26 W E S T W O R D F o o d & D r i n k 2 0 2 5 westword.com Food for Thought WESTWORD’S FORMER RESTAURANT CRITIC REFLECTS ON THE DENVER DINING SCENE…PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. BY L AUR A S HUN K Let me begin this refl ection on Denver dining with a moment of silence for the restaurants we’ve lost or are soon to lose, and allow me to eulogize a few of them for what I’ve lost, personally. Fruition, where I wrote my very last review as Westword’s restaurant critic, because I wanted to go out on a high note stuffed with carbonara. Q House, one of the fi rst places I took my firstborn when he started eating solid food because I thought he needed a solid foundational palate of Chinese noodles. Sushi-Rama, the bar by which that fi rst- born still measures all restaurants because so few of the others have conveyor belts. Brider, where I picked up lunch for my team at the Colorado Restaurant Foun- dation during a particularly traumatic event set-up so we could simultaneously laugh and cry into our kale salads. Stoic & Genuine, where I once played hooky so I could spend an afternoon eating two dozen oysters and drinking a full bottle of wine with a friend from China who was in town for less than 24 hours. Live in a city long enough, and you in- evitably see some of your favorite haunts become ghosts. But not so many of them. Not like this. When I became Westword’s food critic fi fteen years ago, restaurant birth notices were much more prominent than obituar- ies. In 2010, Denver was in the early years of a hospitality renaissance. Talented chefs were exploring and innovating, opening restaurants with daring menus and part- nering with beverage masters who built cocktail, beer,and wine programs to match. Denver had long loved to socialize in its food and watering holes, and it was more than game to go out and support these trailblazing entrepreneurs: It cheered gamy offal, hot peppers, bitter liqueurs and sour beers, and asked over and over, what next? What else? Not every dish, cocktail, restaurant worked – but the confl uence of risk-tak- ing paid off. Over the years, that swirl of talent just continued to improve, as young upstarts got the training they needed to make the leap into a new, bold concept of their own, as talent from more established culinary meccas poured in, bringing new perspective, and as peers challenged each other both competitively and collabo- ratively to reach for more. Quickly and surely, this began to forge a food identity for Denver, drawn as much from those kitchens as it was from the community exchange of ideas – of local farmers, world- class producers in beer and spirits, and scions from the communities that had long been engrained here: Vietnamese, Mexican, Ethiopian, and Korean restaura- teurs also began to get their due as diners with expanding palates hungered for more context, more fl avors, more experiences, and the ingredients and fl avors from these restaurants seeped into the broader culi- nary canon. I left Denver in 2012, and when I re- turned in 2016, I had a sense that the city had grown up, gone beyond a rising-star restaurant town to a fi rmly established nationally recognized dining scene. And it still seemed we were only at the begin- ning of something exciting – hundreds of restaurants per year continued to open, many continuing to push the gastronomic bar in Denver to ever greater heights. Contrast that with today, not even ten years later, when we are instead losing hundreds of restaurants per year, including long-time stars that had secured hard-won institutional status. Some of Denver’s most experienced operators are now fl eeing to the ‘burbs, to Texas, to consulting jobs or different industries entirely. Many who are staying are doing so only if they can offl oad risk, aligning with hotels or luxury developments offering a lifeline of tenant improvement allowance and the added benefi t of not having to go it alone through Denver permitting. Offl oading risk speaks to a dampened creative environment. Gone are the factors that made unusual but good ideas blossom and grow – the very root of what created this supreme garden of eating to begin with. What the hell happened? In short, restaurant economics are breaking in Den- Fruition shuttered in January after eighteen years in business. FRUITION continued on page 28
