Little Bites - Big Day! And lots of drinks!

Dixon's Downtown Grill
16th & Wazee
Attendees: Lara, Katie, Ang and Jenny

I got to Dixon's at 8am on January 20, 2009! I knew it was going to be a Big Day! A day I'll never forget! Though parts of it are hazy due to the drinks! I got us a great round booth looking at the TVs over the bar. It was perfect!

Now, I didn't start drinking until 9am when the gals showed up. We started with Bloody Mary's! They were sooooo yummy! Now things started happenin'! We watched all the festivities and toasted often! Second round, not quite as yummy, but they still worked. We ordered the food during the inauguration prayer. Not sure if that is Kosher, but we were hungry! The food was yummy! I remember the hash browns and bacon were crispy (very important). The eggs tasted like eggs; I'm not a huge fan of eggs.

Now the after breakfast drinks:
I remember some Giggle Juice (mimosas), maybe some more Bloody's for some of the gals, and I think Katie had a fancy shot of some sort. It was a wonderful, memorable time! I think I cried a little. I felt pride, relief, joy, hope and giggles! The crowd was loving the moment too! Lots of hootin' and hollerin', clapping, waving good bye to the Bushes, and other signs of glee! That was the second time I had been to Dixon's for brunch, the first being New Years Day. I think Dixon's is a nice place to have brunch. I have never had to wait, the food is good, not great, but good. I've always had great service!

Next Stop: The Pour House
1435 Market St.
Now we are feeling good! Celebrating! We found ourselves at The Pour House, hoping the roof top was open. It was such a beautiful day, in so many ways, we wanted to enjoy it all! The sign said it was open, it was not! So we grabbed a table and switched to beers. Not sure how many during this time, but enough. We had a nice waitress, though she was the only on in there and was quite busy. Some time during our visit we were joined by Pete. This is when the shots appeared. Something yummy....sweet??? Not sure what!

Next Stop: Red Square
1512 Larimer St. #38R

Our final stop! I had a yummy fruity drink suggested by Katie. Don't remember the name of it, but it wasn't too fruity, just right. There might have been some more drinks. Jenny and Ang took the light rail home. Katie, Pete and I had a very meaningful and heavy conversation! I'm sure no one could understand it but us! This is where I departed. My wonderful husband picked me up, took me to Good Times and took me home, where I needed to be. I promptly feel asleep on the couch. This was the best inauguration day I have had, and probably will ever have! :)

Banzai Sushi

In attendance: Jenny, Ang, Caroline, Rhonda & Marie

http://www.100rolls.com/

A few of the girls decided to go to sushi one Friday night. We decided to go to Banzai Sushi located at 6655 Leetsdale Drive Denver, Colorado 80224. Some of the girls had been there before and were excited to try the nitro rolls again. This is going to be a short review of the food unfortunately.

Banzai was one of my favorite sushi joints in Denver until this visit. I must admit I still like their sushi a lot and find their selection of over 100 rolls very interesting. However, their service just plain STINKS. It was indeed a busy Friday night, but I for one felt like we were a bother to the server. Banzai isn’t exactly a $1 sushi joint and for the money, I felt the lack of service made it impossible to enjoy the good rolls that night. We also ordered the Dynamite appetizer and it was overcooked by the time our server actually remembered to bring it to us.

My husband and I used to go to Banzai every few months when we had the Jones for the “Hotshot Roll.” Several times the cute owner of Banzai would even sit at our table with us and ask how our sushi was. It was a delight and this kind of attention rarely happens in the era of the chain restaurant. So personally, when I went with the girls last month I felt ripped off by our server. I don’t like being a negative reviewer. For me to write this the experience was truly bad and this is very hard to write. Banzai, you need new servers and more of them on a Friday night! After all this, I would still recommend trying Banzai because their nitro rolls are excellent. My advice would be to try take out, stopping by a liquor store, and buying a large bottle of sake to take home.

DG Afterhours: The Colfax Prowl #1

Every now and then the dinnergirls have a night where after dinner it just ain't quite time to go home, Thursday was one of those nights!

While heading out of the CityGrille we decided it just wasn't quite time to go home yet so we jay-walked our little butts across Colfax and found ourselves in a cozy booth at the Red Room
(320 E Colfax) where the majority of us decided what we needed was more vodka.

Rhonda and I both ordered the Key Lime Pie Martini...freakin' delicious. Sweet with a tinge of sour and quite creamy, but I think the that kind of foo-foo really needs a edge of sugar on the rim of the glass.

(Real Quick: I like my martinis freakin' ice cold. I really have never met anyone that doesn't. I like my vodka after it has beaten the edges off some ice cubes...maybe that is not how they are supposed to be made but that's how I like them. Every vodka martini I was served this Thursday was not "Siberia" cold, if you know what I mean...call me crazy, but vodka should be "freezing"!!!)

Meanwhile...back at the Red Room...this was after 9pm on a Thursday night and they were not busy at all...but they were slow, slow slow. I think there may have been only one wait gal and my guess is that she was new cause she didn't seem too familiar with what was available and we must have waited for 10 or 15 minutes before our drinks arrived. Needless to say, we decided that it really was not our night to sit and drink expensive drinks, so we departed and headed east down the 'Fax for more casual, less swank...and man, that's just what we found at the Satellite Bar (308 E. Colfax).

Welcome to Punk Rock Happy Hour...this place was exactly the kind of establishment that makes Colfax great. Cheap beer (Man, if you are into that kind of thing...their freakin' canned beer selection is GD unbelievable), reasonably-priced shots, games and a loud stereo.

Jared, the cute bartender that poured our prospective poisons was friendly, attentive and super fun. The music blaring out of the speakers, for one split second, made me feel like, "holy crap, they are so gonna take away my fake ID!" Plus, not only was there a pool table, pinball and video games, but, please, there was a shuffle board table, that, seriously, if I put my hand on it, the sand was probably warm.

The girls settled on a couple of drafts, some slow-sipping shots and a water (that Caroline, so smart!!!) and plopped our butts down at the end of the bar. A few minutes later, Rhonda decided shots were needed and asked Jared if he knew how to make a Butter Baby. It's one of my favorites but being the driver for the evening I declined, which made me a little sad when they arrived because they were unlike any Butter Baby shots I've ever seen! Instead of blending all the ingredients, Jared made them so the heavier cream was sitting atop the clear liquid...they were pur-dy!!!

And that was all she wrote.

We finished our drinks and paid the tab, left our fella with a hefty tip and made our way out to Colfax to hail Lara a cab...which, in all sincerity, I would say was the most fun of the evening!
With that said and wrote, I'm going for this...give me a dive bar over the "it" place any day, cause for this gal, my money was on Jared and his ability to seriously obliterate some ice with The Grey Goose and make me one happy girl, with extra olives to boot!
xo

Grill in the City

City Grille

321 E. Colfax
Denver, CO
Thursday, January 8, 2008
www.citygrille.com

Attendees: Lara, Jen, Caroline, Rhonda & Ang.

I have always wanted to go to City Grille but something always seems to come up or get in the way and even though I have lived here for over 10 years I have never managed to get there. Upon entering I was a little surprised to find an cute little neighborhood joint, right smack in the middle of downtown Denver...just a hop, skip and a jump from the Capitol Building.

Well....for this Dinnergirl I gotta start by saying, I don't really want to be "judgery" but overall I gotta give this Denver landmark...complete with a giant hamburger on the side of the building and a huge banner in front acknowledging their burger prowess, a just above medium and so-so review.

Let me start with the service. I la-la-loved our waiter, Allen. He was awesome, funny, self-deprecating and totally into the whole, The-Bitches-Have-Come-For-Dinner vibe that was going on (especially with me), and I am completely aware that it was a Thursday night, very busy for a neighborhood joint but the gal that seated us and subsequently served us our food was not very friendly or initiating in any way, so much so that I didn't even have a chance to ask her name. As I said, it was a rather busy night in the restaurant and I can totally understand the whole, My-God-I'm-Swamped kinda thing, but ultimately, to me, two second of your time to make sure everything is right and okay really doesn't seem too much to ask.

The girls started out by ordering a round of martinis at the table (except Lara, who went simple and practical with a lager). Since we had varying degrees of "dirty" and olive count Allen, super-smarty and seasoned waiter that he is brought a glass full of olives and a small beaker of olive juice! Brilliant!

I will start by admitting that I did not have the Best Burger according to the Denver Post 2008, so I can't speak to that. I did have a scrumptious bite of Rhonda's Buffalo Burger which I did think was YUM but their claim-to-fame, I did not taste.

I had the Beer Battered Halibut and City Fries. The halibut was cut into small fillets and deep fried to a golden brown perfection. I am a fan of chunky tartar sauce so I was kinda excited about the prospect of said sauce with capers. I love capers. Don't get me wrong, I could taste the capers, salty and interesting, I just couldn't see them and to me the whole thing was kinda masked by the flavor of dill, which I really like but was just not expecting and rather overpowered the tartar just a bit too much. The fish was really good and you do get a lot of it so it was definitely worth the $10, which, for halibut is a bargain.

But I don't know why they make a big deal out of calling them "City Fries" specifically, because, basically they were shoestrings plain and simple. Good, but by no means exceptional.

With all of that said and even so...I would definitely do CityGrille again and I think next time, I'm having the burger!