What To Eat
In Denver

01 · The main event

Green Chile: The Only Food
Argument That Matters

Colorado and New Mexico have been fighting about this for thirty years. Governors have gotten involved. Here is what is actually different.

First, the pepper

Start with the plant, because that is where the difference begins.

Hatch is not a variety. It is a place. A New Mexico chile can only be called a Hatch chile if it was grown in the Hatch Valley, much the way champagne has to come from Champagne. Under that umbrella sit several actual cultivars — NuMex 6-4 Heritage, Big Jim, Barker, Sandia — most of them bred at what is now New Mexico State University.

Pueblo chile works differently. The variety that matters is called Mosco, and it has a name because it has a person behind it.

Michael Bartolo is a vegetable crop specialist who grew up near Pueblo and spent most of his career at Colorado State University's research station in Rocky Ford. He was given a bag of seeds by his uncle, the late Harry Mosco. Then he started planting them, selecting, and replanting. Over years of classical crop breeding he stabilised a pepper with unusually thick walls, high yield and real heat. It was released commercially to growers in 2005 and named for his uncle.

The plant's other name is Mirasol — "looking at the sun" — because unlike most chiles, the pods grow pointing upward rather than hanging down. That is genuinely the easiest way to spot a Pueblo chile field from a road.

Then, the heat

Mosco chiles are generally cited between roughly 5,000 and 7,000 Scoville heat units. A standard NuMex 6-4 Heritage — the classic Hatch-type pod — sits far lower. Sources disagree on the exact top end, and heat varies year to year with weather, but the direction is not disputed. Pueblo chile is hotter.

Thicker walls matter too, and for a practical reason. A thick-walled pepper survives a hard char without collapsing, so it roasts beautifully and peels cleanly. That is why Pueblo chile ended up defining a stew-based cuisine while thinner New Mexico pods lend themselves to a sauce.

Now, the dish

Here is where most out-of-state visitors get confused.

In New Mexico, green chile is usually a sauce. You are asked red or green, and it arrives on the plate. In Colorado, green chile is usually a stew — pork, roasted chile, onion, garlic, often a little tomato, thickened lightly with flour. It is thinner than a chili. Therefore it pours.

And Coloradans pour it on everything. Smothered burritos, obviously. But also breakfast burritos, eggs, fries, a cheeseburger, a bowl by itself with a tortilla. Some places will put it on a cinnamon roll if you ask, and a few will not stop you.

The tomato question is where Colorado argues with itself. Denver-style green chile often includes a little tomato. Pueblo purists frequently object. Both versions exist within an hour's drive, and nobody is going to settle it.

Ask for it smothered. That single word gets you the actual Colorado experience, and it costs about a dollar.

Where the roasters come in

From roughly August into October, Colorado smells like burning chile.

Growers and grocers set up big rotating drum roasters in parking lots across the Front Range. The chiles go in green, tumble over an open flame, and come out blistered and smoking. You buy them by the bushel, sweat them in a bag, peel them, and freeze them for the year.

This is a genuine ritual here, and it is one of the few food traditions in Colorado that has nothing to do with tourism. People plan around it. Freezer space gets negotiated. If you are in Denver in late summer and you smell something you cannot place, that is what it is.

Pueblo throws a Chile & Frijoles Festival each fall to mark the harvest, and it is worth the drive if you want to see the whole thing at scale.

So which is better?

Honestly? They are different, not ranked.

Hatch chile is milder, more consistent, and slightly earthier — which makes it excellent for sauce, where you want the chile to support everything else. Pueblo chile is hotter, meatier and fruitier, which makes it better as the main event in a bowl.

If you grew up on one, you will prefer that one. That is not a food opinion, it is a memory. Still, if you are eating in Denver, you should eat what Denver makes. Order the Colorado version, get it smothered, and form your own view.

Sources: Colorado State University Agricultural Experiment Station and CSU newsroom on Michael Bartolo and the Mosco variety; Pueblo Chile Growers Association; New Mexico State University Chile Pepper Institute; Outside magazine reporting on the Colorado–New Mexico chile question. Scoville figures vary by source and by growing season.

02 · Before the stars

The Restaurant That Was Here
A Hundred Years First

Denver got Michelin stars in the 2020s. It got its first restaurant in 1893, and that one is still open.

Henry H. Zietz opened it. He was, by any measure, a strange man to end up running a restaurant.

Zietz met William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody in 1875, when he was ten years old. Within two years he was riding as part of Cody's band of scouts. Chief Sitting Bull gave him the nickname "Shorty Scout" because of his height, and the two reportedly stayed friends for life. Then, at twenty-eight, Zietz opened a saloon.

Why it is called the Exchange

This is my favourite detail in Denver food history, and almost nobody knows it.

The saloon sat directly across Osage Street from the Rio Grande Railroad yards. Every Friday, railroad workers crossed the street to exchange their paychecks for gold. Zietz handled the exchange — and handed each man a token good for a free lunch and a beer.

That was not generosity. It was arithmetic. As Zietz reportedly put it, nobody ever heard of a railroad man stopping after one beer.

So the name is literal. The Buckhorn Exchange was, for a while, a check-cashing operation with a bar attached. The second floor was a lodge where railroaders slept it off.

Roosevelt, and then Prohibition

In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt's presidential train pulled into the Rio Grande yards. He ate at the Buckhorn. Afterwards he hired Zietz as a hunting guide on the Western Slope, which is how an African Cape buffalo shot by Roosevelt ended up on a wall in Denver.

Then Colorado went dry — in 1916, three years ahead of the rest of the country. Zietz converted the saloon into a grocery store. Local lore holds that favoured customers were shown up a private staircase where the arrangement was somewhat less grocery-focused.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Zietz applied for a liquor license immediately. The Brown Palace was reportedly going for the same one. Zietz got it. Colorado Liquor License No. 1 has hung on that wall ever since.

What is on the walls

575 taxidermy pieces, by the restaurant's own count. Buffalo, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, dozens of birds, a two-headed calf and a jackalope.

The bar itself was crafted in Essen, Germany in 1857. It reached Denver by way of New York and, at the end, by oxcart.

The menu still runs game — buffalo, elk, rattlesnake, and yes, Rocky Mountain oysters. Zietz died in 1949. His son ran it until the family sold to a group of local investors in 1978, and the new owners kept the collection intact rather than modernising it away.

Why this matters for how you eat here

It is tempting to treat Denver's food scene as something that started when Michelin showed up. That framing is wrong, and it leads people to the wrong meals.

Denver has been a game and beef town since it was a supply depot for mining camps. The high plains grow lamb. The ranches run bison. The rivers hold trout. Meanwhile, the San Luis Valley has grown potatoes since before statehood, and the Arkansas Valley has grown melons and chiles for over a century.

What actually changed in the last decade is not the ingredients. It is that a generation of chefs stopped importing a template from the coasts and started building menus out of what was already here. The two-star restaurant in this city serves an eclectic tasting menu whose chef describes grain as his luxury item. That is a very old Colorado idea in a very new room.

Sources: Buckhorn Exchange restaurant history; National Trust for Historic Preservation; Library of Congress, Carol M. Highsmith Archive; VISIT DENVER. Some details, including the private-staircase story, are local lore reported by the restaurant and the Trust rather than documented record.