Its back baby! Four days of chefs, wine, cocktails, and enough delicious temptation to destroy even the most carefully planned eating strategy. Good. Let it.
There is a special kind of delusion involved in arriving at a food and wine festival with a plan. Festivalgoers have studied the lineup, circled the chefs and identified the restaurants they absolutely must hit first. Some may have even promised themselves they’ll pace the wine and drink water between pours like the responsible, hydrated adults they briefly intend to be.
Aww, adorable.
Because somewhere between the first cold splash of Sauvignon Blanc and the smell of something fatty, salty and sizzling nearby, even the most carefully constructed strategy is null and void —and thank God for that.
The Denver Food + Wine Festival isn’t the place for culinary monogamy. It’s four days for festivalgoers to taste recklessly, sip curiously and happily let complete strangers influence what lands on the next plate.
Anyone heading to the festival would be wise to arrive with a massive appetite and wear forgiving pants. Perfume is best left at home—There is wine to smell, after all—and a little room should always be saved for the bite no one knew they wanted. That’s usually where the really good stuff is hiding.
Denver has become almost annoyingly good at feeding people. Just when diners think they’ve caught up, another chef opens something, another bartender hands over a drink containing an ingredient previously thought to belong in a garden, and another little restaurant starts serving something so damn good it begins making regular appearances in their dreams.
The Denver Food + Wine Festival packs a glorious chunk of Colorado’s culinary talent into four delicious days, culminating on Saturday with the Grand Tasting at the Tivoli Quad. More than 50 restaurants join an impressive lineup of wine, spirits and cocktails, transforming the afternoon into one enormous edible adventure where restraint becomes highly overrated.
Dinner requires a commitment, while a tasting simply asks guests whether they want a bite. Of course they want a bite.
One bite might be rich and fatty, while the next brings enough acid to wake the tongue right back up. Something smoky comes off the grill, something cool and delicate follows, and then someone hands over something fried. Just like that, any sensible eating plan brought through the festival gates is officially obsolete.
The best festival bites aren’t simply miniature versions of restaurant entrées. They’re their own delicious little creatures, and a great one can tell an entire story in just two bites: crunch against something creamy, smoke cut by acid, spicy chiles softened by sweetness, or a gloriously fatty piece of meat rescued from becoming too much of a good thing by something sharp and pickled.
And please let there be sauce. Not three decorative dots requiring forensic equipment to locate, but the kind of sauce that has diners looking around before seriously considering whether licking the plate in public would actually damage their reputations.
Food lovers have standards; they just become remarkably flexible when sauce is involved.
Festival cooking is also far more difficult than those adorable little plates make it look. A chef may have only two bites to make a lasting impression, which means flavor has to arrive quickly but without smacking diners in the face. Crunch actually has to remain crunchy, hot food should preferably still resemble hot food by the time it reaches its destination, and everything has to work while guests stand in the Colorado sunshine balancing a plate, a wineglass and whatever dignity they have left.
Tiny food isn’t necessarily simple food. Done well, it becomes a chef’s edible calling card—a chance to say, this is who I am. Sometimes, two bites are all it takes.
A diner may not be looking for this particular restaurant, may not recognize the chef and may almost walk right past the table. Then comes the first bite, followed by a sudden stop. Well, shit. Just like that, there’s somewhere new to eat. This is how it happens.
There are four days to get into trouble. Saturday may be the big show, but Denver Food + Wine offers several days to work up to that level of culinary irresponsibility, beginning with some rather civilized wine glasses.
Even the most respectable wine drinkers have occasionally consumed perfectly good wine from deeply questionable vessels, including coffee mugs, plastic cups and, under certain circumstances, a bottle with a really long straw.
The wine survived, and presumably, so did everyone else.
Still, the Riedel Wine Glass Seminar, Wednesday, August 26 from 6 to 7 p.m., is designed to demonstrate how the vessel holding the wine can actually change the way it tastes.
Sommelier Shelley Sale of Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits will lead guests through a sensory tasting using Riedel glassware to explore how the shape of a glass can influence the perception of what’s inside it. Same wine, different glass, potential existential crisis.
If the Cabernet suddenly tastes significantly better because it has been poured into the wrong glass all these years, there may be questions. Fortunately, there will be wine available while these matters are pondered.
And the location is worth noting, because nobody wants to spend cocktail hour wandering around the Auraria Campus in search of Cabernet: MSU Denver’s Hospitality Learning Center, 1190 Auraria Parkway, second floor.
This is the sophisticated evening of the festival. Guests should enjoy it while they can, because the following night, dinner comes from trucks.
By Thursday, the stemware lesson is over and it’s time to get down and dirty.
The Shake + Brake Showdown, August 27 from 6 to 9 p.m. at Tivoli Quad, puts food trucks and bartenders into friendly competition for People’s Choice honors. That gives guests some very important responsibilities: they must eat, they must drink and they must judge.
It’s exhausting work, but somebody has to do it.
When a taco is properly overloaded, a sandwich is dripping down a wrist or something fried arrives so blisteringly hot that guests resort to that ridiculous open-mouth breathing maneuver because waiting 30 seconds was apparently impossible, things are heading in exactly the right direction.
The cocktail half of Shake + Brake gets even more interesting because the drinks have to keep pace with food coming at the palate with salt, fat, smoke, spice and char.
A cocktail that leans too sweet can quickly become exhausting; too boozy, and suddenly the taco tastes like tequila. But when the bartenders nail the balance—bright citrus against fried food, bitterness cutting through richness or bubbles sweeping the palate clean—the drink stops being something merely served alongside the food. It makes the next bite even better.
Guests taste, compare, and occasionally return for a little verification. The voting is serious business, and anyone who finds themselves fiercely campaigning for a food truck they discovered 20 minutes earlier can consider it official: they have found their people.
Friday slows the pace with Dine Out, the festival’s culinary auction series featuring dining experiences, tastings, classes, trips and other food-and-drink adventures, with many taking place August 28 and others scheduled for future dates.
This year’s auction comes with some serious temptation. A Quattro Piatti experience for two at Frasca Food and Wine is among the offerings, while another evening begins with oysters and a welcome drink at Traveling Mercies before moving on to a three-course chef’s tasting at Annette. Xiquita and Lucina are also part of the August 28 lineup, giving bidders even more delicious reasons to clear their Friday-night calendars.
The future-date offerings aren’t exactly suffering, either. One experience takes four guests inside Beckon’s private Sommelier Salon for a seasonal tasting menu, curated beverage pairings and time with the people behind the food and wine.
Then there’s Champagne Tiger’s Great American Bubbles and French Fry Festival. Champagne and French fries. Thirteen kinds of fries, dipping sauces, grower Champagne and caviar.
At that point, does anything else really need to be said?
That’s precisely what makes the Dine Out segment of DF&W so interesting. Bidders aren’t simply competing for dinner reservations; they’re bidding on experiences that give chefs, restaurants and wine professionals room to stretch out, play a little and offer something guests probably wouldn’t encounter on an ordinary Friday night.
A festival bite is the elevator pitch. Dinner gets the whole sentence.
At a tasting, flavors need to introduce themselves quickly. At dinner, a chef has the luxury of whispering an entire culinary love story into a guest’s ear, and there is something truly special about that.
Something delicate gets to remain delicate. A broth can taste as though it took three days because maybe the damn thing did. A sauce can arrive glossy, reduced and exactly where it belongs on the plate. A thoughtful wine pairing can send diners back to a dish they just tasted, only to discover something they somehow missed the first time.
Those little moments are why food lovers keep coming back to the table.
A great plate shouldn’t taste exactly the same from first bite to last. It should move and change as it’s eaten, revealing details diners may not have noticed the first time around. And if dessert manages to sneak something salty into all that sweetness, a beautiful friendship may be inevitable.
After two nights of sipping, swirling, grazing and pretending those small portions don’t add up, Dine Out offers another particularly seductive luxury: a chair.
Never underestimate the sex appeal of a chair on day three of a food festival.
Then Saturday arrives, and the Grand Tasting takes over Tivoli Quad, bringing together more than 50 Colorado restaurants alongside hundreds of wines, spirits and cocktails.
Three or four hours may sound like plenty of time until guests walk in and suddenly find food everywhere. Wine is being poured, cocktails are being shaken and already-beloved restaurants compete for attention alongside places diners have been meaning to try and others they’ve never heard of.
Suddenly, three hours feels like speed dating with snacks.
The first rule is simple: pacing matters. Small plates should never be confused with small amounts of food. It’s the same logic that suggests seven tapas somehow don’t constitute dinner. They do, and 30 tasting portions most certainly do.
Rather than inhaling everything during the first lap, diners should actually taste what’s on the plate. Notice the crunch and temperature. Pay attention when something rich gets hit with exactly enough acid to demand another bite, or to that delicious moment when the chile pepper heat finally shows up.
If something is spectacular, diners should stop walking for ten damn seconds. There will always be another booth, but great food deserves some attention. Give it a moment, appreciate it properly, then move along because, yes, there is still more food.
Eventually, even the most enthusiastic palate is going to get tired. This is not weakness. This is butter.
After enough meat, cheese, fried things, creamy things and things lovingly glazed in other delicious things, taste buds are bound to get a little sleepy. That’s the moment to find some acid: citrus, pickles, vinegar, bubbles, something bitter or perhaps something green that has managed to escape being covered in cheese.
Once the palate has been properly reset, a return to the pork belly is entirely reasonable. This is palate cleansing, after all, not surrender.
And the weird things shouldn’t be dismissed. Some of the most memorable dishes are the ones that raise questions—the bite that brings fermentation, smoke or char, or something spicy or sweet where savory was expected. Even an ingredient a diner has spent 20 years insisting they hate deserves one more chance to prove them gloriously wrong.
At the Grand Tasting, there is one strategy even more valuable than pacing: curiosity.
The most rewarding guests tend to ask questions. They talk to chefs about what’s on the plate, find out what’s hiding in the sauce, ask bartenders what they’re pouring and have absolutely no problem stopping a stranger carrying something gorgeous to find out where the hell it came from.
Listening can be just as useful. Food lovers make very specific noises when something is good: the quiet mmm, the surprised oh, the considerably more serious ohhh and, perhaps most telling of all, complete silence.
Silence is the reaction worth investigating. When two people who haven’t stopped talking for the last 15 minutes suddenly go quiet because they’re chewing, whatever is on their plates deserves immediate attention.
This is how the temporary culinary gossip network works.
Someone mentions the thing over there. Nobody knows exactly what it is, only that it’s crispy and there’s some kind of sauce.
That’s usually enough information to warrant further investigation.
Half the fun of a food festival is taking restaurant recommendations from complete strangers whose names may never be known but whose opinions are somehow completely trustworthy because they have sauce on their shirts.
The People Behind the Plates
Eventually, even the most dedicated diner should put down the fork for a minute.
Underneath all that delicious chaos—the clinking glasses, hot pans, sweating chefs, rattling cocktail shakers and approximately 4,000 cocktail napkins—is an industry made entirely of people. Feeding others for a living is hard, exhausting, beautiful and occasionally ridiculous work, and much of it happens while everyone else is busy having fun.
Restaurant professionals work through birthdays, anniversaries, promotions and first dates, along with the spectacularly bad last dates. They feed people through celebrations and heartbreak, and sometimes simply because it’s Tuesday and the thought of cooking dinner is absolutely unbearable.
Guests should absolutely come hungry. They should drink the wine, try another cocktail, and make room for one more bite, knowing that underneath all that deliciousness is something genuinely worthwhile.
For four days, eating and drinking exceptionally well helps support some of the people who have spent their careers feeding everyone else.
That deserves a toast. There was probably going to be one anyway, but now there’s a better reason.
Denver Food + Wine will bring together restaurants diners already love, chefs whose names they recognize and wines they already know they enjoy. Familiar favorites deserve a visit, a hello and absolutely another splash in the glass. But spending the entire festival eating and drinking only what is already familiar would miss half the fun.
After all, the best bite of the weekend might be the one nobody saw coming.
The Denver Food + Wine Festival benefits the Colorado Restaurant Foundation, the nonprofit philanthropic arm of the Colorado Restaurant Association. As Colorado’s largest restaurant-industry fundraiser, the festival helps support the people working behind the scenes of the state’s hospitality community.
The Foundation supports Colorado ProStart, scholarships, professional training and ServSafe certifications, while its Angel Relief Fund provides emergency assistance and mental-health-care grants to Colorado restaurant, foodservice and hospitality workers facing unexpected hardship.
Behind every beautiful plate, perfectly timed pour and packed dining room are people who spend their careers taking care of others. Denver Food + Wine gives diners a particularly delicious opportunity to return the favor.
Guests should seek out the booth surrounded by three strangers making involuntary happy noises and immediately find out what they’re eating. Somewhere among those 50-plus restaurants could be the bite that ruins every other bite for the rest of the afternoon—and that’s exactly the kind of delicious trouble the Grand Tasting is built for.
A diner stops, takes a bite and then stops all over again.
Maybe crunch comes first, followed by salt and something gloriously rich and fatty. Acid cuts through at exactly the right moment before a little heat begins creeping across the back of the tongue. Suddenly, the fork is frozen midair and remembering anything beyond that bite—including a name—seems wildly unnecessary.
A diner looks down at the plate, then over at whoever happens to be standing nearby, and asks the inevitable question: “That looks amazing. What is it?”
There it is. That’s the bite—not the dish that was already expected to impress, but the one nobody knew existed. It’s the chef whose name suddenly needs to be remembered, the restaurant being Googled before anyone has even left Tivoli Quad, the discovery that gets talked about on the drive home and the bite still lingering in someone’s thoughts Monday morning.
Perhaps that dish will eventually be ordered at the restaurant, or maybe that exact version will never be tasted again. That’s part of the beauty of it. Right now, nobody knows what that bite will be. The chef may not even have decided yet.
The best bite of the weekend? There’s only one delicious way to find out.
Photos courtesy of Denver Food & Wine Festival
