I guess for me food is a quite important part of the travel
experience, particularly when I go places where there is a specific or unique
cuisine there . I’ve started photographing my more interesting and unique meals
and sometimes dedicating entire blog entries to the cuisine of a place I visit.
Well, once I started doing that, it didn’t take long for me to start taking
pictures of my food around home in Denver, at least the better, more
interesting, and festive meals. What keeps me from having far more pictures and
a much bigger entry is that I frequently didn’t have my camera with me and
somehow never got into using my cell phone for taking photos (they don’t seem
to come out very well).

Quite a few of my pictures here are from lunches or dinners
at my favorite restaurant in Denver – Le Central on Lincoln Avenue south of
downtown which bills itself as “the affordable French restaurant”. Considering
how expensive French food usually is in restaurants, that’s a very fair
description. My favorite is the pots of mussels available in numerous styles
with unlimited french fries for $13.95, but almost everything on the permanent
menu and the constantly changing specialties has always been good . Some of the
best deals there are monthly tasting dinners and monthly themed dinners of
French regions served family style at communal tables, effectively quite
reasonably priced all-you-can-eat affairs. I used to consult their website
monthly and plan out their special events and dinners to go to.

In the age of Groupon and other online promotional sites, I
started going to some fancier places around town with friends that I normally
wouldn’t frequent such as Vespa Dipping Grill, La Fondue, and various steak and
chop houses. To be honest, though, I find that kind of dining a little too
fussy and pretentious. Even partaking of special deals, I didn’t find them to
be very good value compared to my staple ethnic restaurants.

What are those ethnic restaurants? Well, from where I lived
in southeast Denver there was probably just about every cuisine in the area or
in southern Aurora. Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese for Pho were my staples, and
a particular favorite of mine was Sushi Katsu on Havana Street in Aurora, and
amazingly reasonably priced AYCE sushi place. I probably ate lunch there at
least once a month during my years living in “The Man Cave” and quite a few
dinners too.