuch was generous with red ink. “At the end of it,” Jaffer says, “I would not see a single word of my own writing.”
Inside the courtroom, both conserva tives and progressives found Gorsuch to be intelligent and fair. In 2009, Denver Police Department (DPD) officers raided a house in the West Colfax neighborhood they sus pected of being occupied by drug dealers and sex workers. The warrantless search turned up neither narcotics nor prostitutes. Instead, the DPD found members of the Martinez family, who’d recently moved in, and the cops arrested two of the brothers for alleg edly assaulting police officers. The brothers
legal thinking began to be transformed by legal realism—the idea that in addition to the written law, jurists should take public policy and the social interest into account when crafting opinions. Then Antonin Scalia came along. Scalia was appointed by Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986 and became a right-wing star for his scathing opinions, stubbornness, and fierce adherence to the strict letter of the Constitution.
Scalia preached the gospel of modern tex tualism, believing that the primary focus of interpretation should be the statute in ques tion. He even refused to sign opinions that relied on ancillary research such as legislative history—all the documents that an elected body creates in the process of passing a law, materials that might shed light on the law makers’ intent. To Scalia, the Constitution was “not living but dead.” “[Supreme Court Justice] Elena Kagan famously said, ‘We are all textualists now,’ ” says James Romoser, the editor of SCOTUSblog. “So Scalia’s influence runs through the entire Supreme Court, both the conservative wing and the liberal wing.”
It also trickled down to many lower courts, including the 10th Circuit, where, in a 2016 opinion, Gorsuch wrote, “Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution. And that document isn’t some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams.” That same year, Scalia died while
“THERE’S NO DOUBT THAT HE BRINGS A WESTERN MENTALITY AND PHILOSOPHY TO THE COURT. WHAT DO I MEAN BY THAT? IT’S CLEAR THAT INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY IS SOMETHING HE BELIEVES IS CLEARLY CAPTURED IN THE CONSTITUTION.”
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on vacation in Texas. Gorsuch received the news on his cell phone while on the slopes and skied to the base of the mountain with tears blurring his vision.
IN 2002, WHILE STILL working in private practice, Gorsuch published an editorial about the politicization of the judicial con firmation process. As evidence, he pointed to the case of Merrick Garland, then a judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals. Af ter espousing all of Garland’s qualifications, Gorsuch recalled that a few years earlier, the Democrat’s confirmation to the D.C. Court had been held up for 18 months by a Republican-controlled Congress. “So much for promoting excellence in today’s confir mation process,” Gorsuch wrote.
Fourteen years later, President Barack Obama nominated Garland to succeed Scalia, but a Republican-controlled Con gress refused to confirm him—and the next president, Donald Trump, nominated Neil Gorsuch to the country’s highest court. One of Gorsuch’s first calls after receiving the news was to Garland, but Gorsuch refused to discuss the ethics of the situation during his
confirmation hearings because he said judges shouldn’t become entangled in politics.
Gorsuch’s tenure on the Supreme Court didn’t start especially smoothly. During his first oral argument, in April 2017, he held that a complicated case could be eas ily decided by following the text of the law, which struck some—his fellow justices included, reportedly—as a little sanctimo nious. His relationship with the other justices also became news in January 2022, when NPR reported that Gorsuch refused to don a mask despite Chief Justice John Roberts asking all the justices to wear them to pro tect Sonia Sotomayor, who has diabetes. (In a joint statement, Gorsuch and Sotomayor said they are “warm colleagues and friends.”)
“Contrary to those stories,” says Jaffer, who returned to clerk for Gorsuch in D.C. and now teaches law at George Mason University, “the justices spend a lot of time working together outside of the court, including public events talking about the importance of civil debate and discourse.” Gorsuch also teaches at George Mason, and in summer 2021, Kagan joined him during the school’s national security summer pro gram in Iceland.
Then there was the matter of Gorsuch’s writing. Jurists can quote Scalia’s most famous flourishes, such as, “This wolf comes as a wolf,” from memory. But while Gorsuch had been hailed as a skillful writer on the 10th Circuit, the legal world soon started lam pooning his Supreme Court opinions. His literary crimes included dropping in quotes from arcane philosophers (see: G.K. Ches terton) and overusing alliteration, but it was his penchant for explaining the obvious that made Gorsuch into a meme. #GorsuchStyle became a game on Twitter, with people tak ing celebrated SCOTUS lines and describing them to death. Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, trans formed Scalia’s phrase into, “This wolf comes as a wolf. That is, the wolf, being dangerous, is coming to us in a way that we can tell it is a wolf, i.e., something dangerous, and not something that isn’t dangerous.”
If the quality of Gorsuch’s prose was a surprise, the substance of its meaning was not. He has consistently sided with the other Republican-appointed justices, who, after the additions of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, hold a six to three supermajority over Democrat-appointed
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judges. Truly his mother’s son, Gorsuch seems particularly wary of the administrative state—those executive branch agencies, like the EPA, charged with regulating industries.
This past term, for example, he joined the conservative bloc in West Virginia v. EPA, declaring the agency couldn’t determine emissions standards across the energy sec tor because Congress didn’t expressly say it could. In other words, the EPA can’t make its own rules. “Admittedly, lawmaking under
our Constitution can be difficult,” Gorsuch wrote in a concurrence. “But that is nothing particular to our time nor any accident. The framers believed that the power to make new laws regulating private conduct was a grave one that could, if not properly checked, pose a serious threat to individual liberty.”
The liberal dissenters on the court pointed out that not limiting power plant emissions could pose a serious threat to humankind, but to Gorsuch, that’s not a justice’s concern.
Congress makes statutes. The judicial branch simply enforces them, guided by the text.
But different words mean very different things to different judges—even conservative ones supposedly guided by the same textual ism. The case of Bostock v. Clayton County involved three people who had been fired either for being gay or transgender; they sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Gorsuch surprised many by agree ing with them. The statute, after all, expressly forbids discrimination based on sex, and Bos tock, a man attracted to men, would not have been fired if he were a woman attracted to men. Textualism 101. Case closed.
Except Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito didn’t read the law that way. What ensued in the opinion and dis sents became a battle over Scalia’s legacy. “Do not simply split statutory phrases into their component words, look up each in a dictionary, and then mechanically put them together again, as the majority opinion today mistakenly does,” Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent. “To reiterate Justice Scalia’s caution, that approach misses the forest for the trees.” In the parlance of the Supreme Court, these were fighting “Conservativewords.academics have raised
questions about Bostock,” says Tara Grove, a University of Texas School of Law profes sor and a textualism expert, who believes Gorsuch’s interpretation of Bostock was correct—at least in regard to adhering to formalistic textualism. “Judges are inevi tably affected by their backgrounds and jurisprudential preferences.”
During the 2021-’22 session, Gorsuch was less inclined to agree with his conser vative colleagues: He was in the majority on 75 percent of judgments, according to SCOTUSblog, the lowest number of any Republican-appointed justice. (Roberts and Kavanaugh scored the highest marks, at 95 percent.) “He’s a very reliable conserva tive,” says SCOTUSblog’s Romoser, “but certainly not all the time. He does have unexpected views.”
ANTHONY KENNEDY RETIRED from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018. A year later, the National Constitution Center gave him its Liberty Medal, which honors individuals who “strive to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.” The center asked Gorsuch to introduce his former mentor dur ing the awards ceremony.
Standing behind a podium decorated in stars and stripes and wearing a dark suit and a blue tie, Gorsuch described the kindness
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of his mentor. Gorsuch had not technically clerked for Kennedy; after he returned from Oxford, Gorsuch served under retired Supreme Court Justice Byron White, also a Coloradan. But Kennedy adopted Gor such into his inner circle, inviting him to his home along with other clerks to debate the court’s docket on a whiteboard. Later, upon rising to the 10th Circuit, Gorsuch asked for advice. “Listen,” Kennedy replied. Kennedy and his wife helped the Gorsuches find a house when they moved to D.C.
When Kennedy delivered his remarks at the Constitution Center, he noted that he considered the ancient Greeks—in par ticular Aristotle, whom Finnis had cited in his Amendment 2 affidavit—to be his heroes. The philosopher, it seems, had ranked democracy as the worst form of government, and Kennedy had spent a summer investigating why. “My conclu sion was that he thought democracy did not have the capacity to mature,” Kennedy said. “It’s our destiny to prove him wrong.”
Gorsuch and Kennedy are bound by more than personal history. They also share geographical roots: Since 1981, only three justices from the western United
States—Gorsuch, Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor—have been appointed to the country’s highest bench. “No less an authority than Justice Scalia observed this lack of representation when he wrote in dissent that the court has ‘not a single gen uine Westerner,’ ” U.S. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado said during Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing. (In a parenthetical, Scalia added, “California does not count.”)
Kennedy grew up in Sacramento in the 1940s and ’50s, and many attribute the state’s relative tolerance at the time to the future justice’s defense of queer rights—just as many credit Gorsuch’s protection of Native American rights to his time spent in Colo rado. During his decade on the 10th Circuit, Gorsuch heard 60 cases concerning Native law, according to the National Congress of American Indians, and he wrote 18 opinions. Many of his decisions favored Indigenous peoples, and that trend has continued during his time on the Supreme Court.
In 2020, Gorsuch sided with the four liberals then on the bench in McGirt v. Oklahoma, a landmark case that ruled that most of eastern Oklahoma, including Tulsa, remained “Indian Country” and so
state authorities had no right to prosecute Native Americans for crimes committed there. During this past session, the Court heard three complaints involving Native law. Gorsuch ruled for Native American interests in all three, including Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, which held that state authorities could prosecute certain crimes on Indian land. “Where our predecessors refused to participate in one State’s unlawful power grab at the expense of the Cherokee,” Gorsuch wrote in his dissent, “today’s court accedes to “There’sanother’s.”nodoubtthat he brings a West ern mentality and philosophy to the court,” Jaffer says. “What do I mean by that? It’s clear that individual liberty is something he believes is clearly captured in the Constitu tion.” Just how broadly Gorsuch applies that belief will be on display this month, when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in 303 Creative v. Elenis.
The owner of Littleton-based 303 Cre ative, Lorie Smith, is a graphic designer who says her faith won’t allow her to cre ate websites for same-sex weddings. The court ruled on a similar case in 2018’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil
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Rights Commission, when the justices ruled the Lakewood bakery didn’t have to make a wedding cake for a gay cus tomer as an expression of free speech, even though the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) prohibits refusing service because of sexual orientation. Smith is challenging a different part of the same law: She would like to add a note to her website saying 303 Creative won’t design websites for gay weddings, but CADA forbids advertising discrimination.
303 Creative might not be the best bell wether for Gorsuch’s views on gay rights. After all, even Kennedy voted in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop. But the 2018 ruling was narrow: The opinion, written by Ken nedy, only affected Masterpiece’s specific complaint. “Kennedy did believe in First Amendment religious freedom exemp tions,” says Jason Pierceson, a political science professor at the University of Illi nois Springfield who focuses on legal issues related to LGBTQ rights. “But not as a way to gut anti-discrimination protections.”
There are indications that Gorsuch might place a greater value on religion. In his Bostock opinion, the justice went
out of his way to write that the case didn’t involve faith and that his opinion might have been different if it had. “I think most observers would expect Gorsuch to be on the side [of], or at least be inclined to side with, the website designer,” Romoser says. Without Kennedy, Pierceson believes the Supreme Court could go much broader in 303 Creative, creating space for reli gious freedom in discrimination laws. That probably wouldn’t mean racists would be free to post “Whites Only” signs. Chris tian adoption agencies, however, might be able to turn away Jewish parents.
If the majority of the court decides in favor of Smith, 303 Creative could create a path to undermine queer rights. Just as alarming to gay rights advocates: the future of Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that upheld that same-sex marriage is protected under the Constitution. When the conser vative justices, Gorsuch included, overruled Roe v. Wade in June, the majority opinion held that nothing in the decision should threaten any precedent other than abortion. “I think that was a bit of an empty promise by the court,” Pierceson says. “Before Dobbs, I would have said marriage equality is quite
secure as a constitutional matter, but now I am much more skeptical. I think there are at least five votes to overturn Obergefell.” Would Gorsuch be one of them?
The justice would likely say that the let ter of the law will decide the outcome. But reality says background and principles— and, yes, politics—will play a part, too. Gorsuch seems stuck between worlds: his Catholic past and his Episcopalian present. He advocated for Garland and then stepped over him on his way to the Supreme Court. He counts both a bigot and a champion of gay rights among his mentors.
Or maybe Gorsuch will be guided by the testimony he gave during his confirmation hearing, when then U.S. Senator Al Fran ken of Minnesota suggested Gorsuch would do the president’s bidding: “I do not appre ciate when people characterize me, as I am sure you do not appreciate it when people characterize you,” Gorsuch said, momen tarily letting frustration bubble through his composure. “I like to speak for myself. I am a judge. I am my own man.” m
Spencer Campbell is 5280 ’s features editor. Email feedback to letters@5280.com.
Mile High Station | 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.
Hosted by Tennyson Center for Children, this country music experience will help kids and families thrive. Enjoy a performance by Adam Doleac paired with BBQ, libations, a mechanical bull, auctions and more. Proceeds support kids and families impacted by trauma. Information and tickets at milehighqandbrew.com.
Boulder, CO | Various Start Times
RUN THE SIGNATURE BOULDER MARATHON!
Epic finish and After-Party Downtown. Named one of the best new marathons in the country. Experience the only course to combine scenic views of the foothills and the first-ever finish line on the bricks of the Pearl Street Mall. “Spectacular” - Denver Post. New in 2022: 5k, 10k, and Kids Run!
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The Brighton, A Non Plus Ultra Venue 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.
For one night only experience our city’s best restaurants at this can’t-miss culinary soirée. Join us for an all-inclusive evening filled with delectable bites, open bars, delightful libations and fun! Presented by Tequila Patròn
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Boettcher Concert Hall | 7:30 p.m.
See one of Tim Burton’s most celebrated films like never before! The full-feature film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, will be projected on the big screen accompanied by Danny Elfman’s darkly charming score played live by your Colorado Symphony.
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4+ Venues Across Metro Denver
The largest film festival in the Rocky Mountain region returns this November 2-13 with red carpets, film screenings, documentaries, shorts, music videos, and episodic content, as well as immersive and virtual reality programming, events, panels, parties, and industry guests.
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Ghosts get a bad rap: Sure, some want to devour your everlasting soul, but others are just trying to make it through their afterlives in peace. In honor of Halloween, we ranked five Colorado apparitions from congenial to downright evil so you know what sort of story you’re walking into.
Legend has it that a 10-yearold child drowned in the Jerome’s former pool (what’s now a garden terrace) in the 1930s. There’s no record of the incident, acknowl edges Dean Weiler, who leads Aspen Walking Tours’ Ghosts, Murder, & Mayhem trip, but guests have reported visions of a wet, shivering child who leaves behind puddles of water and is responsible for disappearancesconfoundingoftoys.
During brutal winters in the early 1900s, the hotel’s fourth floor served as a temporary morgue until the ground thawed enough for burials. Even then, the departed seem to have had a difficult time, well, departing: Kitchen staff at the hotel have seen uten sils thrown about, and guests have witnessed misty forms accompanied by inexplicable footsteps. The apparitions seem to abstain from violence, but given that they’re often missing appendages or even heads, they’re certainly unsettling.
—COURTNEY HOLDENIn the late 1800s, Miss Sylvia was living in a boardinghouse and searching for a second husband when a smallpox outbreak claimed her life. Now, says Gail Westwood, author of Haunted Breckenridge, Sylvia spends her days tidying clutter for the mixologists who occupy her former residence. It’s only men, though, who report feeling the lovelorn wight’s breathy whispers in their ears.
SHERIFF WILLIAM J. THOMPSON
While savoring the tri-tip bulgogi, keep an eye on the lightbulb on the back wall. When you notice it pulsing, raise a glass to Sheriff William J. Thompson, who died in the restaurant’s doorway more than 110 years ago after losing a battle of bullets to the local marshal. Fortunately, unnerving evidence of this lawman-turned-specter—new equipment dying suddenly, doors banging inexplicably—seems to have subsided now that the staff keeps a shot of Old Forester on the bar’s top shelf.
Dozens of the Mexican restaurant’s employees have described doors slamming, voices screaming, and sightings of a top-hat-wearing figure dressed all in black. Local historian Steve Chapman of Salida Walking Tours has had guests struck by sud den headaches and nausea, always after standing near the building’s western corner. It’s no wonder: The place was a mortuary from 1911 to 1961, and a medium passing through town revealed that the ailments are symptoms associated with portals between the worlds of life and death.
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