Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [204]
There are sandwiches, soups, and salads, too, which look just fine, but in truth, when we walk into this happy place, we instantly become too obsessed with eating ice cream to consider anything else.
Colorado
Bongo Billy’s
300 W. Sackett Ave.
719–539–4261
Salida, CO
BL | $
Thanks to Chuck Henrikson for tipping us off to this cute little sandwich shop in Salida—one of two Bongo Billy’s in Colorado. (The other is in Buena Vista.) It bills itself as a café, but it has more of a coffeehouse spirit, with all sorts of whole beans and coffee (and tea) drinks available, as well as an inventory of coffee makers, mugs, and T-shirts. The walls are decorated with a changing display of work by local artists, and bluegrass and folk musicians regularly perform in the evenings. A deck overlooking the Arkansas River provides customers a wonderful opportunity for meditative caffeination.
The menu is a sprightly selection of salads, sandwiches, and such Mexican-accented dishes as a Three Sisters Quesadilla (corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, and cheese) and breakfast burritos. Our pick dish is the Blue Moon Harvest Salad, which is a mesclun mix topped with blue cheese, spicy toasted walnuts, dried cranberries, and sweet peppercorn dressing. On the side comes a length of French baguette.
Beyond coffee, espresso drinks, and tea, drinks include smoothies, imported Italian sodas, cider, wine, beer on tap, and microbrews by the bottle.
Buckhorn Exchange
1000 Osage St.
303–534–9505
Denver, CO
LD | $$$
Holder of Colorado Liquor License no. 1 (issued in 1893), outfitted with antique firearms and furniture, and hung with a dazzling menagerie of some five hundred game animal trophies shot by former owner Shorty Zietz and his progeny, the Buckhorn Exchange is not only a frontier-themed restaurant for tourists. It happens to be a good place to eat the cuisine of the Rockies.
At lunch, hamburgers, salads, and sandwiches are consumed without ado by a cadre of regular customers inured to the stare of a thousand glass eyes and the creak of wood floors where Buffalo Bill once trod. Tourists like us cannot help but gape and wonder—and then tuck into a seriously carnivorous meal. Those who want to eat really wild western fare can start with Rocky Mountain oysters (sliced, fried calf testicles) or rattlesnake marinated in red chile and lime. For the main meat you can choose buffalo tenderloin, elk medallions, Colorado lamb, beefsteaks, or pork ribs. If there’s more than a single passionate meat-eater at the table, the dish to have is “The Big Steak,” a strip steak sized for two to five appetites and carved tableside.
Top it all off with a broad slab of hot crumb-topped apple pie with cinnamon rum sauce, and you have eaten a true-West meal.
Bud’s Bar
5453 N. Manhart St.
303–688–9967
Sedalia, CO
LD | $
Bars tend not to be great places to look for satisfying food, but if it’s a hamburger you seek, they’re worth putting on the hit-list. For a first-rate bar-burger, we suggest heading south on Highway 85 out of Denver to the town of Sedalia and finding a mid-twentieth-century watering hole named Bud’s. Here is served what tipster Mindy Leisure described as “one of the best burgers you will ever eat.” It is juicy with a good crust, modest-size, and served with no unusual toppings. Pickles and onion are the only garnishes available. You have a choice of a single or a double with or without cheese. There’s no deep-fryer on premises, so the menu advises patrons, “We don’t have no damn fries.” Instead, you get a bag of potato chips.
As you might guess by the extremely