Sparrow Flies the Coop

I have mixed feelings over the recent closure of Sparrow at 410 East Seventh Avenue. On the one hand, I was never a big fan of the place — having beaten it down once in a review ("Cry Fowl," March 17, 2005) and then returning for a Second Helping last June that found Sparrow improved, but only enough so that it no longer ranked among my least favorite restaurants in the city.

But on the other hand, it was a restaurant that always tried. It didn't succeed, necessarily, but it was certainly a place that was striving to do better — a compliment I am unable to give to many worse restaurants and many chefs who, unlike Sparrow chef Josh Botsford, seem content to let their houses run on autopilot straight into the ground. Sparrow had high standards and wanted very badly to serve interesting, comforting food in a beautiful, half-casual location. And in that, it was worthy of respect and had earned itself a neighborhood following.

True, the neighbors' standards were not my standards, and their ideas of beauty and comfort were not my ideas of beauty and comfort, but Sparrow did good trade and was much loved by its regulars — until the last Saturday in January, when, quite suddenly, Sparrow put out the lights, locked the doors and just walked away.

This is a location that has swallowed up a lot of big names — everything from Transalpin to JV's the Cork to Sacre Bleu to Sean Yontz's white-tablecloth nuevo Latino experiment Vega. Those restaurants were all killed off by different maladies, and when I got owner Nancy Scruggs on the phone early this week, she told me that what got Sparrow was the oldest story in the business: a battle with the landlord. "It was a personal issue that's been going on for years," she said, and though she was unwilling to discuss specific details, she did say that the bulk of the problems dated from the wicked storms of last winter that put so many of Denver's restaurants in the red.

"That's when the situation went bad," she said. "We thought we might be able to renegotiate and reopen without anyone noticing, but I guess not. We are done at that space."

But the news is not all bad for the Sparrow faithful. Scruggs told me that she and her husband, Mark, and partners Josh and Jen Botsford are all still together and looking for a new space either downtown or in Cherry Creek: something slightly smaller and more easily managed, a place with enough traffic to drive both lunch and dinner service. And there's also the Sparrow Market and Cafe, which opened in the old 7th Avenue Cafe space at 701 Grant Street at the beginning of January and has been doing much better business than even Scruggs expected. "Sales are doubling every week," she told me. "And now that we have all this downtime, we're going to be able to ramp it up."

She'd also been planning to open another Sparrow in the new Landmark development in Greenwood Village, as well as a market — deals that were made before the closure of the Denver Sparrow and all the complications of trying to find it a new home. Now the partners may not go forward with opening another Sparrow Market down south (which the Landmark developers "wanted quick," Scruggs said), but the Landmark Sparrow, which still has at least an eighteen-month lead, is definitely on, according to Scruggs.

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Double play: There's this quote, attributable now to Robin Williams but actually an old chestnut from back in the Tin Pan Alley days.

"Hey, kid. How do you get to the Met?"

"Money. Lots of money."

I like it because it's useful in many circumstances, descriptive of so many situations. And it fits perfectly with the James Beard House in New York, one of those destinations that young chefs dream about. All the big names have had their night there, and because there seem to be more and more "big names" in the United States every year, the Beard House now hosts about 200 dinners a year. This month, for example, it has eighteen dinners scheduled, covering everything from Jason McClure's Sazerac in Seattle to Mark Dommen doing a California farm-to-table dinner to a bunch of guys from Colorado Springs doing (of all things) a lobster degustation.

Provided you don't burn the place to the ground, a Beard dinner is an excellent showcase for your talents and the kind of thing that goes right on the top of the resumé. But it's also a logistical nightmare, a black hole of money (all that travel, the shipping of specialty ingredients — and the food-allowance reimbursement, based on a maximum guest count of 74, never even comes close to covering the cost of the dinner and is traditionally given back as a "donation," anyway) and, at best, a long-shot chance at culinary immortality. Still, Colorado keeps trying.