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Steuben's Uptown
Steuben's Uptown opened in 2006, the second restaurant from Josh Wolkon, who'd moved to Colorado in 1995 and opened the fine-dining-leaning Vesta Dipping Grill in 1997 before wanting a more relaxed, lower-stakes space where his kitchen could experiment. He named the new restaurant after his great-uncles' Steuben's, a Boston restaurant and nightclub that operated in the 1940s, and built the concept around American regional road food — diner classics reworked with real technique rather than nostalgia alone. The building itself is a former auto body shop in Denver's Uptown neighborhood, converted into a retro-leaning dining room and bar that fits the "road food" concept the menu is built around. Fried chicken has become the dish Steuben's is most specifically recognized for — 24/7 Tempo named it Colorado's best fried chicken restaurant — but the kitchen's broader comfort-food menu, including a well-built diner cheeseburger, runs on the same philosophy: familiar American formats executed with more care than the format usually gets. Wolkon has since built Steuben's into part of a larger local restaurant group, Secret Sauce Food & Beverage, which also runs Vesta and Ace Eat Serve, along with a Steuben's location that opened in Arvada in 2016 and a food truck that's been running since 2009. That growth has stayed rooted in the same Uptown building where the concept started nearly two decades ago. For a Denver cheeseburger list, Steuben's Uptown is the essential "chef-driven diner food" entry — a comfort-food menu built by a fine-dining-trained chef inside a converted auto body shop, where the cheeseburger sits alongside award-recognized fried chicken as proof the kitchen takes classic American cooking seriously.
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Bastien's Restaurant
Bastien's has stood on East Colfax Avenue since 1937, when the Bastien family bought the Moon Drive Inn that previously occupied the site. The current building — a striking, curved-roof example of Googie architecture designed by a member of the Bastien family himself — replaced the original structure in 1958 and has been the restaurant's home for well over six decades since, making it one of the more architecturally distinctive steakhouse buildings anywhere in Denver. The restaurant's signature is actually a steak, not a burger — the "Sugar Steak," rubbed with a sugar-based seasoning before searing, is what most first-time visitors are told to order. But Bastien's has run a sugar-rubbed hamburger built on the same technique for just as long, applying the restaurant's defining flavor idea to a simpler, cheaper format for regulars who want the Bastien's taste without a full steak dinner. What's most notable about Bastien's now is how long it's stayed a genuine family business: it's currently run by a fourth generation of Bastiens, with Ryan Bastien in the kitchen as head chef, and the menu has stayed close to its 1958 form rather than chasing contemporary steakhouse trends. Diners describe it as loud and unpretentious rather than formal — an old-school Denver restaurant that's never tried to be quiet or precious about its own history. For a Denver cheeseburger list, Bastien's is the essential "steakhouse burger, done the same way for generations" entry — a sugar-rubbed hamburger from a nearly 90-year-old, family-run Colfax Avenue institution, served inside one of the city's most distinctive pieces of mid-century architecture.
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