The biggest biscuits of them all at Denver Biscuit Company
Once just a run-of-the-mill watering hole on a gentrifying stretch of East Colfax, the Atomic Cowboy (3237 E. Colfax Ave., 303-377-7900) is slowly turning into a boozy food court. First, Fat Sully’s took over a corner of the cavernous bar to hawk delightfully greasy New York-style pizza. Then, in late 2009, the Denver Biscuit Company quietly nestled into the back.
Its menu is based on flaky, buttery, Southern-style biscuits. Delicate, soft, golden—lovely for nibbling and perfect with a dab of honey. Denbisco, as it calls itself for short, is currently only open for breakfast at the Atomic, which is good news for brunch-hounds and other daytime drinkers. (It is planning to hit the road soon, though, with a tricked-out “Biscuit Bus,” jumping on the trend for freshly made, mobile food.)
Tucked away inside the rowdy Atomic, a bar known to blast metal and pour rivers of beer, the cute little biscuit shop seemed like it’d be ritually set on fire after about a week—that is, until you actually get a good look at the biscuits. Denbisco isn’t baking petite lumps of crumbly loveliness; it’s putting together mammoth hunks of butter and flour, made in-house with your choice of whatever badass thing you want to do to them.
Starving? Get a biscuit sandwich made with a patty of Angus beef in the middle. Or douse one of the bastards in chicken pot pie filling to make a giant-sized version of chicken and dumplings. Even just getting a plain old biscuit with a side of honey butter is a hefty, alcohol-absorbent meal.
The Ellsworth sandwich is perhaps the most quintessential of Denbisco’s offerings, a burly biscuit with fried chicken in the middle. The chicken is generously slathered with grainy mustard and topped with a couple slices of spicy, homemade pickle. It’s impossible to eat the thing in a traditional sandwich fashion; with fillings added, the massive biscuit becomes a tower of food. It’s easier to just take the top off the sandwich and eat the rest with knife and fork, taking occasional bites of the top biscuit-half for the smooth, butter-drenched flavor.
These biscuits aren’t mint-julep, porch-sitting, ladies-fainting Southern. They’re red-eyed, drunk, and mean-looking Southern, like a biker dude at a Skynyrd show—a biker dude who just wants to hug everyone around him.
