Editor’s note: Each week in Staff Favorites, we offer our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems).
That’s how I got acquainted with Becherovka, a Czech liqueur I tried while visiting Prague and Brno in 2019. It’s become one of my favorites to pair with autumn weather. First introduced in 1807, Becherovka is a secret blend of 20 herbs and spices that was originally sought out and lauded for its medicinal benefits. The recipe is said to have remained the same since its inception.
Locals in the Czech Republic drink Becherovka straight as a shot, allowing the spicy character with notes of clove, cinnamon and star anise to envelope the senses. Upon first taste, it’s tempting to liken the pungent liqueur to Rumple Mintz or Fireball, but those are lazy comparisons. Though it’s more bitter, Becherovka is also far more delightful to imbibe, particularly as a digestif or nightcap and especially this time of year since the flavor is reminiscent of the holidays.
The bottle of Becherovka stays in my freezer and I usually sip it chilled in a miniature piece of stemware, but bartenders in the Czech Republic and beyond use it in cocktails. Black Angel’s, one of Prague’s best mixology bars, features Becherovka in a James Bond-inspired martini with vodka, Lillet Blanc and peach bitters, among other recipes.
Closer to home, Restaurant Olivia in Denver just added a fall Negroni featuring the liqueur to its menu. Made with The Family Jones’ gin, sweet and dry vermouth, house-made huckleberry bitters, spiced orange bitters and Becherovka, co-owner Austin Carson describes the cocktail as a spirit-forward negroni that finishes with fall flavors.
Carson said he likes to use Becherovka as a “seasoning” element because of its strong character, and he touted its versatility. He suggested adding it to a classic Sidecar or Cosmopolitan for extra spice.
“It’s a little higher-proof, it’s herbal forward with fun autumnal spices,” he said. “Especially after dinner, it’s a wonderful digestif. Enjoy this in lieu of your favorite amaro or grappa. It’s a fun way to finish the dining experience.”
Look for Becherovka’s signature green bottle at bars and liquor stores around Colorado.
The peak of fall colors has arrived in Colorado’s central mountains with spectacular colors in abundance, but you might want to get up there as soon as you can if you want to see fall foliage in all its glory.
Some mountain-dwellers fear that a cold snap bringing precipitation to the state this week may cut the show short for two reasons. They say cold temperatures and moisture seem to speed up the evolution of color changes, and wind could knock off some of the leaves that have already changed.
For now, though, it’s gorgeous up there. At this time last week, folks in Aspen were saying the color change had just started, but now it’s on in full.
“We are seeing aspen in peak,” said Aspen resident Ruthie Brown. “It’s been a very quick transition and they have all of a sudden exploded into colors everywhere — reds, yellows. It’s beautiful. It happened very quickly, once the nights got cold. That really affects how quickly they change. And then moisture on top of that really makes a difference.”
Just over 20 miles to the south, Crested Butte is seeing the same.
“This week is it,” said Emma Coburn, an Olympic track athlete who grew up there. “They are peak, perfect.”
The aspen are turning near Marshall Pass, about 15 miles southwest of Salida. This photo was taken Sept. 27. (Provided by Melissa McLean Jory)
Kyle Groen, a Gypsum resident who spends a lot of time working in the Vail Valley, described a walk he took Monday near Eagle as “breathtaking.” Beaver Creek on Sunday, he added, “was aglow with yellow aspens” while the cottonwoods along the Eagle River were turning.
Up in Rocky Mountain National Park, where locals say the change came late this year, the show now seems close to a crescendo even though some of the aspens are still green.
“It’s very, very close to peak,” said Estes Park Trolleys co-owner Brandon McGowen, who runs tours in the park. “There are some brilliant reds, oranges and yellows right now, everywhere you look, but some trees are still holding onto green and haven’t dropped anything. I’d say it’s about close to prime. Maybe by the weekend. I would imagine once that cold snap hits, it’s really going to flip, the stuff that’s still green is going to change immediately. Some of the reds that have been out for about a week might even start dropping.”
With peak colors moving from north to south, the change is well under way in the Salida area, 80 miles south of Interstate 70. Local resident Melissa McLean Jory went for a mountain bike ride Monday in the Marshall Pass area and said the foliage was “spectacular,” even though the peak hasn’t arrived there yet.
“It’s not full-on yet — there’s still patches of aspens that really haven’t changed — but there are some dramatic gold colors,” McLean said. “It was just gorgeous.”
McLean is especially appreciative for this year’s color show because last year’s left something to be desired.
“This seems like a normal year,” McLean said. “Last year we had snow, September 8 and 9, and we just didn’t have a good fall like this. So this is just glorious.”
And even though the peak hasn’t arrived, McLean said this may be the best week for leaf-peeping trips there.
“There were sections driving up the road Monday where some of the leaves were blowing off, but then there’d be completely green aspen trees next to them,” McLean said. “I think the next few days, with our weather changing, may accelerate it a bit. I think two weeks is too long. I think it’s going to happen fast.”
House prices in Denver continued their hot streak in July, hitting an all-time high for year-over-year gains, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller home price index reported Tuesday.
Denver’s home price index increase of 21.3% made it one of seven U.S. cities to record their highest-ever 12-month gains. The other cities were New York, Boston, Charlotte, Cleveland, Dallas and Seattle, according to the index.
Overall, the West was sizzling. Phoenix, San Diego, and Seattle had the highest year-over-year gains among 20 cities. Phoenix led with 32.4%; San Diego was second with 27.8%; and Seattle was third at 25.5%.
“July 2021 is the fourth consecutive month in which the growth rate of housing prices set a record,” Craig J. Lazzara, managing director and global head of index investment strategy at S&P DJI, said in a statement.
The national price increase of 19.7% from July 2020 was the highest annual gain in more than 30 years, Lazzara said. It also marked the 14th consecutive month of accelerating prices.
In Denver, house prices rose 1.8% from June to July. The seasonally adjusted monthly gain in the national index was 1.5%.
“We have previously suggested that the strength in the U.S. housing market is being driven in part by a reaction to the COVID pandemic, as potential buyers move from urban apartments to suburban homes. July’s data are consistent with this hypothesis,” Lazzara said.
On the rental side of housing, the trend remains on an upward trajectory, too. Rents rose 2.7% in Denver from August to September, according to a monthly survey by Apartment List, an online marketplace. Rents jumped 16.5% from the same period a year ago.
The median rent in Denver is $1,501 for a one-bedroom apartment and $1,839 for a two-bedroom unit, compared to the national average of $1,275. September was the eighth-straight month that rents went up after a decline in January.
Statewide, rents were 17.2% higher than in September 2020, Apartment List said. Rents have increased across the metro area. The fastest growth has been in Parker, where rents rose 22.1% from the previous year.
The metro-area city with the most expensive rents is Lone Tree. The median rent for a two-bedroom residence there is $2,482. Arvada has the lowest median rent in the metro area at $1,653 for two bedrooms.
Demolition is underway on the large warehouse building at 2900 Brighton Blvd. in RiNo, resulting in a pile of rubble that extends for a full block.
A large apartment complex is part of what will eventually replace it, development plans indicate.
The property, directly across from the Industry Denver coworking space, has been owned since 2017 by Santa Monica, California-based Mass Equities and AECOM Capital. They paid $38 million that year for the 2900 and 3060 Brighton Blvd. parcels — about 8 acres in all.
The two firms renovated the existing building at 3060 Brighton Blvd. and landed VF Corp. as a tenant before selling that property for $37.6 million around the start of this year.
The 2900 Brighton Blvd. parcel had 93,736 building square feet on it prior to demolition, according to property records. It is zoned for up to eight stories.
Courtesy of Google Maps
The warehouse at the site, shown before demolition began, stretched for a full block and was flush against the sidewalk.
Houston-based developer Hanover Co. is looking to build an apartment complex on part of the site. The latest version of the company’s site development plan, submitted to the city in August, calls for a seven-story, 390-unit complex. It would have about 8,600 square feet of retail space and 530 parking spaces, the plans show.
The complex would be built on 3.3 acres, according to the plans, leaving room for additional development on the parcel.
Mass Equities Principal Brian Bair told BusinessDen in an email Monday that the company is still evaluating options for the northern portion of the parcel.
Hanover didn’t respond to a Monday request for comment. The company does not currently own any complexes in Colorado, according to its website, but has previously developed here. Its projects include Acoma at 816 Acoma St. in the Golden Triangle, completed in the late 2000s.
And RiNo isn’t the only local neighborhood of interest for Hanover. The company paid $9.5 million in late December for a 2.47-acre site at the corner of Jewell Avenue and Acoma Street in Overland. The city has approved development plans for a five-story, 278-unit apartment complex there, records show.
Recipes are stories and, so, they have tales to tell. About a set of ingredients transformed into a new thing, surely, but also about their time and place, about the level of skill of their cook, even about the cook’s ideals.
But because recipes are stories, they also are fact — or fiction. In one way, every recipe is a fact; it’s there, simply. But is a “Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad” a “Caesar Salad?” No, it’s a fiction, because the fact of a true “Caesar Salad,” at its origin, as it began, didn’t sport any grilled chicken. (Or, for that matter, anchovy, garlic, Dijon mustard, or small croutons or many other possible ingredients that a typical, contemporary, so-called Caesar salad might contain.)
This is the hobgoblin of “authenticity,” a notorious determinant for any recipe.
Cesare Cardini, an Italian immigrant to the United States, who lived in San Diego but also ran a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, was said, by his daughter Rosa Cardini, to have invented the Caesar Salad on the Fourth of July 1924 by cobbling together merely seven ingredients: whole leaves of romaine lettuce, a raw egg yolk, Italian olive oil, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, Worcestershire sauce and lime juice. And a round slice of baguette, nicely toasted.
Apparently, Rosa’s father did not appreciate whole anchovies and considered the amount of anchovy (in essence, the level of umami) in Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce to suffice. All the other stuff — the garlic, etcetera — came afterward and at the hands of others, including his brother, Alex, who also laid claim to the “authentic” Caesar salad.
And so it goes with the origins — and, to say it another way, the authenticity — of recipes.
And when more than one source lays claim to the beginnings?
Along a 60-mile stretch of the Canal du Midi in southwestern France, three towns boast theirs as the authentic cassoulet. But Castelnaudry’s original recipe insists on lingot beans and a piece of ham added to the universally-included various cuts of pork, whereas Carcassonne’s adds a shank of lamb and a partridge (though updated from its original, neither) and Toulouse’s insists on its famed sausage as well as tarbais, never lingot, beans.
So which is “the” authentic cassoulet?
In Nice, writes the great food historian Waverly Root in his classic “The Food of France,” the salade nicoise “is innocent of lettuce … and must contain tomatoes, cut into wedges (not slices) … and should contain nothing cooked, with the possible exception of hard-boiled egg, not often permitted in Nice itself.
“Outside of Nice (and as close as Paris itself), the salade nicoise often sports green beans and potatoes, both cooked,” writes Root, “though a purist would regard either of these, especially the latter, with horror.”
And where’s the tuna?
“The Nicois [a person or persons from Nice, France] often combine anchovies and tuna fish in the same salad,” allows former Nice mayor Jacques Médecin in his book “Cuisine Nicoise,” although, he adds, “traditionally this was never done, tuna fish being very expensive and reserved for special occasions, so the cheaper anchovies filled the bill.” (Root does not even mention tuna fish as a possibility.)
In any case, in France, even today, the tuna would rarely, if ever, be a grilled plank of sushi-grade tuna with a cold center. It would “authentically” be canned tuna in olive oil. So, again, it goes.
As for the authentic recipe for our beloved green chile (chile verde)?
“It’s not canonical,” points out Mark Antonation, Communication Manager for the Colorado Restaurant Association and former food and drink editor for Westword. “It varies from town to town and region to region and changes all the time. Probably the only original ingredient is the chile itself,” which everyone agrees gives it its surname, “green” or “verde.”
In Mexico, Antonation notes, “they will use a combination of poblano and jalapeño, along with tomatillos,” but in New Mexico, “Hatch chiles, no thickeners and no or few tomatoes,” and in Colorado, “jalapeño and Pueblo chiles, tomatoes and thickeners such as masa or cornstarch or potatoes,” all these latter very much looked down the nose by New Mexicans who consider, Antonation says, “chile verde as the state dish.”
Bill St. John, Special to The Denver Post
The seven ingredients of the original Caesar Salad: whole leaves of romaine lettuce, a raw egg yolk, Italian olive oil, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, Worcestershire sauce, lime juice and a toasted round of baguette. (Bill St. John, Special to The Denver Post)
The Original Caesar Salad
By Cesare Cardini, July 4, 1924, at Hotel Caesar, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico; measurements from various sources. Serves 2.
Ingredients
1 head romaine lettuce, outer leaves discarded and separated into individual leaves
Using a large open bowl (wooden, if you have one), add the lime juice, the egg yolk and the Worcestershire sauce and whisk or emulsify with a wooden spoon or spatula. Grind in the black pepper and mix in.
Slowly add the olive oil while emulsifying further and then 1 tablespoon of the cheese. Mix well. Add the romaine leaves longways and gently roll them over each other so that they gather up as much of the dressing as they can.
Plate the salad onto 2 chilled plates, the romaine leaves spine-side up and topped with the toasted baguette slice. Sprinkle the remaining 1 tablespoon of grated cheese over the plated salads and croutons.
Note: To coddle an egg, bring a small pot of water to a rapid boil. Meanwhile, have ready an ice water bath in a bowl in the sink. Carefully lower the egg into the boiling water and precisely time exactly 1 minute when the water begins simmering again (almost immediately). Remove the egg to the ice water and let it cool well, 3-4 minutes, stirring gently. Crack the egg at its fat end and allow the liquid-y white to drain away, saving the yolk in the palm of your hand or on a large spoon for making the Caesar salad dressing.
