The best local spots for throwing it back in people’s faces
As a direct result of my rampant drinking, I often find myself taking taxis in this city. And for the most part, those rides go like this:
ME: Busy night?
CABBIE: Not too bad.
ME: Where are you from originally?
CABBIE: Ethiopia.
ME: I’ve been to Tanzania.
(silence)
But the other night, my conversation with the cabbie went differently. For starters, the guy wasn’t from Ethiopia, he was a New Yorker: gruff voice, hard-boiled demeanor, the type of guy who eventually winds all conversations back to how there’s no place like NYC for a slice. We were somewhere in the middle of this process when he started complaining about Denver. He was as polite as a New Yorker could be, doing his best to support his arguments rather than just pummeling body blows at the city that belched me from her loins. But his diatribe culminated with his asking, “Don’t you think if Denver had a color it would be beige? Don’t you think if Denver had a flavor it would be vanilla?”
First of all, if Denver had a flavor, it would be craft beer. Second of all, what kind of creep goes around licking cities?
The most galling part of this exchange, however, was that he was driving me and a friend to Bastiens Restaurant (3503 E. Colfax Ave., 303-322-0363), Denver’s golden dive bar of a steakhouse that’s been serving up sirloin in a retro-fitted octagon since 1937. We were celebrating my buddy’s recent completion of some finals, and we figured we’d do it in a classic Queen City kind of way, at some funky place that makes its own butter, that uses its marquee to write things like, “Crooks steal police station toilet seats; cops have nothing to go on,” a place where my dad dined the night his first child, my older sister, was born in 1978.
But had our cab driver ever been to Bastiens? “This is the first time I’ve ever taken anyone here,” he replied.
The next day I got a text from a friend who had recently moved back home from New York City. We went to high school together, but that was the last time she had lived here. “Major culture shock,” the text read. “Help.”
I invited her to a show at the downtown Comedy Works, a place I’m biased toward because I’m on stage a lot there, but a legendary club nonetheless, a crowded comedy sweatshop that would make the top five list of most of today’s comics. She seemed pleased.
Both experiences reminded me that Denver is a pretty amazing city, but not the type of city that’s going to bowl you over. It’s subtle, a soft kiss on the lips as opposed to a slap on the ass. You have to find the cool in Denver. It’s not going to find you. And if you haven’t found it, it’s not because it’s not out there—it’s because you’re lazy.
But me, I’m always searching, an annoying yet convenient side effect of all those amphetamines. So what follows are a few places that I found or frequented in 2009 that continue to make me love this city. Maybe they’re obvious to you, maybe you’ve heard of them before, regardless they’re favorites of mine and I hope you enjoy them.
Denver’s got no good cuisine: Heard that before? It’s total bullshit. Three favorites I sampled for the first time this year: Ba Le (1044 S. Federal Blvd., 303-922-2129) for delicious, filling, $3 Vietnamese sandwiches; Las Tortas (5307 Leetsdale Dr., 720-379-7269) for delicious, beyond filling, fairly priced Mexican sandwiches; and Oshima Ramen (7400 E. Hampden Ave., 720-482-0264) for delicious, filling, cheap Japanese non-sandwiches.
Coffee shops: St. Mark’s (2019 E. 17th Ave., 303-322-8384), Café Europa (76 S. Pennsylvania St., 303-722-1024), and Pablo’s (630 E. 6th Ave., 303-744-3323). I’ve been to all of them plenty before this year, but they remain favorites for bagel-eating/dick-joke-writing/shorty-peeping.
But what about us aesthetes, Adam?: Where can we go to bask in the type of dilapidated charm that only comes with neglect and disrepair? Where can we go for a glimpse of Jack Kerouac’s Denver? Well, it’s unfair to hold a city to 60-year-old portrayals, but here goes: Riverside Cemetery on Brighton Boulevard; the headstones are ancient, old Colorado titans are buried there, and it’s always empty so you can have the place to yourself. Or the abandoned Gates Rubber Company off Santa Fe; peep the graffiti, note the creepy Axis Chemicals vibe. Or the old CoBusCo warehouse off Evans and Lipan, with its giant smokestack that sits up against the mountains and the abandoned train cars out front. They’re all pleasing to the eye and testaments to eras past.
And those are but a sampling of recent favorites. Denver is a city that rewards you for searching, for rifling through its pockets and coming up with loose change. And sometimes when you find that loose change, it’s fun to pelt it into the back of the head of some sass-talking cabbie, and tell him to use it to buy a clue.
