12 MARCH 12-18, 2026 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | One for the Books NOW SERVING: FOUR DECADES OF RACINES HISTORY AT THE DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY. BY TEAGUE BOHLEN If yours was one of the many families or groups of friends that regularly patronized Racines, a classic restaurant that became one of the many COVID-related losses in 2020, some- one in your clan probably swore by the Nutty Cheese Salad. It was a popular dish, if sort of weird, but weird in that way people sometimes loved, and miss: a base of romaine and fi eld greens, shredded fontina and white cheddar, grape tomatoes, slices of banana, sunfl ower seeds, cashews, almonds and some crunchy puffed wheat, all under a custom, sweetish- vinaigrette dressing. It was one of those things Denver diners loved...or laughed at. “I did not love that salad,” laughs Lee Goodfriend, one of the founders of Racines, along with the also now-defunct Good- friends and Dixons. “But my partner David Racine, he loved it. He was the one who put the bananas on it, which is something I don’t personally want on my salad. But he did, and other people did, too. We’re all different, I guess, right?” The Nutty Cheese Salad is one of the many Racines dishes that lovers of Mile High cuisine will be able to remember, courtesy of memorabilia that Goodfriend donated to the Denver Public Library: menus, drink lists, Westword Best of Denver awards, reviews and more than a few signed photos from celebrities. Goodfriend says she has more stuff, but she didn’t want to overwhelm the DPL archivists all at once. But the DPL archivists were defi nitely interested in getting it. “This donation en- ables us to provide interesting and valuable historical information to our researchers who visit from across the country and around the world,” says Archives Access Supervisor Laura Ruttum Senturia in February letter confi rming that Goodfriend’s “stuff” was now available to the public. “The collec- tion is likely to be particularly popular with Denverites who enjoyed the restaurants over many years,” she added. After all, those restaurants are part of Denver lore, and represent an era during which Denver was undergoing fundamental changes, evolving from a one-horse town to one where Blucifer could welcome almost 85 million travelers to the Mile High City in 2025. In 1979, Goodfriend and Racine were both 29 years old and working at Zach’s, Denver’s original fern bar – she was a server “back when we were called waitresses,” she says, and he was a bartender – when they decided to open Goodfriends. They “hadn’t a pot to pee in, as they say,” according to Goodfriend, but found some investors, including Dixon Staples, a chef at Apple Tree Shanty (which in 1986 would win Best Apple Pie in the third annual Westword Best of Denver), and the trio leased a building on East Colfax Avenue at 18 percent interest. “It was originally the Pick-a-Rib BBQ House,” Goodfriend says, “and then it became the Band Box Lounge,” a nationally-recognized venue that hosted the likes of Charlie Venture, Gene Rains, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and more throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. “Then it became a series of strip joints.” They only came to that location because a neighborhood group had protested a res- taurant going in at 12th and Madison, their initial choice. “I saw an article in the paper about them closing The Factory strip club,” recalls Goodfriend. “I called the owner, who was part of the original family that owned the Pick-a-Rib, and she leased it to us.” Some of that history adorned the walls of Good- friends, old Rocky Mountain News clippings about the businesses that had inhabited the building in years past; they, too, have found their way to the Denver Public Library. Goodfriend says she modeled that fi rst restaurant on a Chicago burger joint named Hackney’s. “They were known for these half-pound hamburgers on black bread, with amazing fries and this brick of fried onion,” she says. “My family would go there often. So I thought I could do that, too, casual food from scratch. That sounds so stupid today, because everything’s like farm-to-table, but back then we were still at the tail end of a lot of industrial, crappy food, and Denver restaurants were either kind of fancy or little coffee shops. I saw the niche. “And Denver was a lot more wide-open then,” Goodfriend adds. “Things were cheaper, getting things done was easier. It was nothing like it is today. I was so young and naive that it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t make a go of it. That wasn’t CAFE FIND MORE FOOD & DRINK COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/RESTAURANTS The original Racines opened in 1983 on Bannock Street. Dixon Staples, Lee Goodfriend and David Racine at an early holiday party; their new Racines opened in 2004 at 650 Sherman Street and closed in March 2020. PHOTO COURTESY LEE GOODFRIEND PHOTO COURTESY LEE GOODFRIEND L ARRY L ASZLO
