Breakfast
Kyle’s Kitchen
Small, cozy and friendly, Kyle’s Kitchen has one of Denver’s very best classic diner breakfasts: Eggs sunny side up, crispy bacon, crunchy hash browns, bracing hot coffee.
On the side, of course, is perhaps the most important ingredient of all: the people from the neighborhood.
And what a lovely, pleasantly populated neighborhood this stretch of Tennyson Street this is.
You’re as likely to sit next to a couple of pre-shift (or post-shift) cops as any of the shop proprietors from the busy block. Young mothers with stroller-bound babies share space with tie-clad BlackBerry-punching professionals. Older couples in matching shoes watch it all go by, nursing bottomless cups of coffee.
Come a little bit later in the day if you’re up for a BLT and a coke; but be sure to arrive before 2 p.m., when the joint shuts down for the day.
Kyle’s Kitchen: 4018 Tennyson St., 303-477-5625
Lunch
Rocky Mountain Diner
Downtown at lunchtime can be a confounding landscape for cubicle-dwellers; restaurants seem to aim too high for budget-conscious workers (The Palm, Panzano) or aim disappointingly low (Subway, Cheesecake Factory).
Which is why the Rocky Mountain Diner, in the thick of it all on 18th and Stout streets, is such an asset.
Prices aren’t mind-blowingly cheap, but most lunch entrees are under or around 10 bucks, including a textbook open-faced hot turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy. A side of coleslaw is your nod to the salad police.
And here’s something special: blue plate specials. What becomes a diner more?
There’s also an excellent whiskey list, divided into bourbon, scotch, Canadian, Irish and, naturally, Cactus Whiskey — a.k.a. tequila.
Rocky Mountain Diner: 800 18th St., 303-293-8383,
Dinner
Breakfast King
It’ll seem counterintuitive to eat dinner at a place called Breakfast King, but two bites into your chicken-fried steak you’ll have better things to think about.
This textbook roadside chow- palace, with its vinyl booths and wisecracking waitresses, would be kitsch if it weren’t so totally real. And in a world of glitzy, prefab “diner” chains blaring doo-wop from neon jukeboxes, realness really shows.
Despite its location at the busy corner of Santa Fe and Mississippi, Breakfast King has the soul of a country diner, not an urban one — biscuits and gravy seem more endemic to the place than Reuben sandwiches. Oversized portions, no-nonsense preparations — this is rib-sticking food with no pretense of preciousness, and that’s just how we like it.
And if your favorite time to eat dinner is 3 a.m., you’re in luck: BK is open 2 4/7.
Breakfast King: 300 W. Mississippi Ave., 303-733-0795
