Zengo In Brief
Zengo is chef Richard Sandoval’s Denver restaurant, located in the heart of Riverfront Park in downtown Denver.
Latin and Asian food served together. If you’re willing to try empanadas and sushi side by side you’re in the right place.
Oak and reddish design with blue and yellow accent lights. Like a forest with a leafy canopy of colorful wine bottles.
The bar and lounge area is a hip place to hang out, but needs a few more servers. 20 minutes to run a credit card doesn’t cut it.
Visit early or late. The food is excellent, but I suspect the popularity stems more from the sum of the design elements and trendy location rather than actual food itself. Thus the place is mobbed with insufficient staff for a hopping winter Saturday night.
More info at (and photo from) Modernmexican.com.
Good review. I can agree with almost everything you said in here (Particularly that the design outweighs the food. But the food is pretty darn good so that says a lot about the atmosphere.)
We went there for pre-theater happy hour a few weeks ago. The app’s were gorgeous and good, tho’ I wished that fewer were fried. We had an order of Kobe chorizo tacos that weren’t fried, but we didn’t select the also-unfried edamame, because that’s not my husband’s idea of “food.” I descrived what we had and posted a couple of pix at
http://culinary-colorado.blogspot.com/2008/02/happy-hour-at-zingy-zengo.html
Great recent write up. I didn’t mention I was there for a party so was dividing my time between the bar/lounge and a friend’s table. I did enjoy the food – empanadas were good(second to BsAs Pizzeria) despite the fact that I was actually contributing to the very crowding and loud decibles that annoys me during busy Saturday nights at places like this…
When I saw the URL for this restaurant in your post “modernmexican.com” I thought it might be your sister site. You know, Future Gringo…. Modern Mexican….. ha.