We had spent much of the day skiing at Eldora Mountain Resort, just 40 minutes up a canyon from Boulder, and we were starved. It would not surprise me if prisoners would turn up their noses at the “food” offered, expensively, at the ski resort. Yet we weren’t sure our stomachs could hold out until we reached home.
So it was Nederland, the little stoner town maybe five minutes from the slopes. Nederland has a Nepalese place. Nederland has pizza. Nederland has German food and a hamburger joint or two, and it has a grub-serving coffeeshop. But we’d also seen Wild Mountain Smokehouse & Brewery, on the town’s miniature main drag. So after we’d schlepped all 4,957 pounds of ski gear across the parking lot and into our freshly muddied minivan, we pointed the vehicle downhill and didn’t hesitate. Beer and smoked meat — and in my wife, Annie’s, case, smoked tofu — it would be.
My expectations didn’t exactly soar.
Good barbecue is tough enough to find along the Front Range, never mind a little town with a healthy appetite for desperate and indiscriminate tourists. I imagined roasted or even (gasp) boiled meat drenched in saccharine barbecue sauce. I considered the possibility of meat smoked somewhere else, in an enormous meat-processing factory in a suburb of Omaha, from which tourist traps from coast to coast trumpeting “barbecue” (along with “fudge”) receive weekly shipments of flesh sealed in plastic and ready for the ol’ microwave.
Bless you, Wild Mountain. Your beer is very good. Your barbecue . . . well, let us say it greatly exceeded my expectations.
Let us begin with the brisket. Tender? Aye, extremely, and walking that fine line between weak smoke and hickory-saturated, too. And sliced thin. My daughters scarfed it up like wolves.
The pulled pork, piled atop a bowl of smoky beans, was tender but slightly chewy, with hints of charred meat for crunch. With the ribs, I felt like a sawmill: Log-shaped things were entering my maw, teeth were moving at great speeds, and with each log, all that was left after a few moments was a hard plank.
As for the tofu, I know some of you are snickering. But it was some fine tofu.
The chicken, however, was dry and not especially flavorful. The garlic mashed potatoes were too garlicky — I tasted what at least seemed like garlic powder more than minced cloves.
But the duds were minor irritants. One thing is for sure: The meal beat a plate of costly and fluorescent orange “nachos” up at the resort.
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
Wild Mountain Smokehouse & Brewery
Barbecue, microbrews and sandwiches
70 E. First St., Nederland, 303-258-9453, Monday-Thursday 6 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 6 a.m.-10 p.m.
Front burner: Excellent barbecue, great microbrews, nice patio for when it’s warm.
Back burner: Not very roomy, especially when it’s too cold for the patio.
Encore on Colfax
Perhaps the most charming feature of Encore, East Colfax Avenue’s newest upscale restaurant, is the piano bar up front. Grab a stool and sip your predinner martini to the strains of pop standards, then settle into the dining room for supper. Singing along optional. 2550 E. Colfax Ave., 303-355-1112. Tucker Shaw
