Guide to Quirky & Unique Dining Experiences in Denver

Interactive Meal by Avital Experiences

Our Denver Interactive Meal is a great way to make any restaurant unique! We team up with the best restaurants in Denver to deliver an exciting dining experience where you enjoy a beautiful four-course meal along with three beverages (either alcoholic or N/A alternatives). In between courses, there are three hosted, interactive activities. We’ll have your group shake up some cocktails, go head-to-head in Denver foodie trivia, and end the night with a taste bud-twisting surprise!

All

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Nocturne

Nocturne is the place where jazz and hospitality meet. When you book a “Dinner & a Show” reservation, you get to choose three dishes off their seasonal three-course menu, and you can also supplement your meal with charcuterie and small plates a la carte. The menu may feature delicious dishes like a spicy oxtail polpetta, an umami carrot and miso gnocchi, and decadent desserts like a lavender buttercream matcha cake.

You can opt to go all in and purchase the “Ellington Experience” (named after the Duke of Jazz himself), where you will be served a curated five-course tasting menu with wine pairings. As you enjoy the great food and wine, the ambiance of spirited live jazz and the supper club atmosphere will transport you all the way back to the 1930s.

Tasting Menu

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Brutø

All it takes is opening Brutø’s website to know you’re in for something wholly original, edgy, and boundary-breaking. This restaurant serves a “crude, blunt, raw” tasting menu of Japanese-Nordic Fusion food that has caught the eye of the Michelin guide, garnering it one Michelin Star, as well as a Michelin Green Star for its environmentally conscious sourcing and disposal practices.

This menu utilizes the hearth as a means of cooking and the process of fermentation in most of its dishes. The Michelin guide praises the “kombu-cured diver scallop with fermented crabapple and chamomile. The non-alcoholic pairings are especially intriguing, as in the lamb fat-washed Old Fashioned.” It’s sure to be a flavor-packed tasting experience showcasing dishes you’ve never experienced before.

Japanese-Nordic Fusion

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Hey Kiddo

Hey Kiddo is like that effortlessly cool girl you were secretly jealous of in high school. Where else can you drop soju shots into your beer with one hand while taking caviar bumps off the other? If you’re feeling adventurous, you can choose from their reasonably priced, highly elevated rainbow cocktail selection (green, for example, is agricole rum, pandan, and muskmelon) or ball out and get bubbles for the table (for about 10x the price).

The food menu operates much the same; you can get cheap small plates like pickled cucumbers, popcorn chicken, and the unmissable HK milk rolls with cultured butter, or you can opt for the luxurious “chef’s choice” seafood platter or, of course, the full caviar service featuring their “bling bling” caviar. It’s a delicious and exciting choose-your-own-adventure experience when you dine at Hey Kiddo.

Asian-inspired

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Buckhorn Exchange

When you walk into Buckhorn Exchange, you’ll immediately feel like you’ve been transported to a hunting lodge. Animal heads hang from every wall and adorn every available surface, and many of those animals are available for order on Buckhorn Exchange’s incredibly unique menu. Where else can you order elk, Cornish game hen, quail, buffalo steak and ribs, or Coloradoan lamb?

With all these exotic meats on the menu, you might be surprised that the most popular dish is a beef steak… Maybe you’ll be less surprised when you find out this steak is big enough to feed 5 people and carved table-side! Check out their roof garden if you’re looking to throw a big bash for up to 60 people! 

Steakhouse

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Margot

Margot has gone from its humble beginnings as a Sunday-only pop-up to a permanent one-Michelin-Star-awarded fixture in the Denver dining scene. Margot’s story isn’t the only thing that makes it unique; if you are one of twelve lucky guests at the chef’s counter, you will get to experience Chef Justin Fulton’s 10-course menu. He is a Coloradan native who infuses his contemporary American cuisine with the best seasonal produce and the deep, comforting flavors of his home state.

The Michelin Guide gushes about the “Individual loaves of fluffy olive oil brioche, freshly baked for each guest, [that] capture the meal’s easygoing charms.” This cultivated 10-course menu will leave you feeling pampered and impressed!

Contemporary American

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SuperMegaBien

SuperMegaBien is serving up some of the best Latin food in all of Colorado, but that isn’t what won them a spot on our list today. If you’ve ever been to an authentic dim sum restaurant, you probably enjoyed some of the best dishes of your meal right off the cart they push around to each table. SuperMegaBien has taken this ingenious invention and given it its own twist by creating a Latin Dim Sum cart!

This adds a sense of adventure to your meal because you can pick whatever looks good as it’s passing by, which will have you sampling dishes you never would have ordered off the menu. They say the eyes eat first, and when you see plates of vibrant chimichurri-coated carne asada and bright avocado mousse-adorned tuna ceviche, you’ll find yourself waving down the cart over and over again. 

Latin

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Beckon

Beckon is another Denver tasting menu that has won a star from the Michelin Guide. The concept and atmosphere here are very different from Brutø. Beckon works with the seasons, and there’s a spiritual tilt to their approach as they speak about the moon’s position in the sky and the turning of the seasons as highly influential towards their menu offerings.

When you enter the futuristic dining area with its warm brown and blue earth tones, you know immediately something magical is about to begin. Then they ask if you want to eat the vegetarian or omnivore menu, and from there, fantastical vegetable-focused dishes like a black truffle calrose rice,  buttery bass with tarragon, and salmon radish, or duck decorated with butternut squash and pumpkin seeds come out one after another. It’s a special dining experience that will engage your every sense.

Scandinavian

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Linger Eatuary

Most people don’t associate mortuaries with food and certainly not with enjoying one of the better meals of their lives, but Linger “Eatuary” might just change your mind on that. Linger Eatuary was once Olinger Mortuary, owned by a family that had the monopoly on human remains in Colorado for many years. Their claim to fame was that they held Buffalo Bill’s body for six months while Colorado and Wyoming argued over where his body would have its final resting place (Colorado won)!

Linger had kept the foundations of the mortuary and converted the inside into an epic dining room, while keeping small reminders of its origins, like the priest’s pew that is now the host stand, and the glass-covered conveyor belts that are now tables. Linger is one of our favorite Denver restaurants for large groups because it has multiple levels and an awesome rooftop happy hour, which makes dining with a big group of friends a delight! You’ll leave this unique and morbid dining spot with your belly full and (perhaps ironically) a lust for life!

Korean

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