Restaurant Week Promotes Experimentation Among Chefs, Customers
DENVER (CBS4)- Denver Restaurant Week is 10 days of good food and fun at more than 240 Denver metro area restaurants. It's the perfect time for both chefs and customers to experiment with new cuisines.
"This is our second restaurant week," said Linda Hampsten Fox, the owner & chef at The Bindery, in Denver's LoHi neighborhood.
Hampsten Fox has worked up a menu that reflects The Bindery's everyday cuisine, with a few surprises added in.
"This year it's a beet and goat cheese ravioli, really nice. We have a lot of vegetarians and also vegan guests, we try to accommodate everyone," Hampsten Fox told CBS4.
The pasta is made fresh daily, and guests can watch it being made. Linda wants diners to feel a part of the cooking experience.
"The design, too, is meant to be that you're like in a workshop," she explained.
When she crafted her first Restaurant Week menu last year, she hoped to draw in some new foodies.
"We really played our hits. We really wanted people to know the dishes that people were really loving," Hampsten Fox said.
"The rabbit rarebit was phenomenal. It just blew my mind," said Savannah Long, a Restaurant Week enthusiast.
Long became a fan of The Bindery after trying during last year's Restaurant Week. It was part of a bigger strategy for her.
"We went to eight restaurants out of 10 nights," she told CBS4.
Long even has a color-coded chart to track which restaurants she's going to with which friends.
"I picked a list of restaurants that I'd never been to before and weeded out the ones that weren't as interesting or had too much lettuce on their menu, because I wanted to try new things. Then I sent the list to friends and I was like, 'If someone wants to go with me, pick a date, pick a place.' And it went really well," Long explained.
It went so well that Savannah has been back to The Bindery several times, making it one of her go-to restaurants all year long.