Join the Club

I like community-oriented restaurants, places that hang their existence on serving one specific subset of society but also gladly welcome others from outside the targeted demographic — seeing them as so much gravy. Hamburger Mary's, the gay-themed burger joint transplanted from San Francisco is one of these, but so are neighborhood restaurants that, by dint of excellent service, exemplary kitchen crews and powerful word of mouth, start attracting customers from far outside the hood. Fruition (1313 East Sixth Avenue) is such a neighborhood restaurant; so is Frasca (1738 Pearl Street in Boulder).

The guys behind Swimclub 32 (3628 West 32nd Avenue) had wanted their small-plates/sake bar concept to be a neighborhood restaurant, but it quickly grew into a destination and special-occasion restaurant — bringing in crowds from Boulder, from Highlands Ranch and elsewhere. When this finally became too much to bear, they decided to close Swimclub and reopen it as a pizza place (as discussed in a June 24 Cafe Society post), harking back to owner Chris Golub's days as a pie man in Philly. Look for the reconcepted Swimclub to open later this month.

Denver has a lot of highly specific ethnic restaurants that were opened solely to serve their community — Ghanaian house restaurants, little Eastern European markets and strange spots all around Russian Plaza on Leetsdale. I've been to Japanese restaurants in my own neighborhood where I couldn't get served at the bar, Korean joints where the servers looked at me with guarded suspicion until it became apparent that I really was there to eat the kimchi and bulgogi and crab soup, a dozen different places where I might not have been the owner's idea of the customer he was expecting, but where I was warmly welcomed and generously fed and (in many cases) educated along the way by the folks for whom the restaurant was opened — the immigrants, the families, the lonely people looking for nothing more than memories triggered by a taste of home.

There are bars out there for bikers, diners built for the long-haul trade, fine French bistros meant to attract guys like me with a yen for snails and goose liver and champagne. And, of course, a vast panoply of crappy chain and fast-food restaurants meant to serve the dim, the rushed, the dead of palate, and those who, as yet, simply don't know any better.

I complain a lot about the fact that Denver has never come up with a solidly cook-centric, late-night joint for guys in the industry — a place where an exhausted grillardin can collapse at the end of a long night's service, pour a few beers down his neck, eat a little something and get weird without fear of intervention by civilians or law enforcement. As much as a cook can get by just fine with a couple of drinks at the bar on the corner and a cheeseburger at the Breakfast King early Saturday morning, what he really wants and needs is a place made for him, filled with fellow travelers and with a really killer juke. The hippies and alternative-fuel fans have the Mercury Cafe (2199 California Street). Vegetarians have WaterCourse, still open behind the scrim of construction at 837 East 17th Avenue, and hipster sprout devotees have City, O' City, in the old home of WaterCourse, at 210 East 13th Avenue. Although Izakaya Den (1518 South Pearl Street) is nice for chefs and there are many cooks who've done terrible things at Dixons (1610 16th Street) over the years, this town still needs a joint like the Irish bar I remember from home — a place with New York punk and rockabilly in the Wurlitzer, its own crowd of dedicated sluts and drug dealers, drink specials for industry brats, and nothing but white jackets and house livery as far as you could see at midnight.

Just like Denver's same-sex crowds needed a place like Mary's. What's more, Mary's may end up being a sort of de facto industry hangout on some nights, because just as the industry could not operate without its armies of Mexican line cooks, Cuban bakers, Filipino runners and Vietnamese prep specialists, neither could it survive a night without its aspiring actors on the floor, its lesbian bartenders (whom I used to fall for with alarming and tragic frequency back in the day), gay captains, stylish floormen and French service teams full of johnson enthusiasts. Frankly, if a place like Mary's makes these folks happy, we need to open a hundred more of them immediately — as many spaces hung with pictures of Audrey Hepburn, serving brunch and blasting S&M-era Madonna tunes as we currently have D.F. and Michoacán-style taquerías — in vain hope of attracting more gays to Denver. Christ knows the service in this town could use the help.