ChoLon Stapleton – “Chef/restaurateur Lon Symensma’s original ChoLon Modern Asian on the 16th Street Mall continues to be one of Denver’s top dining destinations, and now the inventive pan-Asian menu — or the best parts of it — are being served in Stapleton, along with a whole range of family-friendly new dishes built for the neighborhood. So longtime fans will still be able to indulge in the French onion soup dumplings, but a new roster of other dumplings is also available, as well as Singaporean crab cakes, pineapple fried rice and braised beef coconut curry. It’s all enough to make downtown denizens jealous.”

LeRoux – “Lon Symensma’s French/European bistro technically opened on December 28, 2018, too late to make our list of the twelve best new restaurants last year. But we won’t begrudge the chef/restaurateur those few extra days of practice before LeRoux became one of the brightest stars of 2019. Dazzling plates, from the mushroom mille-feuille, which presents a rectangle of mushrooms sliced so thin that they resemble the pages of a book, to the wagyu beef tartare, presented beneath a smoke-filled glass cloche, have become signature items, while duck, lamb and seafood go through seasonal variations. A tribute to the chef’s mentors in his younger days, LeRoux proves that the onetime student of European cuisine has now become the master.”

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