Around Colorado Cocktails and chocolate: Walking tours for your own backyard

I found my guide, Lesia M. Bankston, outside our first restaurant of the afternoon, LOW Country Kitchen. She gathered our small group and ushered us inside to a reserved table. Bankston, a former chef instructor turned food, wine and fashion enthusiast, addressed the five of us with a natural smile.

“We’ll be visiting five places today,” she said, “and I never tell you where we’re going next till we’re there. I like surprises.”

I had put my afternoon in the hands of Local Table Tours, a Front Range outfit that offers themed culinary walking tours of Boulder, Fort Collins and Denver. Their tours focus on cocktails, coffee, chocolate, donuts, pub crawls, culinary or farmer’s markets.

On this afternoon, we had embarked on a three-hour culinarycocktail combo, beginning with Southern fried chicken.

LOW Country Kitchen started in Steamboat and opened this Denver location on Boulder Street about 18 months ago. It started us off with a pickleaccented whiskey sour and a sampling of its signature chicken, brined for 24 hours, then breaded with buttermilk and hot sauce. Served with collard greens and fancy mac ’n’ cheese, it was delicious — and a solid, carb-enforced base for what was to come.

Bankston led us out the door, over a bridge and onto North Platte Street, where we ducked into Savory Spice Shop to lick infused sugars and salts off our palms; exotic hints of whiskey, ghost pepper and vanilla played on our palates as we moved on again.