Category Archives: places

Bento Zanmai in Boulder hits the ramen spot

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Bento Zanmai in Boulder serves wonderful, rich ramen.

OK, I can stop whining. I’ve been on a ramen hunt for a couple of months. But I’ve finally sated my jones, with a trip top Bento Zanmai on the Hill in Boulder.

Unlike Los Angeles, where a row of ramen shops take up most of a block along Little Tokyo, and San Francisco’s Japantown, which has a several stellar restaurants that specialize in ramen, Denver is a ramen-lover’s desert island. We’re stranded in a place with no ramen in sight, and we’re left holding an empty bowl and a pair of chopsticks.

I overstate our condition. We used to go to Oshima Ramen, but it’s not as good as it was when it opened a decade ago. Plus, their ramen is pricey.

We’ve heard about a couple of Japanese restaurants north of Denver that apparently serve ramen, but we just don’t feel like driving that far. We’ll make the trip someday.

But when we were dining at one of our favorite restaurants, Amu, in Boulder (we live close to Boulder, so it’s not so far), we were talking with the owner, Nao-san, and we groused that he should serve ramen. He said, quite nonchalantly, that he was already serving ramen. Conversation at the izakaya‘s bar, where he was making up people’s tapas-like orders, came to a silent halt. The 10 people at the bar asked, in unison, “You make ramen? Why didn’t you say so?”

He explained that the ramen was available at his new restaurant, Bento Zanmai, at 13th and College in Boulder’s University Hill neighborhood. He warned that the ramen was only available from 3 to 6 pm — weird hours — but I was ready. I wanted ramen.
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A Taste of Tokyo on Colfax Ave.: Taki’s Restaurant

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Special ramen at Taki

I’m having leftovers for lunch as I type. Really good leftovers: ramen from Taki’s Restaurant, an inventive, unique and funky dive of a Japanese joint on E. Colfax Avenue and Pennsylvania in downtown Denver’s Capitol Hill district. It a block from the state Capitol, and three blocks from my office.

Ramen is relatively new to Taki’s. The restaurant usually serves udon, the thick Japanese noodle, or soba, the thin but brittle Japanese buckwheat noodle. The owner, Hisashi “Brian” Takimoto, who usually just goes by “Taki,” (I call him “Taki-san” out of respect but he’s too unassuming to think he deserves an honorofic and seem embarrassed by it, just began buying fresh-made and packaged ramen noodles from a company in California, and now offers it as an option.

We’ve been in an unrequited ramen mood for weeks. We’d heard that a new spinoff in Boulder of the great Amu (our current fave Japanese restaurant and itself a spinoff of Sushi Zanmai next door) called Bento Zanmai on the University Hill served ramen during certain hours. But we tried twice to go there and the place was closed. I checked a short list of area Japanese restaurants that serve ramen, and the only two candidates I found were in Longmont, a small town northeast of Boulder. The one place in the area thar’s known for noodles, Oshima Ramen in southeast Denver, had fallen off our list over the years for being expensive, less tasty than when it opened over a decade ago, and recently, kinda dirty (never mind Westword’s surpisingly naive rave “Best of Denver 2008” award).

Hisashi Takimoto has operated his restaurant for 20 years.We’ll make it to Bento Zanmai someday — they serve ramen only from 3-6 pm weekdays, and from 11am-3 pm Saturdays (they close at 3 on Saturdays!) — but for now, I’ve been so desperate I made a package of instant ramen at home one night last week. It actually hit the spot.

So when we decided at stop at Taki’s for a bite the other night after attending a reception hosted by the Consul-General of Japan to mark the birthday (Dec. 23) of Emperor Akihito, we were jonesing. When taki came out front to greet us, we accosted him: “When are you going to start serving ramen?”

“I can make it for you,” was the reply. We almost kissed his feet. Well, not really. Have you ever looked at the shoes of anyone who works in the kitchen of a restaurant? Gross.

It turns out he’d just started serving ramen as a daily special. They’d stopped for the evening but he boiled some noodles for us anyway, and it was a real treat.
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The Sierra Club’s privileged caste: Is the green movement white?

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Sierra Club decalThe folk-rock group I play with, Mallworthy, was asked to perform at a holiday party and awards ceremony for the Sierra Club in Boulder last night. The event was held in the cafeteria of a Unitarian church, and there was a constant clatter with a couple-hundred people standing in line for the array of potluck food and then sitting and eating the food, while they talked and laughed.

We could barely hear ourselves play our brilliantly rehearsed setlist, never mind anyone in the “audience” paying any attention. One woman who stood about four feet in front of me while she waited in the food line leaned over and said she could barely hear our instruments but not our voices at all.

So when a well-heeled middle-aged woman in all black began banging her wine glass with a fork — during one of our songs — so the crowd could quiet down and listen to her announcements and several pages of “Bushisms” that she’s collected, I had had enough. It was a reflection of how invisible and unnecessary we were to the festivities at hand. Almost half an hour later, while the merry members held their raffle giveaway, we decided we should just pack up and go home.

We couldn’t even consider this a rehearsal since we couldn’t hear each others’ parts. It was nice to just get out of there.

But I had a cloud nagging at me all night, long after I’d gone home and started watching TV to distract my brain.

Even before the presumptuous woman interrupted our playing, I had looked out over the room and noted a disturbing fact: Besides myself, there were two Asian faces (women, who appeared to be there with Caucasian partners) and one African American woman. I wasn’t sure if anyone in the room was Hispanic. But it was clear that overwhelmingly, the room was filled with eager, erstwhile, Earth-loving white people.
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Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the DNC in Denver

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We were lucky enough to get a couple of tickets to Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech that capped off the Democratic National Convention at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High. We got there late afternoon and sweated though hours of speakers like Al Gore, Bill Richardson and Joe Biden, and entertainers including Stevie Wonder, Sheryl Crow and Michael McDonald. The crowd went wild when Obama hit the stage, and his speech sent an electric charge through the 84,000 people in the stadium. The evening ended with fireworks, confetti and lots of applause.

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper: Rock star treatment on the 16th St. mall

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I ran into Denver’s Mayor John Hickenlooper a cpuple of days ago on my way to the dwntown bus station after work. He was being mobbed by people who wanted to shake his hand and pose for photos with him. It was amusing because I’ve known John for a long time — almost 25 years! — from back when he was a struggling ex-geologist in the oil industry just opening a restaurant. That restaurant — the Wynkoop Brewing Company — was the first microbrewery in Colorado, and set a trend in brewpubs that exploded nationwide. He still looks slightly embarrassed when he gets mobbed like this.

Today the city of Denver announced that the fundraising for the DNC, which had been the topic of much derision when the host committee came up short of projections a few months ago, had in fact raised more then $10 million above the goal. Good for John — he’ll be a rock star in the national Democratic Party’s eyes too.


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