RESTAURATEUR BOOSTING AMARO TREND IN DENVER
Denver restaurateur boosting the Amaro trend
Elliot Strathmann has always been a curious person. After studying physics and the liberal arts and sciences in college, he dabbled in finance and considered law school. He worked in restaurants and married a chef. “I don’t satisfy easily,” he said. “But when I dig in, I dig deep.” These days, Strathmann is digging in on amaro.
And that’s proven to be a very good thing for him and his wife, Cindhura Reddy, partners in the restaurant Spuntino in Denver’s Lower Highlands neighborhood.
Before settling in Denver in 2013, and buying the restaurant the following year, Strathmann and Reddy circumnavigated the globe. After quitting their restaurant jobs in Philadelphia, they backpacked for nine months through Southeast Asia, India, Egypt, Turkey, and Eastern and Western Europe, extending their budget by working on farms. In Italy’s Abruzzo region, they stayed with a friend’s father in the medieval town of Pacentro.
“After we dined on a large and heavy meal, our various restaurant proprietors would invariably produce an unmarked bottle of dark brown liquid. Always, they insisted we drink,” Strathmann recalled. “It was homemade, and all based around the gentian root — genziana in Italian — which is wellknown for its digestive quality. We kind of hated it.”
Gentian is a flowering plant whose root has been used in herbal medicine for more than 2,000 years. Along with cinchona bark, wormwood and angelica root, it is among the most common bittering agents used to make amaro.
Strathmann guesses the amari (plural for amaro) they drank in Italy contained anywhere between 17 and 35 percent alcohol. “They weren’t labeled or tested, but some were softer and sweeter than others. At best, I might have appreciated how they made me feel. But I certainly didn’t enjoy the taste.”
Back then, like many Americans, Strathmann didn’t yet have the palate for the bitter. Nonetheless, he was