The kale-and-apple salad was one of the dishes that landed Denver’s Acorn restaurant a spot on OpenTable’s dining awards list. (The Denver Post, Cyrus McCrimmon)
Five Colorado restaurants, including Acorn in Denver and Black Cat in Boulder, have won OpenTable’s Diners Choice Awards.
The awards honor the Top 100 Fit for Foodies Restaurants in America, with the list generated from more than 5 million restaurant reviews collected from verified OpenTable diners between Sept. 1, 2013, and Aug. 31. .
The criteria, according to OpenTable, the restaurant reservation site, was restaurants that boasted “unique menus, easygoing ambience, and passionate chefs who have a ‘source local, cook global’ approach.”
The three other Colorado restaurants making the cut were Bistro C.V. and Laundry in Steamboat Springs, and Django’s Restaurant & Wine Bar in Crested Butte.
Granted, given that the list was put together from OpenTable reviews, there’s some skewing. Considering the criteria, it’s surprising that area farm-to-table restaurants such as Fruition in Denver, The Kitchen Denver and The Kitchen Boulder didn’t make the cut. And while chef-owner Eric Skokan’s Black Cat garnered enough votes for the list, his restaurant Bramble & Hare, equally committed to that ethos, did not.
And for that matter, Husk in Charleston, S.C., where chef-owner Sean Brock is an absolute national hero in the farm-to-table movement, was unaccountably left off the list even though the restaurant is a perennial James Beard Award winner/nominee.
Anyway, hats off to the restaurants.
