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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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The Cherry Cricket
The Cherry Cricket has occupied the corner of 2nd and University in Cherry Creek since 1945, when it opened as Mary Zimmerman's Bar. Lloyd Page bought the place in 1950 and gave it the name that's stuck ever since, and the marquee sign he put up — still glowing over the sidewalk today — has become one of the most recognizable landmarks in a neighborhood that's otherwise filled with upscale shopping and condo towers built up around it. That contrast is a big part of the Cricket's identity: it's long described itself as the "black sheep of Cherry Creek," a genuinely divey, unpretentious bar that never got remodeled into something glossier as the surrounding blocks did. The burger is built for choice rather than a single fixed recipe — a hand-formed patty customers dress from a long list of toppings, from green chile and grilled onions to fried eggs and jalapeños, so that regulars tend to have a specific, personal build they order every time rather than a single "house" version everyone gets. National attention has followed the local reputation rather than the other way around: Food Network's Aaron Sanchez called his burger there "the best thing I ever ate," and Travel Channel's Man v. Food singled the Cricket out as one of the best burger joints in the country. The bar took a real hit when a kitchen fire closed it the night before Thanksgiving in 2016, but it reopened five months later with its character intact, and has since grown carefully to a handful of additional metro-area locations without losing the original Cherry Creek room's rough edges. For a Denver cheeseburger list, the Cherry Cricket is the essential "this is the one everyone already knows" entry — an 80-year-old dive bar burger, built to order from a genuinely long topping list, that's held its reputation through a fire, a neighborhood's total transformation around it, and decades of newer competition trying to take its place.
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