Chef Patterson and his business partner sommelier Bobby Stuckey have raised the bar for all Colorado restaurants that aspire to be great. These guys do it great day after day with seldom a slip. I have tested them at least a dozen times since they opened and have always been amazed at the preparation, quality of service and presentation of excellent new, recognizable creations. Frasca, Boulder has become a destination restaurant; people are flying in from all over North American to get a taste o ...

The Mr. Five Star team suggests the French Laundry to be one of the top five restaurants in the United States. Restaurants of this high caliber are very difficult to judge which of them is the better. I don’t think anyone will argue with me on this point. Just bring a credit card with a large limit and prepare for one of the finest meals you may ever have. The French Laundry is the is the best of the best. There are dinners—the kind you go out for because you’re hungry—a ...

During the course of one of my long, exhaustively intricate meals at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s new restaurant in the Time Warner Center, one of my guests experienced an epiphany peculiar to New Yorkers of a certain overly sophisticated kind. Already we’d sampled coddled eggs tipped with black-truffle purée, and the chef’s famous “oysters and pearls” (Island Creek oysters, pearly tapioca, Osetra caviar). We’d listened to informative disquisitions on the ...

I was supposed to have become an actor said Patrick O'Connell owner of the Inn at Little Washington but soon found the living theater of the restaurant world more compelling than the stage. Running a restaurant allows me to be the producer, director, set designer, and lead player in a wonderfully fractured nightly performance in which the world of complete illusion in the dining room is brilliantly juxtaposed with the blood-and-guts reality of the kitchen. Sometimes it seems like a Broadway ...