City Cast Denver

All this week, we’re celebrating the gorgeous season that is fall in Colorado. Today, we’re focusing on perfect weekend getaways — the best places to go, things to see and do in just one overnight stay. From mountain towns to chile country, we’ve rounded up all the most charming locales we love for soaking in this cool and colorful season. Host Bree Davies and producer Olivia Jewell Love are joine...

More than ten thousand people with big dreams arrived in the Mile High City for this year’s Denver Startup Week, and AI was the talk of the town. So will Denver become a hub for this massive tide-changing trend in technology that has congress confused and tech folks energized? Adeel Khan founded his first startup earlier this year, and he was in the thick of networking-palooza all week long. So ho...

This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of what our guest calls “Comedy Christmas” — aka, the High Plains Comedy Festival. Returning fave Joshua Emerson, who also co-chairs the Denver American Indian Commission, is telling jokes on stage at High Plains for the second year running. He joins host Bree Davies and producer Paul Karolyi to share his High Plains hacks, recommend a few shows (with ticke...

At the height of the racial justice protests of 2020, Denverites — like the rest of the country — reckoned with our past. Statues depicting bigots and racists were torn down, and quietly the City of Denver assembled a commission to examine, research, and reassess the names of our parks — green spaces like Jefferson Park, La Alma-Lincoln Park, but also some lesser known park names with potentially...

It’s Tuesday, so host Bree Davies and producer Paul Karolyi are breaking down all the local stories that matter. First, a report of a so-called “homeless bar” with “prostitution tents” at 23rd and Champa Street had the national tabloids looking Denver’s way. But what was really going on there anyway? Then, overdose deaths are making headlines again in Colorado, this time because more and more of t...

With the opening of Yuan Wonton’s new shared brick-and-mortar restaurant in Park Hill, the food trend of the fall is officially the humble dumpling. But what can we consider to be a dumpling? Is it just a pocket of dough filled with … something? Or is it much more nuanced? 5280 Magazine’s assistant food editor Ethan Pan is a bonafide dumpling lover, digging into the hype and searching for Denver’s...

U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert had a big night out at the theater in Denver this past weekend, complete with vaping, loud singing, and being escorted out. But is this just a case of Big Divorced Energy from the MAGA darling? Or a sign of something bigger? The story (and the surveillance tapes) exploded this week, just as Boebert was attempting to roll out a new image, so we’re breaking it all...

After months of anticipation and rumors, the Michelin Guide bestowed five local restaurants a Michelin star at an exclusive ceremony in RiNo on Tuesday evening. There were big winners and big snubs. But was this moment the validation for Colorado’s dining scene that we thought? Newsletter editor Peyton Garcia joins producers Paul Karolyi and Olivia Jewell Love to talk about who won, who lost, and...

The humble user review — taken alone, is just one person’s opinion. But put a bunch together, and that aggregated star rating can make or break a local business. So today, we’re going inside the minds of the people leaving one-star reviews for some of our favorite Denver places. Producer slash quizmaster Paul Karolyi puts producer Olivia Jewell Love and returning fave JD Lopez to the test. Can the...

It’s easy to walk down the streets of Denver and see the major issues facing our city — housing, homelessness, public safety, etc. It’s much less clear how Denverites really feel about those issues. A brand new nonprofit polling group, Colorado Polling Institute, has stepped forward to fill the gap, promising regular surveys of how Denverites feel about their mayor, city council, encampment sweeps...

It’s easy to forget, but Denver is still a young city, constantly searching for an identity. So it’s confounding why there’s so little research on a characteristic as important as the way we speak. Do Denverites even have an accent? Or maybe there’s more than one? Fortunately, we found some researchers at CU Boulder who are working to cross the t’s and dot the i’s on the particulars of Mile High s...

Mayor Mike Johnston is tackling Denver’s homelessness crisis head on, but the city might not be able to wait for long. When Denverite reporter Kyle Harris spent 21 hours at a calzone shop on Broadway, he met a business owner who’s been pushed past his limit and heard rumors of a possible violent revolt spreading through encampments. Host Bree Davies and producer Paul Karolyi sit down with Kyle to...

When a brand new Denver restaurant landed on Bon Appétit’s most anticipated openings list, we were sooooo curious — what’s the big whoop about Sap Sua? Fast-forward to now and the contemporary take Vietnamese cuisine has got people talking. Host Bree Davies and producer Paul Karolyi dig into all the latest food and dining news with newsletter editor and resident foodie Peyton Garcia, who also give...

For more than 100 years, the brick power plant at Zuni Street and West 14th Avenue generated electricity for Denver using steam. But now that the plant has been retired, it presents a conundrum: Should the crusty old building and its two smokestacks be demolished? Or somehow redeveloped into an asset for the Sun Valley neighborhood? Host Bree Davies and producer Paul Karolyi visit the defunct Zuni...

Denver’s a cool place, full of cool things to do each and every month — and September is no exception. But how do you choose what to fill your calendar with when the Mile High has so much to offer? Host Bree Davies and newsletter editor Peyton Garcia each picked four awesome September events to share, and producer Olivia Jewell Love has the harrowing task of picking the official City Cast Denver “...

When State Senator Julie Gonzales wrote the Towing Bill of Rights last year, she had no idea that she’d have to get towed herself to find out just how badly tow companies have been skirting her law. The legislator took to social media last week to share a parking saga gone wrong that ended up exposing some shady towing practices. The senator joins host Bree Davies and returning fave, comedian and...

The Michelin Guide is giving some mystery, top tier restaurants highly coveted stars at their invite-only event on Sept. 12, but why wait? Turns out the world’s most prestigious dining guide went ahead and crowned some Denver Metro restaurants with a coveted spot on its Bib Gourmand list, which is kind of like an upscale version of the “value menu” for fine dining. Newsletter editor Peyton Garcia...

They don’t make stuff like they used to…turns out that’s true for Denver’s buildings as well. Art Writer and Architecture critic Michael Paglia has written about the Mile High’s growth spurts over many decades for Westword, and he’s seen some multi-story highs and lows, architecturally speaking. Michael joins host Bree Davies to discuss the city’s built environment of the 21st century — the good,...

Host Bree Davies and state politics and green chile correspondent Justine Sandoval are breaking down all the local stories that matter this week — starting with a Democratic committee appointing Tim Hernández to the vacated 4th house district seat and Justine digs into what the appointment of a Chicano community activist says the current Colorado democratic party. Then, Bree talks about the list o...

Denver’s park system is something to behold — we have more than 250 dedicated green spaces in the city proper and over 14,000 acres of Denver-owned parkland in the mountains, all open to the public for free. There are so many beautiful spots to soak up our Mile High magic outdoors, so where do you start? From the most underrated public landscapes to the most prime people-watching spots, host Bree...

When the University of Colorado hired NFL Hall of Fame superstar Deion “Prime Time” Sanders to be their next head football coach, Boulder went bananas. But it’s time to see what the new-look Buffs can do on the field, and the off-field stakes are just as high. Producer Paul Karolyi is talking through the implications for Boulder and the whole CU system with 5280 Magazine’s Editor Lindsey King and...

Guy Fieri’s people have returned to two Colorado restaurants made famous by “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” — which has us pondering what kind of an impact the show can make on a local business. Then, what was known for a quarter-century as the Park Tavern in Cap Hill is getting another chance at bar life, complete with tacos! And finally, we ask a contentious question: should dogs be allowed in res...

Well, it’s happening again. Complaints about traffic have driven the powers that be to make the same old proposal: What if we just added an extra lane to that troublesome highway? This time it’s the main road out to Denver International Airport — Peña Boulevard. The transit experts say it won’t help. But what about our new Mayor Mike Johnston? And what about all the new neighbors set to move into...

It’s Tuesday, and we’re talking about all the local stories that matter this week. First, the Latino Cultural Arts Center recently announced plans for “Las Bodegas,” a sprawling arts and cultural campus in the La Alma Lincoln Park neighborhood. But that’s just the latest big project transforming the Westside, a section of the city marred by a history of displacement and divided by highway infrastr...

A few years ago, the New York Times spent a weekend in Denver as part of its “36 Hours” series, offering a guide for how a visitor to the Mile High City could get the most out of our lovely city. This Denver travel guide felt somewhat theoretical, at best, and painfully unaware, at worst. Sooooo, we decided to fix it and make our own! Today on the show, host Bree Davies and producer Paul Karolyi a...