I suspect that Wheat Ridge has as good a claim as anywhere in the Denver area for having the best food. Aurora may have a wider range of international cuisines, and Capitol Hill may produce fancier plates, but for good, old-fashioned fill-er-up meals packed with honesty and soul, it’s hard to beat Wheat Ridge.
Given the deep Italian roots in this part of town, it makes sense that the residents of these streets know how to eat and how to cook.
As evidence: Vincenza’s Italian Bakery and Deli on West 44th Avenue, where you’ll find killer eggplant Parmigiano.
Vinnola’s Italian on West 38th Avenue, which slays me with its Italian sausage sandwich.
Abrusci’s on Youngfield Street, around the corner from Applejack, where the spicy linguine with clams rules.
And Valente’s on West 38th, with an excellent patio and a supercool staff.
But my favorite of the bunch may just be Dolce Sicilia Bakery, located in a strip mall just down from a casket shop and a Polish butcher at West 32nd Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard.
To be fair, Dolce Sicilia is more a bakery with a few tables than a full-blown restaurant. There’s no table service, no pasta plates, no wine or beer. It’s not even open for dinner. Just a counter serving breakfast, lunch and bakery items during the day. Most of the business is takeout.
But the food is spectacular. Especially the cookies (more on those later).
For breakfast, Dolce Sicilia serves bagels (go figure) loaded up with things like eggs, provolone and sausage, or capers and artichoke hearts. Aggressive flavors for first thing in the morning, but unquestionably satisfying.
Also for breakfast, almond biscotti, which are sweet and nutty but crunchy enough to require a cup of coffee for dipping. Luckily, there’s freshly brewed Italian-roast coffee on the premises. (Espresso and cappuccino too.)
For lunch, they’ll grill you a hot, crusty panino, filling it with sausage, meatballs, spinach or any of a number of other fillings. Each one is pressed fresh.
Or they’ll heat you up a slice of pizza, or better yet, a wedge of calzone, available with a range of fillings from sausage to spinach. These 2-foot-long monsters are wrapped in a soft, doughy, yeast-rich shell and baked each morning alongside the breads, then sliced into individual portions and served with a scoop of Dolce’s gently piquant tomato sauce. Get there early for the best slices (from the middle), which are all that plus a bag of chips.
No, really. At Dolce Sicilia they throw in a bag of chips for free.
All of Dolce Sicilia’s lunches can be warmed and eaten on site, or taken home. (Tip: Buy yourself a pizza stone, which you should be able to get for less than $40 at most cooking supply stores. It will last forever, and nothing reheats pizza or calzones better. Using a stone helps balance out your oven temperature, and also helps crisp the crusts.)
But savory stuff notwithstanding, cookies are what Dolce Sicilia does best.
After all, dolce, in Italian, means sweet, gentle, soft. And there’s no better way to describe the cookies that come out of Dolce Sicilia’s oven.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t made an entire meal out of a box of these cookies. In fact, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t made several meals over the last few weeks out of several boxes.
If I had to choose my favorite from the dozen or so options in the bakery case, I’d make an unlikely choice. I’d choose the chocolate brownie cookies.
Unlikely, because I’m not much of a chocoholic. Usually, I go for whatever’s butteriest, not whatever’s chocolatiest. But these soft, rich, deep, dark, sugar-dusted bombs of choco-manna made my eyes roll back in my head the first time I had them, and I’ve been chasing (and capturing) that dragon ever since, two or four or six at a time.
(If you get a box of assorted cookies at Dolce Sicilia to take home for friends or family, get a few extra of these chocolate brownie cookies and hoard them in a separate bag for yourself. Insurance.)
Also worth taking home by the boxful are the delicate pinoli (pine nut) cookies – flourless, merenguelike, almond-paste cookies covered in pine nuts. The first one I had melted immediately on contact with my tongue, taking me straight back to the old country – not to Italy, but to the neighborhood Italian bakery I used to live around the corner from, Rocco’s on Bleecker Street in lower Manhattan.
Dolce Sicilia also makes another version of this cookie, with pecans instead of pine nuts. It’s equally delicious.
Fans of straight-up butter cookies (of which I am one) are well provided for at Dolce Sicilia, especially by the so-called “Sicilian” cookies, small, crumbly cookies that look dry as a bone but leave your fingers shining with butter.
Scoring major points for prettiness are the tiny, jewel-like farfallette, or fruit-filled bow cookies, glistening with berry or apricot. Also lovely to look at are the mezzaluna, or half-moon cookies.
Three bucks scores you a crowd-pleasing, raspberry-apple puff pastry twist, dusted in powdered sugar – a light, fruity dessert that, gently warmed in the oven and served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, makes an easy wow-factor finish to whatever you’re making for dinner at home.
Dolce’s tiramisu is colorful, generously portioned and sweet, but I’m still looking for Denver’s best tiramisu. I say stick to the cookies.
The cookies, and the cannoli.
Dolce Sicilia’s cannoli, tube-
shaped deep-fried pastry shells that are piped full of whipped ricotta and flecked with chocolate or pistachio, carry a sweet-
spicy crunch that cuts through the sugariness of the filling.
Handle them with care: When I dropped a box of six cannoli on the floor, all six smashed into smithereens. At first, I was upset – I’d cracked all the cannoli. But all the debris remained in the box, so I dumped it into a bowl and grabbed a spoon.
Cannoli pudding. Nothing wrong with that.
Dolce Sicilia also puts forth a fresh, flavorful ciabatta, and several other breads. When you go in for a loaf, buy two; the ciabatta you don’t eat today will make great toast tomorrow, and even better bruschetta the day after.
Don’t come to Dolce Sicilia looking for supper. They close at 6 p.m. But if you have a lunch hour to fill, or an afternoon to kill, you’d be hard-pressed to find an easier place to hang out. My only wish is that they’d stay open later in the evening, so I could score some chocolate brownie cookies after supper at Vincenza’s.
I’ve never been to Dolce Sicilia when there hasn’t been a tableful of people, often a family, who look like they’ve been chilling there for a while, enjoying cookies and coffee and chatting with a member of the superfriendly staff, rarely in English. The lilting sounds of spoken Italian and the low hum of the corner television (which has become increasingly loud over the past few weeks, thanks to the World Cup) are Dolce Sicilia’s soundtrack.
And what a dolce soundtrack it is.
Dining critic Tucker Shaw can be reached at 303-820-1958 or at dining@denverpost.com.
Dolce Sicilia Bakery Italian Bakery
3210 Wadsworth Blvd., Wheat Ridge; 303-233-3755
**|Very good
Atmosphere: Tiny strip-mall bakery with counter service and a few tables.
Service: No table service, but the folks behind the counter are friendly, knowledgeable and indulgent of those of us who chronically mispronounce words like farfallette.
Wine: Fuggetaboutit. No wine, no beer. Have a coffee.
Plates: Cookies, $12 a pound. Calzones, $5.50.
Hours: 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday, 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Closed Sunday.
Details: Parking lot in front. Great bread. Wheelchair accessible. Kids will love it.
Six visits.
Our star system:
****: Exceptional
***: Great
**: Very good
*: Good
No stars: Needs work
