Wine Experience Cafe

I started worrying about Wine Experience Cafe the moment I stepped inside. The place was empty, completely deserted on a day and at an hour when the eighty-seat dining room should have been packed. I was thinking that in this neighborhood (Southlands, another one of those commercial/residential, new-urbanism developments that seem to be growing like kudzu out on the plains, springing up and spreading with a fierceness and hunger that borders on the supernatural), where there's still some money and the competition is twenty national chain restaurants, a Chipotle and a bunch of places to buy cookies, a place like this would kill, drawing down the foodies like a magnet.

Wine Experience has the credentials. It's got a hook and a location that isn't great (not exactly on the Southlands main drag, instead facing out into one of the dozen labyrinthine parking lots in the back), but isn't bad, either — plenty of parking, lots of windows, a corner lot on one of the side streets. The chef is Matt Franklin, ex of San Diego and Taos, a modern chef with a French nouvelle mindset and some California chops. He was top dog at 240 Union for a long time and created menus there that were almost too Californian for Colorado but definitely too Coloradan for California. They were both classical and borderless, jumping around among French, American, Italian, Asian and Mediterranean — sometimes all on the same plate. And, yeah, I hate that shit, but what saved it was Franklin's impeccable technique and an understanding of the interplay of ingredients that sometimes seemed almost molecular. Lobster corn dogs? Goat-cheese-stuffed French toast on a dinner plate? It was gimmicky and goofy and shouldn't have worked in a million years — and yet, if I were to make a top-ten list of the most memorable single bites I've had since coming to Denver, that goat toast would be on it. It was awesome.

For Franklin, the Wine Experience Cafe concept was a perfect fit. It's a wine shop with a restaurant attached. (Or, in my world, a restaurant with a wine shop next door.) All of the bottles and glasses served in the restaurant are available for sale in the shop; most of the bottles in the shop can be cracked and poured in the dining room. All of the cuisine (and there's a lot of cuisine here, an almost incalculable amount) is keyed to the wines and is designed by Franklin, with his weird, six-way sense for ingredient combinations, to complement the bottles or be shocked against a certain pairing. He does wine dinners; he does tastings. He does the whole chef-plus-wine-guy shtick. And so the Cafe would seem to have everything going for it.

But still, it was empty when I walked in for the first time — and worse, the floor staff was whoring it up to raise a little trade. Whenever anyone would walk close to the doors, peek inside, stop to glance at the menu, they'd rush the front like Marines trying to take a machine-gun position bare-handed. They'd talk and chatter, invite people to come inside for a drink, do everything short of beg. And seriously, that kind of thing will put anyone off his feed.

It almost scared me away, but I'm stubborn and I was very hungry. I'd had a look at the menu — a great menu, in its way, and broadly engaging by any measure. And then I saw Franklin, standing in the kitchen (not sucking up drinks at the bar, not chilling in the cool of an office somewhere), surrounded by his crew. I was thinking, "Okay, brother. You look ready to cook. Let's see what you've got..."

What he had was crab cakes — really good ones, fat with lump crabmeat, golden brown, not gunked up with bell pepper or filler, and touched with a harissa aioli and a cucumber raita. For those of you keeping score, that single plate has the signal elements of three different and widely varied world cuisines, each of them working in perfect concert: luxurious Americana, fever-hot North African and cooling, soothing Indian. Not a bad start.