The women who created Gypsy Juice are gypsies no more: They’ve officially opened a neighborhood juicery and vegetarian cafe called The Corner Beet in Capitol Hill.
Just nine months ago, in the Denver area — their organic, were getting rave reviews at places like Root Down and Atticus. Back then, their idea was to expand to a street cart and delivery service. “Our plan was to be peddlers,” said Hazamy. “But then we found this space, and it all fell into place.”
It’s a great addition to the hipster neighborhood at East 14th Avenue and Ogden Street, with a simple but creative vegetarian menu that features fresh, organic produce.
You can stop by for their Gypsy Juices, like Roots of Love carrot-beet-apple juice and Bon Vivant green juice. (On Friday, they served up samples of a juice they’re soon to roll out — a tasty concoction of purple cabbage, ginger, lemon and apple that’s so new it doesn’t yet have a name.)
It’s a comfortable place to hang out, so you can also stay for a meal. For breakfast, there’s a selection of toast with their hand-crafted toppings. The Friday special was vegan pumpkin butter, and their beet butter is always on the menu, along with the farmer-style garlic toast served with hard boiled egg.
Lunch items include soup and $9 sandwiches like The Jam, which is a delicious stack of thinly sliced ripe pear, goat cheese, fig jam and mixed greens. There are also salads, such as the $9 Southwest with black beans, red onion, black olives, avocado and pico de gallo, and the $8 Super Seed, a mix of greens, carrots, cucumber, feta and lots of healthy seeds: sunflower, hemp and pepita.
They’re open Tuesday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p. m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Corner Beet, 1401 Ogden St., 720- 295-4447.
More veggie options
There’s more good news for local vegetarians. Bistro Vendome, owned by James Beard award-winning chef Jennifer Jasinski and Beth Gruitch, has launched a vegetarian tasting menu.
It’s created by chef de cuisine Adam Branz, who got the idea while working with different local farms for .
“I had so much fun pulling vegetables out the ground at the Table Mountain Farms,” he said. “I was just surrounded by them.”
When the idea of a five-course vegetarian menu popped into his head, he embraced the challenge of making vegetables “the star of the show.” The result is a menu that changes each month, emphasizing not just the seasonality of vegetables, but the many subseasons.
Root vegetables are sweetest after the first frost, so they’re on the December menu, along with Brussels sprouts, radishes and turnips. The menu is vegetarian, not vegan, because Branz uses lots of butter and cream in true French style.
One course features parsnips and leeks flavored with orange, garlic and vadouvan, a French-style curry spice. Another spotlights acorn squash, oyster mushrooms and kale with farrotto — spelt berries cooked like risotto — and parmesan. For dessert, sweet-potato beignets are served with crème frâiche caramel and Bastille whiskey.
The vegetarian tasting menu is available Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. The cost is $40 per person, or $65 per person with wine pairings.
Bistro Vendome, 1420 Larimer St., 303-825-3232.
Old West holiday fare
Christmas in the Old West could be just as Dickensian as anywhere else in the Victorian era, with pork roast, plum puddings, mince pies, fruitcake, eggnog and gingerbread, according to the new cookbook “Frontier Fare: Recipes and Lore from the Old West” by Sherry Monahan.
Material for the book, from Globe Pequot Press, is drawn from Monahan’s True West magazine column, and she describes home cooking and hotel cuisine in places like Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West.
Winter holidays meant festive foods, and Victorian fare was particularly popular in the mid- to late 1880s. One woman, a native of England, described a Christmas spread that included tipsy cake, Victoria sandwiches, meringues and dessert.
The cookbook includes an 1860 recipe for eggnog, an 1879 recipe for fruitcake and an 1874 recipe for Victorian sandwiches, which are made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour and jam.
New Year’s Day meant visiting friends and neighbors, and tables were laden with “holiday delicacies and treats,” she writes. Festive menus included oysters in cream, lobster salad, ladyfingers and Roman punch, which was like sorbet, made from Madeira or port wine, brandy, lemon juice, and sugar.
The Brown Palace Hotel, which she calls “the crowning jewel in the West,” featured the potent punch on its menu in 1896.
If all this makes you hungry for a Victorian treat, and make it yourself, or you can visit the special Holiday High Tea at the , which is all decked out, Victorian-style, for Christmas. Tickets are about $25, and there are many time slots available from Dec. 18 to 21. For more information, call 303-832-4092.
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or twitter.com/coconnordp
