Broomfield Restaurant Reviews

Oh woe!  Lafayette, Colorado has a lot of great dining options, and possibly more variety than Broomfield.  But there’s a dearth of restaurants serving Sunday brunch, it seems.

Beth and I set out this morning around 11:00 to try to find brunch in Lafayette.  We knew Casa Alvarez had what used to be a well-known breakfast buffet on the weekend.  I checked their website and it lists the Saturday and Sunday breakfast buffet, though it doesn’t say what you’re likely to find.  Beth was in the mood for American breakfast foods, and I thought a mix of American and Mexican would be nice.  So we headed straight to Casa Alvarez.  But as soon as we got seated, I looked around and had a bad feeling.  We asked the waiter, and he said they stopped doing their breakfast buffet about six months ago.  The regular lunch menu didn’t have food on it that Beth was looking for.

So we left, and headed down South Public Road.  There are several restaurants in old town, but they’re mostly Mexican joints and I didn’t have any hopes that they would have American brunch.  So the next place we visited was Canopy Grill.  It was even listed in a book on great Denver breakfast restaurants a few years back.  But when we got there, the waitress told us they stopped doing breakfast about a year ago.  So we settled for lunch.

Louisville has Huckleberry and a few coffee shops.  Broomfield has The Egg and I and a few hotel restaurants that serve breakfast buffet.  But we’ve been to all those.  I just can’t think of a single full service restaurant that serves American style breakfast food in Lafayette.  Are there any?  What do people in Lafayette do when they want to go out for breakfast?

I just read this from the Broomfield Enterprise:

http://www.broomfieldenterprise.com/news/2009/may/30/broomfield-hooks-butcher-shop-with-tax-incentives

Herb’s Meat and Specialty Foods, which has been a Boulder fixture since 1976, will relocate to the Depot Hill Shopping Center at the corner of U.S. 287 and 10th Avenue. High rents and a shifting customer base are forcing the independently owned butcher out of its longtime home.

Woo hoo!  A real butcher shop within walking distance of my house.  Now if we could just get an independent owned coffee shop and a real bakery in the same area…

The Armadillo Mexican restaurant in Broomfield went out of business a few months back.  H.K. is a Chinese guy I work with, and he’s from Hong Kong, the world center of dim sum.  He told me he heard that a dim sum restaurant was moving in there, and I was so excited!

You see, ever since being introduced to dim sum on a business trip to San Jose, CA about 12 years ago, I’ve been really fond of it.  But the nearest dim sum to Broomfield is way down on Alameda, where apparently almost all the dim sum restaurants in Denver are.  I’m a fan of King’s Land, myself.  H.K. says it’s the most authentic.

But then weeks came and went, and I started to wonder.  I did a little research and couldn’t find any information at all about a dim sum restaurant.  I did find the public record of the sale of the property.  I think it was in 2007 and the new owner didn’t have the kind of name I’d expect from a dim sum restaurantier, if you know what I mean (it was something like George Leonidas).  So I gave up.

But just last week, after several months of nothing, a sign went up on the building:

Heaven Star Chinese Dim Sum Coming Soon

That’s all.  No date.  But I have noticed that some mild and slow-paced remodeling has been going on there over the past couple weeks.  So, I’m back to feeling optimistic that we’re going to get dim sum.  I don’t know if this is strange or not, but this dim sum restaurant will be almost at the exact geometric center of Broomfield’s 3 pho restaurants, and no more than 300 yards from any of them.

I’m even thinking of inviting Jason Sheehan (the restaurant reviewer for Westword) to go have dinner with us on opening night, as a way of celebrating.  But I doubt he’d stoop to dine with mere mortals.

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Update: The restaurant opened January 20.  I visited twice in the first week and wrote this review of it.  So I’m disabling comments on this post now.  Please leave your thoughts about Heaven Star over here.

If I had my way, here are the types of restaurants that people would create in Broomfield:

• small family owned diner and coffee shop near Highway 287 and Miramonte, not unlike Mel’s Diner (which only stayed open less than 2 years, I think)
• fairly nice Indonesian restaurant
• Hawaiian BBQ, including plate lunch