Milk & Honey spices up Larimer Square
Since Denver’s LoDo neighborhood started hitting its stride in the 1990s, Larimer Square has been a magnet for excellent restaurants.
Rooms such as Rioja, Tamayo, Bistro Vendôme and Osteria Marco call the street home. Ditto for respected chain operations such as Ocean Prime, The Capital Grille and Crú.
To that mix, add Milk & Honey. After much talk and a few delays, the restaurant opened in early June. It has put itself on the map with an excellent rotating menu that shows passion, creativity and plain good sense about what makes taste buds high-five themselves.
Milk & Honey occupies the former Lime space, although if you were blindfolded on your walk into the place, you would never guess that. While the room’s dimensions remain largely the same, the decor has utterly changed. The restaurant is dimly lit and while large, it feels intimate.
It is divided into a main dining room and a spacious bar-lounge. The latter has a long wall with a banquette, plus an array of curved, upholstered booths that look like the dining industry’s answer to the Bermuda Triangle. They’re that big.
There is also a 12-seat bar. On one recent evening, a personable bartender from Virginia shuttled between two parties, one of them a couple from England who were doing a months-long grand tour of Canada and the United States.
The kitchen is helmed by executive chef and owner Michael Shiell, who ran Michael’s Cherry Creek in the 1990s and also worked at Baldoria in New York. The chef chef de cuisine is Lance Barto, who worked at Brazen. (Earlier this year there was a bit of an online dust-up about Milk & Honey’s name, which duplicates two well-known spots in New York and London but is