Best BBQ 2007 | Cabin Creek Smokehouse BBQ | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best BBQ

Cabin Creek Smokehouse BBQ

Courtesy Cabin Creek Smokehouse Facebook
The standard barbecue offerings at Cabin Creek are excellent: the ribs stiff and smoked all the way to the bone with a surface like shellacked hardwood; the pork juicy, fatty, tender and woody-sweet, turned electric with the addition of a great Carolina mustard-and-vinegar sauce. But what elevates this spot above all other barbecue joints is the rest of the menu. The kitchen does open-faced barbecue sandwiches and barbecue po' boys. It does green chile shot with barbecued pork, cowboy chili made molasses-sweet, and red-chile-spiked baked beans hit with a handful of pulled pork or shredded brisket. The crew also rolls a terrific barbecue burrito, wrapping spicy beans and pork in a tortilla and smothering it with green chile, cheese and sour cream. And then there's the ultimate in barbecue-junkie midnight hangover food: the BBQ masher, a bowl of mashed red-skin potatoes topped with pulled pork or brisket, topped again with cheese and again with sour cream. There hasn't been anything done better with barbecue since the first pork sandwich with pickles was invented.

Best BBQ Sandwich

Sam Taylor's Bar-B-Que

The worst thing about barbecue is waiting for it. And the worst thing about wet barbecue is that it can't be eaten while driving. Well, not without seriously compromising the resale value of your ride. Thus, the very worst thing about Sam Taylor's barbecue -- which comes slathered in a thick, sticky, gloss-black sauce, a Tennessee-meets-K.C. riff that packs both heat and sweet -- is that it's done wet, which means the only thing to do when you're buying a whole lot of barbecue to go is to top off your order with a "poke sammich" -- a pork sandwich done on a grilled roll with enough structural integrity that you can eat it one-handed in traffic.

Best BBQ Pork

Yazoo BBQ Company

Cassandra Kotnik
When Yazoo owner Don Hines says he's doing Deep South barbecue, he's not kidding. He's from Mississippi, and it shows when he smokes. His meat cooks low and slow -- twelve hours -- over a combination of hickory and pecan wood, with only a strong dry rub to keep it company. As his website advises, "All Yazoo meat items can fend for themselves in taste, but we will let you add different barbecue sauces." That always kills us -- "let you," as if the pit man needs to grant permission before anyone can fuck up his own supper. But Don's right: Straight from the smoker, Yazoo's meat -- and in particular, the pork shoulder, powerfully flavored by sweet pecan and hickory smoke -- is so good that absolutely nothing else is required.

Best Asian BBQ

Pacific Ocean International Market

Barbecue isn't an exclusively American passion. Far beyond the traditions of this country's pit masters, there's a world full of ropa vieja, churrasco and smoky roasted pig head that drives us just as wild as that perfect shredded pork butt redolent of hickory and slapped with a brush of sweet-hot K.C. mop. To us, barbecue is a global sensation, a borderless pleasure that has the same meaning in Guangdong Province as it does in Greenville. And when we're in need of a fix of international barbecue, we head straight for the counter at Pacific Ocean. Here, Chinese barbecued pork -- along with trotters, pig's heads and all the other carnivorous Asian ephemera -- is laid out in huge slabs and orders measured either in pounds or the space between two fingers, then taken home and sliced or shredded for shameless midnight consumption.

Best BBQ From a
Drive-Thru

Jim 'n Nick's

Hunter Stevens
What's better than barbecue? That's right: fast barbecue. While Jim 'n Nick's has all the trappings of a traditional barbecue restaurant -- tables, menus, waiters and such -- what makes it special is the drive-thru. Not only can you order off the entire menu here, but service is lightning-quick, and the real wood smokers fill every car with the smell of good old-fashioned brick-pit barbecue.

Best Potato Chips

Govnr's Park

In thirty years, you learn to do some things right. And Govnr's Park, which marked its thirtieth anniversary last summer, does potato chips very, very right: sliced thin, freshly fried, salted and served on greasy waxed paper.

Best French Fries

Via

Since chef James Mazzio took over the kitchen at Via, a lot of things have improved. The biggest improvement? Definitely the fries, which are now so good they'd be impossible to improve on. Served in a tall paper cone stuck inside a cool wrought-iron holder, in both presentation and taste these are reminiscent of the award winners that Mazzio served at the late, lamented Triana. They're cut thin, fried just right, hit with a little sugar and a little spice mix, then served with a side of excellent housemade horseradish cream sauce. Fries don't get any better than this.

Best Fried Chicken

Castle Cafe

Courtesy Castle Cafe Facebook
This is great chicken, slow-cooked chicken, tender and greasy chicken sheathed in a crisp armor of salt-and-peppered batter, a one-off of the incomparable Kansas City style practiced by places like Stroud's and a hundred and one less well-known fry joints and chicken shacks. It's also chicken that can take more than forty minutes to arrive, because every bird that's ordered at Castle Cafe is split in half, hand-floured and cooked to order in a shallow pan by a guy whose only job is to watch those chickens and turn each piece at just the right moment to make sure each one is perfect. You know what? We love that guy. And the wait is totally worth it.

Best Taste of Southern Hospitality

Joseph's Southern Food

Fried chicken is not really meant to be eaten in a dining room. It's meant to be eaten around the family dinner table, or sitting on a splintery picnic bench in the sun, or standing on the front porch watching the sun go down. At Joseph's Southern Food, you have no real choice but to take your chicken on the run, since every mess of breasts, legs and thighs is fried in the pot to order and then bagged up to go. But that process takes twenty minutes or so, which leaves you time to order up some sides, peruse the old-fashioned candies and fountain sodas on display in the front room of the old house where Joseph's is located, then have yourself an entire picnic packed for the park.

Best Chicken-Fried Steak

Reiver's

A makeover, a change of staff, and suddenly this old watering hole has become a real restaurant, where you'll find the best chicken-fried steak in the city. Over the years, the kitchen crew at Reiver's has gone through some serious ups and downs, but the joint is definitely back on top now, with a renovated dining room and a passion for giving the regulars what they want. Lucky for us, the loyalists seem very fond of chicken-fried steak made Reiver's style, with a milk-soaked and pounded steak wrapped in prosciutto, breaded Southern style in crushed Saltine crackers, then fried and served over a mound of mashed potatoes and under a nap of thick chicken gravy.

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