In the Highlands, where Tejon Street and 30th Avenue meet, fluorescent white tubes illuminate the word Linger, overlooking downtown Denver, back east across the South Platte River. Linger, a restaurant opened last year by New York transplant Justin Cucci, resurrected the old Olinger Mortuary as an “eatuary” in this “it” neighbourhood.
But it’s Monday night, just before the winter solstice, and Linger is closed, so I turn up Tejon to the corner of 32nd, where brick-fronted Williams & Graham booksellers deals in liquid wares. Opened in November, the speakeasy-style bar is revealed by a secret door in the shelving of the cubbyhole-size “bookseller.”
Inside, it is dark and woody, with a high tin ceiling, shelves piled with bottles containing tinctures of all descriptions, and nary a book in sight. It’s a small temple to the art of booze. A very fine local buzz comes from the $8 South Park Cocktail, made with yellow chartreuse, fresh mint, lemon juice, agave nectar, angostura bitters and, the key ingredient, Leopold Bros. gin, distilled in Denver in small batches, hand-bottled, -labelled and -numbered since 2002.
A few heart-warmers in, the tab settled, we move onward a couple more blocks to 33rd and Osage to Root Down, Mr. Cucci’s first Denver restaurant opened in an old gas station in 2008 (in the maw of the global recession). Built with reclaimed and recycled materials, serving largely local food, Root Down is packed with diners enjoying salads of radish and Medjool dates, hoison duck confit sliders and other tasty morsels.
This is Denver. The Mile-High City, long considered a town to traverse with barely a blink on the way from the airport to the mountains, is vibrant and well worth exploring. Mr. Cucci’s arrival is emblematic of the city’s revival.
A Greenwich Village native (his grandparents ran the Waverly Inn for half a century before it became an “it” spot co-owned by Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter), Mr. Cucci moved to Key West, Fla., to open and run family restaurants before relocating to Denver. He liked the feeling here, seeing potential and diversity where others saw only meat and potatoes, in this city of two million nestled against the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
“Like New York, I loved that there was a lot of ethnicity here,” says Mr. Cucci, 43. “There's a very large Mexican community, there's a large Thai community, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Restaurant-wise, there was a lot of great ethnic food, which immediately is something, as a New Yorker, you crave. The other thing I loved about it – I had a daughter by this point in time – I loved that you could be in the city and then a half-hour later be in the Rocky Mountains. I loved that it was that close.”
Politicians, business owners and residents alike have worked to create a lively scene within the town limits, starting with Larimer Square on the edge of downtown, near the hockey arena and football stadium. On a Sunday night after a Broncos game, the many restaurants and bars are packed. Civic boosters like to note that Denver ranks as one of the most walkable cities in the U.S., alongside San Francisco and Boston. And, they point out, it's not all about beer, spirits and snow: The Denver Art Museum hosts the only U.S. stop of an Yves Saint Laurent retrospective, which opens in late March. The museum's expansive view of art also brings the cleverly titled Read My Pins exhibit in April, a surprising and thought-provoking collection of more than 200 pins worn by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
Beer, however, is big here.
At Williams & Graham, at Cucci's Root Down, and pretty much everywhere else, the drinks flow, with support coming from the highest echelons of power in the state. Governor John Hickenlooper arrived in Denver in the early 1980s with a master's degree in geology, but after the mid-eighties crash he left the oil business and led a group in creating Colorado's first brewpub. In 1988, Wynkoop Brewing Company opened its doors, quickly becoming a key player in the revitalization of LoDo – Lower Downtown (and remaining, to this day, a go-to spot). It helped to launch the microbrew revolution, a significant achievement in a state that brought the world Coors Light.
