Home » Arts & Entertainment, Lori Midson
Word of mouth
March 5, 2009 | 9:25 am
3 
By Lori Midson
I’m not a fan of green beer or rivers that are dyed shamrock green. I’m leery of leprechauns, and I’ve never plucked a four-leaf clover for good luck. That said, I can always be coaxed to kiss the Blarney Stone, and I celebrate St. Paddy’s Day with abandonment because, well, I’m Irish and I have no issues with unleashing that Irishness. That is exactly what I plan to do March 17, most likely at Katie Mullen’s Restaurant & Pub, a behemoth establishment that just opened in the Sheraton Downtown Denver Hotel at 1550 Court Place. Denver (along with the ‘burbs) has plenty of Irish watering holes — Fado, Clancy’s Irish Pub, The Irish Hound, The Irish Rover, Pogue Mahone’s and Nallen’s — all of which will no doubt be inundated with pub-rockers knocking back pints o’ Guinness and shots of Jameson until they’re bleary-eyed. All these public houses have their virtues, but they don’t hold a Harp to the megapub that is Katie Mullen’s, at least not when it comes to space — 11,500 square feet of it, to be exact, which is enough footage to cram in 600 Irishmen (and women) in its dark-wooded maze of bars, booths, tables, nooks, crannies and corners. As for the grub, it’s exactly what you would expect from an Irish pub: boxty potatoes with smoked salmon, fish and chips, Irish stew, shepherd’s pie and a full Irish breakfast, complete with rashers of bacon, baked beans, black and white pudding, Irish sausage and two fried eggs. But executive chef John Ruane goes beyond the traditional fossils of Irish pub fare (bless him), proffering a five-page menu that also includes an ale-marinated hanger steak, Irish sausage sliders, calves liver and onions, linguine with fresh clams and braised short ribs – in other words, lots of lucky charms.
Ready, set, shuck and slurp. Both aquatic outposts of Jax Fish House (1539 17th St. and 928 Pearl St., Boulder) are gearing up for two consecutive weeks of oyster madness. The first week, March 9-15, revolves around Jax-Boulder, where chef Hosea Rosenberg is rolling out an oyster-oriented, three-course prix fixe menu for $35 per person. From March 16-22, Jax-Denver executive chef Sheila Lucero is doing the same deal. Both fish shrines also are offering 11 oysters for $11, with 11 cents from each oyster slurped donated to the Emergency Family Assistance Association in Boulder and The Gathering Place in Denver. If you think you’ve got what it takes to gulp more oysters than anyone else, you can enter one of two oyster-eating contests. The first is at Jax-Boulder on March 15; the Denver competition is March 22. For all the briny pearls, go to oysterweeks.com.
It just became much easier to choose a breakfast or lunch spot in Denver while simultaneously contributing to the well-being of dozens of tireless women working to come off welfare and ease their way into the job market, specifically in the restaurant industry. Work Options for Women, an 11-year-old nonprofit that trains impoverished women in the necessary culinary skills to find jobs in restaurants, will continue to improve the lives of those women when the organization opens Café Options this month in the US Bank Tower at 1650 Curtis St. “Every meal sold at the café will strengthen our community by providing job training and real-life work skills to women seeking a fresh start toward self-sufficiency,” says Toni Schmid, WOW’s founder and executive director. The café will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, offering house-roasted meats, scratch-made soups, made-to-order salads, handcrafted sandwiches and fresh-baked pastries. Take note that 100 percent of the profits from the café are returned to WOW. For more info, visit workoptions.org.
Café Options isn’t the only new restaurant that’s making a splash. Organixx, whose Web site reads like Earth Day on steroids (“Sustainable, eco-friendly, reusable, recyclable, fair trade, natural, energy-efficient, organic, local, green, low-impact, fresh. These are words that inspire us at Organixx.”) is peddling salads, soups and sandwiches (and one long laundry list of adjectives) at 1520 Blake St. For all the green-themed details, go to organixxrestaurant.com. Ristras Santa Fe Grill, opening March 12 at 11961 Bradburn Blvd. in Westminster, has taken a much simpler approach to its menu, a New Mexican catch-all of blue corn tacos, quesadillas, stuffed sopapillas and burritos smothered in red or green chile. Visit ristrassantafegrill.com for more info. Over in the Berkeley neighborhood, Lakeside Waffles, which is roughly the size of a waffle maker, has set up digs at 4335 W. 44th Ave. The breakfast and lunch joint, open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, is the only place I know where you can order a “Wild Chipmunk,” two waffles pelted with peanut butter chips and topped with walnuts and pecans. Talk about going nuts.
"));
RSS
TWITTER
FACEBOOK
Leave your response!