Offbeat Eats

As I mentioned in a few reviews, Colorado Springs has been a semi-frequent work travel destination for me for a few years now. Originally, I’d always stay at The Antlers, which is a fine hotel, but starting in 2019 Hilton opened up a new Hilton Garden Inn on North Cascade a few blocks north of there. And, I’ll admit it, in the case of hotels loyalty programs seem to work well for me, so most of my trips now have me staying there. In 2019, I was taking a shortcut out of the hotel to E Bijou Street, and found myself instead in a small alley off Bijou, staring at a bright neon sign for the recently-opened Shame & Regret Cocktail bar, and felt compelled to check it out (heck, it’s one of the best cocktail bar names I’ve ever seen).

Much like my review of King’s Chef Diner, I’ve had a handful of places that I had started reviewing around Colorado Springs, but deferred publishing once Covid hit, preferring to wait until I could make sure I could follow up and revisit them to check up on how they are doing. One of these places is The Skirted Heifer, a burger joint which I’ve visited on several trips to Colorado Springs. Now, with visits on my 2019 and 2021 trips, I can confirm things are well at the Heifer.

Most of the time I’m in Colorado Springs, it is because I’m visiting the United States Air Force Academy for work. While during non-pandemic times, if you can ever swing a visit to their Mitchell Hall dining room, it’s a sight to behold, with them serving the entire student body in 30 minutes in a giant dining room (the only similar experience I’ve had was dining at the Naval Academy’s King Hall). But during these pandemic-restricted times, the primary dining option for visiting researchers is… Subway. My Academy host agreed that this was sub-par, so every day we headed off-campus to try out some different dining options. And in this case, we headed out the North Gate to the nearby shopping center for some Cajun food at Momma Pearl’s Cajun Kitchen.

In my previous review of Bonny & Read, I discussed how I had asked several good bartenders and waitstaff around Colorado Springs for what other places they’d recommend, and several places all percolated to the top of everyone’s list, most notably the above-mentioned Bonny & Read, and The Carter Payne. I hadn’t been aware of The Carter Payne on my previous visits, but at the time it was still a bit of a startup. Located about a block and a half SE of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, The Carter Payne is located in a former AME Church. Original opened in 1897 as the Payne Chapel (after Daniel Payne, one of the AME church’s founders) and later renamed after the Carter Brothers who moved to Colorado Springs from Philadelphia, the Church outgrew the chapel in 1987, moving to a much larger building in NE Colorado Springs. After a period of time hosting various offices, events venues, and satellite church operations before getting refurbished in 2016 as The Carter Payne, a shared vendor space.

During my trip to Colorado Springs, I decided to drop in and check out Bonny and Read for some good seafood. Mentioning this fact on Facebook got a fair bit of skpetical feedback of the “Have you looked at a map? Colorado Springs is about as far from the ocean as you can get!” variety. While that’s not quite true (the North American pole of inaccessibility is in Bennett County, South Dakota, several hundred miles further from the oceans), yeah, it’s a bit risky getting seafood more than 700 miles from the nearest ocean. But I wasn’t terribly concerned, because of recommendations. As I discuss a bit on my Resources page, one of my standard methods of finding good places to eat when traveling involves finding a good place to eat or drink with good staff, and asking the staff there where they eat when they aren’t on the clock. And in this case, the bartenders at both Shame & Regret and Local Relic included Bonny and Read near the top of their dining recommendations. So, on the first night of my last trip to Colorado Springs, when craving a light dinner, armed with this advice I headed off to Bonny & Read.

Most of my years my business travel has some unexpected twists and turns, and I certainly wasn’t expecting Colorado Springs to be my top travel destination for the last few years, with almost three weeks spent there since 2019. But I rather enjoy Colorado Springs. It’s a bit of a funky mish-mash, since there’s two “downtowns”, the actual downtown (where I stayed), and to the west Old Colorado City that got absorbed into Colorado Springs in the early 1900s. And there’s a lot to do with Pikes Peak and Garden of the Gods park nearby. And then, after hiking and exploring, there’s a good selection of restaurants, diners, breweries, and the like that I discovered on my first trip out this year; and followup trips really gave me a chance to explore downtown Colorado Spring’s culinary offerings. In this case, King’s Chef Diner.

Colorado Springs has a lot of the old, classic “Out West” vibe going strong, and one place that really stands out is in the selection of fine dining restaurants: Colorado Springs has quite a few high-end steakhouses right in town: Saltgrass, Mckenzie’s Chop House, Peppertree, and the Famous, just to list ones easily walkable from my hotel. After several long days of work, we decided that it was worth going out and celebrating, and since I had wandered by The Famous a few times, we decided to drop in and give it a try.

If there’s one culinary topics I’ve railed on a lot here at Offbeat Eats, it’s the basic concept of biscuits. I love a good biscuit, one that’s delicate, flaky and rich, with a nice buttermilk flavor to it, and a nice caramel browning on top. They are great with sweet or savory filling, and oh so enjoyable. Alas, with a few exceptions (like, for example, Montpelier’s Downhome), most everyplace in New England makes biscuits, that, quite frankly, suck. So when I’m traveling, particularly in the South, I like to search out good biscuits. So when I find a regional chain that’s reliably able to produce some tasty biscuits, I figure it is worth a shoutout. That takes us to the Denver Biscuit Company.

I find it a bit interesting that in my travels as an engineer that I’ll go years without traveling even close to a region, and then get several trips to that area back-to-back, even for completely different clients. In this particular case, Colorado Springs. I hadn’t been to Colorado for work for 8 years, but this year had me visiting Colorado Springs three times (so far) for business. While a bit sprawling, and being one of those cities with two distinct downtowns (“Downtown” and “Old Colorado City”, the latter originally being a distinct city that was annexed), it has some nice charms: the downtown is rather walkable, has a nice private college (Colorado College) with a nice campus and art museum, and a decent selection of dining establishments. Like much of Colorado, it actually reminds me a lot of a younger, less-sprawling, and more temperate Phoenix area. On my first trip this year, we arrived rather late in the evening, and looking for a light dinner near our hotel led us right to Phantom Canyon Brewing Company.