Sucking Eggs at Red Rocks Grill

A large, liberal American in the Whitmanian sense, with a bloodlust to contradict my bleeding heart, I can never help but marvel how a good collection of wall-mounted hunting trophies really ties a room together into some sort of cheerfully morbid petting zoo. And since the Director, the Constant Watcher & I happened to be hashing out our plans for MORRISSEYTOWN—an amusement park (or, as we like to think of it, dejection park) based entirely around the lyrical death throes of everybody’s fave frontman of phantasmironica—just as we entered the Red Rocks Grill in Morrison (coincidence? think not), we were pretty sure we'd come to the right place. Its furry decor 

 

at once inspired a brainstorm for our own Life Is a Pigsty dead-petting zoo & made for an ideal setting in which to sketch out the details of the Meat Is Murder concession stand. (Not to mention a fitting pitstop before catching Jaws up at Film on the Rocks.)

But we were wrong. Foodwise, it was not the right place. That much became clear with a glance at the menu, one of those faux-newspaper inserts listing such "Red Rocks Originals" as a BLT & a Monte Cristo (what dictionary did they get their definition of "original" from?), a Santa Fe pasta with chicken, green chili & cheddar startlingly served with a flour tortilla, & a teriyaki chicken dinner dolefully described as "two 6 oz. breast [sic] drenched in teriyaki sauce"—maybe one of the exceptions to the guarantee that "most of our food is homemade"?

Certainly I'll eat crow (could probably just pull one down off the wall) if the dinosaur eggs weren't the finest becrumbed, cream-cheese-product-injected jalapeno-like objects ever to roll off an assembly line out & out of a box. 

As for the "special jalapeno jelly" it comes with—I'm thinking raspberry from a jar with a drop of hot sauce in it?

The rest was neither here nor there. There was nothing particularly wrong with the Director's combo plate #4, for instance—a steak-&-bean burrito with green chile plus two shredded beef tacos. When I asked him how it was, he shrugged. The bite or two I took revealed a fairly mild green chile & not much else of note.

My taco salad with chicken was likewise just fine, with more lettuce under there than you'd think. If the salsa was made in-house, though, it did an amazing impression of Pace.

I think you must have to be pretty darn sharp to catch the sorts of nuances that would distinguish the Constant Watcher's Mexican burger from, say, a beef burrito, unless it's just the fries on the side. My own powers of observation weren't up to the task. I'm open to enlightenment on this one.

Either way I don't plan on coming back here to taste the difference for myself. One too many Mexican burgers and the next thing you know you're starring in Morrisseytown's Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others burlesque revue.

Comments

[Beth Partin]

That place looks like my father-in-law's house. Just wait until the baboon head from South Africa, or wherever it was, shows up.