Editor’s note: In September 2023, Michelin awarded stars, five in total, to restaurants in Colorado for the first time, putting the state on the must-visit list for foodies. Which restaurants were left out? It depends on who you ask. But there’s no denying the cachet that comes along with a star, not to mention the business. This is the first in an occasional series, “The Road to Michelin,” that takes readers into the kitchens where the owners, chefs and staff are chasing that elusive star.
Executive chef Samuel McCandless runs the expo line at Corrida in Boulder, organizing plates of food before they’re carried into the dining room. It’s one of the hardest jobs at the restaurant, but McCandless is there every day of the week, calling out orders and balancing cook times.
If there’s an order for a dry-aged steak in the third course, for instance, he’ll let the other chefs know ahead of time so they can start cooking it in between the other courses.
“Order fire olives! White asparagus, jamón ibérico and peppers,” he shouts, grabbing an order ticket fresh out of the printer.
“Heard chef,” his two sous chefs repeat in unison.
“Every detail of the plate matters,” McCandless said, grabbing a dish and wiping it spotless with a special cleaning solution. He uses kitchen tweezers to make last-minute touches, readjusting chocolate mint leaves and small cuts of rhubarb on the hamachi crudo before gliding over to shave pieces of black label (meaning the finest) dry-cured Iberian ham straight from the leg.
McCandless joined Corrida — a Spanish steakhouse and tapas bar owned by Bryan Dayton — in 2021 after cooking or staging at several Michelin-starred restaurants like Boulder’s Frasca Food and Wine (one star), the now-closed L20 in Chicago (two stars), and Manresa, also closed, in San Francisco (three stars). And he has a set standard of cooking and cleaning principles for his kitchen team.
“They don’t set hot pans on metal; they clean their station constantly; use some of the best knives and the nicest cutting boards,” he explained.
When he creates a recipe, he writes down each ingredient like a formula, with the number of grams weighed out. It’s a practice that is modeled after French chef Laurent Gras, from his days at L20. And every day before the doors open at 3 p.m., he and his team review the covers for the night and the improvements they want to hone in on. As the night goes on, they take guest notes on new diners to get an idea of what they like to order for future reference.
But despite every thoughtful detail, dish and Michelin-inspired technique, Corrida was one of many restaurants passed over by the inaugural Colorado Michelin Guide last year.
“This is a destination space, just look out the window,” McCandless said, pointing to Corrida’s panoramic views of the Flatirons. “But then we also make sure we try to create the best experience possible. If Michelin comes or not, we’ll still be here.”
Only five Colorado restaurants (Beckon, BRUTØ and The Wolf’s Tailor in Denver, Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder and Bosq in Aspen) took home a Michelin star last year, nine Colorado restaurants received a Bib Gourmand Award for quality meals at a good value, and another 30 were recommended in the company’s first annual Colorado guide.
But now the “famously anonymous” inspectors are back eating their way through Denver, Boulder, Aspen and Snowmass Village, Vail and Beaver Creek Resort, before the next annual awards ceremony.
And plenty of restaurants in the Centennial State want a star — whether or not they’ll admit it.
RELATED: Does Denver have fine dining restaurants? Yes — but they might not look how you expect.
Some, like Corrida, went back to the drawing board to see what they could do differently to elevate their game. They’re hoping to catch the inspectors’ eyes (or stomachs) with new improvements to the menu, service, sustainability, and restaurant space itself.
Others, like Noisette a new traditional French restaurant in LoHi, know they need to be patient as it usually takes more than a couple of years to build up a worthy reputation. Restaurant Olivia, an Italian eatery in Washington Park, meanwhile is gunning for a green star — a special recognition that Michelin awards for a restaurant’s sustainability practices.
On the other hand, the owner of the Barolo Grill, a 32-year-old fine dining staple, is doubling down on what he knows has already been impressing Denver diners for years.
Different approaches. The same elusive goal.
Michelin awards stars – one, two or three – based on five criteria: the quality of the ingredients, the harmony of flavors, the mastery of techniques, the personality of the chef as expressed through the cuisine, and consistency across the entire menu and over time.
But many restaurateurs feel like stars are handed out for more than just what’s on the table.
“It can’t be just the food or they wouldn’t be known for coming in and dropping the fork,” Restaurant Olivia co-owner Heather Morrison said in reference to the stories about Michelin inspectors who supposedly place a fork on a restaurant floor to see how attentive the staff is.
Corrida
To go with its fourth-story Boulder views and enormous outdoor patio, Corrida, at 1023 Walnut St., serves an elevated Spanish menu focusing on steak and tapas. Its display case boasts bone-in New York strip dry-aged for 26 days and 33-day, dry-aged ribeye. You can also order a 2 oz sirloin strip of A5 Japanese wagyu to grill on a hot rock. Or stick to traditional tapas, like Cantabarian anchovies with grilled bread or white asparagus with caviar and creme fraiche.
McCandless travels twice a year to Spain to help with menu development, and the staff participates in weekly wine tastings to test out new products from the Iberian peninsula.
So when Corrida didn’t even make it on the Colorado Michelin Guide’s list of 30 recommended restaurants, he was disappointed to say the least.
“But you can only be so bummed and have to keep pushing,” he said.
He’s considering new flatware and serving steaks on wooden boards instead of the round serving plates Corrida uses currently. He and Dayton — who also owns OAK at Fourteenth in Boulder, C Burger in Englewood and BriDer in Denver — have brought on a new sous chef and upped staff training, and McCandless is planning to expand tableside service, adding an aperitif cart for dessert drinks, in addition to the gin and tonic cart that already roams around the chophouse.
“From a business perspective, a Michelin star would mean more customers and create more attraction for the restaurant and Boulder,” he said. “It’ll help us invest in better products, ranchers and new talent.”
Until then, McCandless likes to keep an eye on solo diners with notebooks, a telltale sign of a Michelin inspector. “I treat everyone like a reviewer anyway, but my radar always turns on with solo diners,” he said.
Restaurant Olivia
Restaurant Olivia did make it onto Michelin’s list of 30 spots to visit in the state, dubbing it “one of the city’s hottest tables.” But owners Ty Leon, Austin Carson and Morrison are always striving for improvement.
“When we thought about what other Michelin star spots are doing that we’re not, we realized that they’re just telling their stories better than we are,” Morrison said.
For the past two years, Restaurant Olivia, at 290 S. Downing St., has honed in on its sustainability efforts, eliminating one of its most popular dishes, lobster spaghetti, because of how much styrofoam was necessary to ship the lobster. The staff is also working with companies like Scraps, which collects its compost for soil, and The Happy Beetle to get rid of hard-to-recycle items, including styrofoam and old silverware.
“We always want to work with good stewards of the Earth,” Leon said.
Michelin awards a green star to restaurants that “hold themselves accountable for both their ethical and environmental standards, and work with sustainable producers and suppliers to avoid waste and reduce or even remove plastic and other non-recyclable materials from their supply chain,” according to the website. Last year, Blackbelly Market and Bramble & Hare in Boulder, as well as Michelin-starred Brutø and The Wolf’s Tailor won green stars.
“I’d love to see a green star on our shelf,” Morrison said.
To tell their story properly, Morrison and Leon have a dream scenario.
First, they would serve the Michelin reviewer a cocktail made with fruits and vegetables from the kitchen and a base of Good Vodka. Good Vodka has a zero carbon footprint because it uses the wasted byproduct of coffee production. Next, they’d recommend the risotto, which uses rice from Cascina Oschiena, a farm situated within an Ecological Biodiversity Protected Area.
For an entree, they’d suggest the venison from Maui Nui, an organization dedicated to conservation and species protection (Restaurant Olivia is one of just three restaurants in the country serving it). And of course, the signature French onion soup ravioli, made with stock using only vegetables from the kitchen — but which Leon believes tastes as good as veal stock.
“It’s an absolute bonus if they notice what we’re doing,” Morrison said. But if things don’t turn out the way they want, “we’re not going to change our path based on chasing a star.”
Noisette Restaurant & Bakery
Lillian and Tim Lu know how much blood, sweat and tears it takes to earn a Michelin star.
They both graduated from the International Culinary Center in New York in 2008 and then worked in the city’s French fine-dining scene for nearly 15 years. Tim was previously an executive sous chef for Michelin-starred Le Coucou, while Lillian was a pastry sous chef for Ai Fiori, which had a Michelin star but lost it in 2022.
“When I opened Le Coucou as the executive sous chef there, we didn’t get a Michelin star until two years later,” Tim said. It was something that took patience.
In Denver, they opened Noisette, a traditional French restaurant, in 2022 at 3254 Navajo St. It was an immediate hit with diners and, like Restaurant Olivia, became one of the first 30 recommended restaurants in Michelin’s Colorado guide. The reviewers applauded Noisette’s “precisely crafted dishes bound by tradition while reflecting a creative approach.”
“Opening a restaurant was so crazy, so there were things we probably didn’t focus on as much,” Lillian said. “But now that we are in our second year, we’ve settled in, and we’re looking at things with fresh eyes.”
In the past year, they’ve added light pink curtains in the dining room to improve the ambiance and the sound of the restaurant. They’re also constantly rotating the menu to focus on in-season ingredients, like English peas in the lamb stew with an herb-crusted, braised lamb shoulder, bone-in lamb belly and pea shoots and veggies from Boulder’s Esoterra Culinary Garden.
But the Lus’ primary goal is to invest in their kitchen staff and train consistency, a key factor in Michelin-star restaurants, across the board, they said. Most of Noisette’s sauces, like Bordelaise and matelote, take three to four days to make. “Training people to do our specific, traditional French style takes time,” Tim said. “They have to know how to butcher and make stock sauces, all the classical techniques that make you a well-rounded chef.”
Unlike other Michelin-star kitchens where they’ve worked, the back of the house at Noisette is, for the most part, quiet, with the team sticking to their stations, whether it’s stocks, sauces or pastries. “I’m a working, hands-on chef, and I don’t need to be militant to earn their respect,” Tim said.
Like Le Coucou, the Lus are hopeful that their second year in business could be a winner.
“I hope that Michelin will expand beyond tasting menus this year,” Tim said, acknowledging that four out of the five Colorado Michelin star winners were tasting-menu-only restaurants.
“And just reward good food for being good food, not because it’s like a small bite with a bunch of flowers on it,” Lillian added.
Barolo Grill
Barolo Grill, which opened in Denver’s Cherry Creek North neighborhood in 1992, likes to consider itself “one of the Old Guard,” owner Ryan Fletter said. “We’ve been through five Presidents, four governors and a few generations already.”
Fletter and Barolo Grill sommelier Erin Lindstone received the 2023 Colorado Sommelier Award from Michelin last September and also made its list of 30 recommended restaurants.
“As Michelin was approaching, I thought I’d be serving people wine at the Michelin dinner, I didn’t think we’d get an award,” Fletter said. “I was completely blindsided. I didn’t know they walked into the restaurant, let alone that we’d get any acknowledgment.”
Barolo Grill serves Northern Italian cuisine inspired by the staff’s annual trip to Barolo, Italy, and boasts a wine collection of 15,000 bottles, ranging from $40 to $7,000, Fletter said. The staff visits Michelin-starred restaurants every year on the trip, so “we’re naturally geared to follow and sniff down the Michelin road, get inspiration from it and see how it makes sense with our brand.”
But with two Michelin recognitions already under its belt, Fletter is hesitant to make any changes (that he wouldn’t already) to the restaurant’s overall mission in an attempt to score a star.
“We’re not sure if we’re one click away or a mile away from getting a Michelin star in their eyes, but we don’t want to do things differently in case that bucks us further off track,” Fletter said. “We want to arrive at our awards naturally and just keep fine-tuning and polishing.”
So executive chef Darrel Truett, who’s been with the restaurant for 20 years, won’t be making five new types of bread, buying a new set of flatware or getting rid of any longtime regulars’ favorite meals. Instead, the Barolo Grill team is sticking to its guns and staying true to the hospitality, food and, of course, wine that has built up its 30-year reputation.
“Do you want to toss all out the door just for ego, or do you fulfill the carpet that’s already been rolled out for you?” Fletter said.
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