1940s Archive

Along the Boulevards

Originally Published January 1946

Always a midst where public living and dining have been both luxurious and important, Colorado's hotels, saloons, and eating places have been celebrated since the days when Silver Dollar Tabor imported a French chef to lend ton to his beloved Saddle Rock Saloon in Leadville, and the era when Harry Tammen, later famed as the co-publisher of the Denver Post, was chief barkeep at the legendary Windsor Hotel in Denver's Laramie Street.

The scene has, of course, changed since pioneer times when Jack Morrisey and Thomas F. Walsh, father of Evalyn Walsh McLean, were satraps of Ophir, Ouray, and Telluride, and when Louis de Puy's Café de Paris at Georgetown was rated the finest restaurant west of the Mississippi. Those were the spacious years when the best hangings in Durango had their origins in speedy justice in the front room of the Nose Paint Saloon and when the Mears Toll Gate House at Bear Creek Falls advertised its bill as including “Lunch, Apple Grove Whiskies, and Fine Cigars.” The Teller House at Central City was setting forth for the enchanted miners at Christmas dinner a spun-sugar dessert representing “The Teller House Illuminated With Central Gas,” and a few years later the famed Antlers of Colorado Springs amazed the world by letting it be known that there was no game course having its origins in the Western Hemisphere that its chefs were not prepared to produce at a moment's notice.

Colorado, as befitted the most opulent of bonanza communities, did its eating and drinking in style, and today there are still vestigial traces of grandeur, although they are implicit with confusions for persons who are accustomed to encountering de luxe hotel life, fine food, and the best wines and spirits, all on the same premises. The two most celebrated hotels in the commonwealth, for instance, are the wonderful Brown Palace in Denver and the late, very great Spencer Penrose's monument to immortality, the Broadmoor at Colorado Springs.

Despite their world reputations, however, neither of these two costly and fashionable establishments serves food that would attract favorable attention from the Wine and Food Society, and the menus of the Broadmoor are designed with such poverty of imagination and served in such mean portions as to verge on constituting a local scandal. At the same time the service and appointments of both hotels in every way transcend reproach, their bars and wine lists are on a par with the best in New York and San Francisco, and, indeed, the cellars of the Broadmoor are world famous. Knowing Coloradoans live, when occasion arises, and do their drinking on all occasions in the Brown and Broadmoor, but at the Springs they dine at the Antlers or Indian Grill, in Trinidad at the Columbian Hotel, in Leadville at the Golden Burro, and in Denver at the Cosmopolitan.

This paradox, particularly in the case of the Broadmoor, which is, save in its kitchens, admirably conducted by Jack Hawkins, sometime of New York's Knickerbocker Grill and the Whitehall at Palm Beach, naturally arouses comment and inquiry. Why should a house which carries sixty-year-old bonded bourbons as its regular, commercial bar whiskies and lists an 1858 Otard Cognac bottled for Park and Tilford as the veriest incidental on its brandy list, serve, literally, an item marked “Peanut Butter Sandwich—.40 cents” as, believe it or not, an entree on its formal dinner menu? The Broadmoor charges, gets, and deserves $75 a day for its celebrated lanai suites overlooking their incomparable view of the Rockies and Pikes Peak, while meat balls with spaghetti is the most formal and luxurious food available in its restaurants.

The answer to this folly seems to be that the Broadmoor is burdened with a chef de cuisine dating from an earlier regime whose respect for his patrons is approximately that of a crosstown bus driver in Manhattan and whose qualifications were never other than those of a short-order chef in a Broadway cafeteria. As soon as practicable Mr. Hawkins plans the rectification of this gastronomic street accident, and the Broadmoor's patrons can dine off something more imposing than meat balls and peanut butter amidst the beautiful and impressive surroundings which go with the Hotel's Ice Palace, artificial lake, spacious terraces, golf course, private zoo, carriage houses, and illimitable luxury devisings.

The cellars arrangement of the Broadmoor is unusual since its resources derive from the personal cellars of Senator Penrose, who seems to have bought up much of the best liquor in the United States prior to prohibition and stored it in one of the impregnable vaults under one of the artificial lakes at Broadmoor. Once or twice a year now the management of the hotel calls for Federal inspectors, opens the sealed vaults, and has revenue stamps affixed to what it estimates will be in requisition during the next few months. The convenience of this arrangement, not to mention the enormous savings in interest on liquor taxes, will at once be apparent. Almost all of Broadmoor preprohibition wines are gone, either through consumption or from extreme age, but some clue to the remaining spirits may be gained from the inclusion in the regular bar list of such ryes and bourbons as Old Lexington, distilled 1891, bottled 1914; Hannisville Rye, distilled December, 1911; Mt. Vernon Rye, distilled 1907, bottled 1921; A. Overholt & Co., Rye, distilled May, 1911.

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