Sixteen James Beard Award semifinalists and two winners. Two restaurants in Bon Appetit’s Hot 10 with four in the top 50. A Food & Wine best new chef and even a “Top Chef” — over the past two years, the Denver and larger Colorado dining scene has started to look more like a padded resume than a gradually growing spread of talented cooks and restaurants.
“First of all, it’s pretty exciting that Denver restaurants are winning enough awards that it’s worth writing this article,” Craig Lieberman, a local restaurateur, told The Denver Post when asked about the city’s dining accolades.
Lieberman is co-owner of two Denver restaurants, Beckon and Call. The latter skyrocketed to national fame in 2018 when it was named in the country, while Beckon made the same publication’s top 50 list a year later. Shortly after, Call closed for remodeling to accommodate the success with more capacity.
But Beckon and Call are just two of Colorado’s big winners in recent awards seasons. have been given in as many months, starting with the season of “Top Chef” that took place around the Centennial State, in which Denver chef Carrie Baird made it as far as the final four; and ending most recently with local restaurant The Wolf’s Tailor,
If millennials are the generation ruined by participation trophies, 21st Century dining establishments will be the ones most changed by awards. Upon winning, a restaurant’s entire business model could be altered, its chefs pushed to impress as diners’ expectations are inflated before even setting foot in the restaurant.
“Our business really did change from that point on,” Lieberman said of Bon Appetit’s award. “And certainly the recognition for Call helped to create momentum and excitement for Beckon from day one.” He likened the second restaurant’s anticipation to a big studio movie premiere: “From the person behind the Hot 10 restaurant Call comes … Beckon!”
And with that build-up came an equally immense amount of pressure.
It’s no wonder the James Beard Foundation Awards, which started back in 1991, have become known as the Oscars of food. Beard Award winners — both individuals and restaurants — quickly rise to celebrity status.
“People always (say), it’s good and bad,” Kelly Whitaker, owner of The Wolf’s Tailor, said of gaining national recognition. “But for us, it was 100% good. It’s got to be good on good,” he reiterated.
The thing about winning awards, and about writing articles like this about awards: it all gives restaurants compound exposure. While this can be difficult to quantify, Whitaker said that following Bon Appetit’s announcement, his Everything that was bookable was booked,” he said. “It was super heavy.”
On the second night after the win, Whitaker was in the kitchen — usually head chefs Kodi Simkins and Sean May are cooking — and after 30 minutes open, he had fielded order tickets for around 40 chef’s tasting menus in the 50-seat restaurant.
“All the things that we had time to think about (before) were gone,” Whitaker said.
His team had about a year before then to dial into what Whitaker calls a “50-60% experimental” menu, where they work with their own milled flours to make extruded pastas and keep long-running fermentation projects going in the kitchen.
But by the time the award came and the masses followed, Whitaker said he and his staff took a week to recalibrate — to figure out things like new purveyors for ingredients that needed to increase in volume, and to rework an expediting system in order to get the food out to tables faster. All this while running a top-10 best new restaurant in the nation. Can you taste the irony?
“You do a thousand little things, like every chef building a restaurant, and you hope that some combination of those gets some sort of recognition,” Whitaker said. “With restaurant margins being what they are, you hope and pray for something like this to happen.”
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At Call, the effects were swift and similar, according to Lieberman. “That’s when things just got out of control,” he said of making Bon Appetit’s Hot 10 list. “We did three or four times as much business for the first month or two after (winning), and it just affected us completely in terms of labor (and ingredients). Our team did an incredible job of really just managing chaos.”
Managing chaos is one thing; managing expectations is another. At the time that Call hit the national spotlight, the business was operating like the quaint daytime cafe and evening snack spot it was meant to be.
Then, all of a sudden, “people would come from out of town and specifically drive to Call from the airport, or make it a part of their weekend plans,” Lieberman said. When visitors arrived, maybe they knew what to expect or maybe they had just seen Call’s name on a list and added it to their itineraries.
“Wait, that’s all you do?” Lieberman said were some of the guests’ responses. “We finally get this national recognition, national love, and it’s probably the worst week of reviews we’ve ever had,” he explained, laughing. “It’s just hard to maintain that level of service when your business has tripled or quadrupled every night.”
“It’s one of those nice problems to have to deal with,” he added.
Long before Denver came on the national radar as a foodie destination, local chef Jennifer Jasinski was pushing for this moment, steadily, from the time she arrived in town two decades ago.
“I moved here in 2000 just seeing how LA, New York, Chicago and San Francisco got a lot of national attention and thinking Denver doesn’t get any national attention with our restaurants,” she said. “But it’s not a flyover city, it’s not a stopover city. We just had to fight for it. It’s just something I was fighting for the whole time, since I got to Denver, to be honest.”
In 2004, Jasinski opened Rioja, with its Spanish wine list, handmade pasta and wood-oven pizza. “Rioja is this culmination of everything I dreamed of and what I wanted to be, and it still really is,” she said. Although it wasn’t until 2013 that she Award for Best Chef Southwest for her work there.
“I’m not like the hot young thing right now, you know?” Jasinski said, laughing. “Even in 2013, we’d been open since 2004, so, yeah, it felt good.”
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While the award certainly gave Rioja a bump in clientele, it didn’t sustain the business for six more years afterward. “It opens up lots of doors,” she added. “It doesn’t pay the bills. To be honest, your local people, your regulars, that’s who pays the bills. Maybe they know you won a James Beard (Award), maybe they don’t.”
Jasinski lives in a two-chef household with her husband, Denver restaurateur Max MacKissock. And she said they have experienced highs and lows throughout years of nominations, awards and dead-ends thereof together.
“You get popular, then you get… I don’t know, it’s hard,” she said. “The whole artist part of it is so sensitive. It just hurts our feelings so bad, we put everything into this plate, and if somebody doesn’t like it… .”
And in recent years, whether for artistic freedom, or disagreements with the process and concerns over a lack of diversity within the system, some . Or from pressure and resulting combustion.
But Whitaker says he’ll savor this recognition while it lasts, and use it as a platform, until it inevitably comes off the shelf, to be handed to the next almost-ready recipient.
“Because we try to stick to the script and hold on as long as we can to that fail line, or even way past the fail line in cases of certain restaurants,” he said. “You know, we’ll hold on to that for the idea that this thing is needed and (it’s) better, and that we love it and enjoy it and hope other people see it like Bon Appetit or James Beard have.”
What’s next for Denver’s award-winning restaurants
should reopen at 2845 Larimer St. by March or April, according to Lieberman, after a redesign that includes more seating, and an adjusted format that will make it “a little bit closer to the ,” he said.
The Wolf’s Tailor, 4058 Tejon St., still offers its family-style tasting menu for $55 per person, as well as a la carte options. The restaurant is open on Tuesday evenings as of this month, and you can check for upcoming events and collaboration dinners. Whitaker has also opened two more restaurants since The Wolf’s Tailor: Dry Storage in Boulder and Bruto at Denver’s Dairy Block.
Jennifer Jasinski’s Rioja, 1431 Larimer St., is celebrating its 15th anniversary with ($95 or $135 per person) in the new year, from January to February. Jasinski will also open her latest restaurant project in June at the remodeled Denver Art Museum.