For summer tourists: our restaurant choices

Mediocre places abound, but we tell you some good ones

| Jul 12, 2010

If you’re one of our summer tourist visitors, welcome. Or, you may be researching a trip to Boulder using Google and you’ve found us, clever you.
Antonio Laudisio making paella on the patio

One word of advice: don’t randomly wander into restaurants downtown. We felt so bad when some visiting friends of ours wandered into, oh, I won’t say the name of the decidedly wrong downtown Mexican restaurant. When it comes to food, we and the spousal unit are fussy.

Here then are our restaurant recommendations, to keep you from making a horrible choice on your own (of which there are potentially many):

  • Radex Bistro (formerly Full Belly) — Not downtown but in the Willow Springs strip mall at 28th and Iris. Reliably wonderful food with a French flair, and a place where you want to order about 10 things on the fairly short menu. Outdoor patio.
  • Chy Thai — Boulder’s best Thai food, with the same Thai family running the place for years and the same cool, friendly servers. Also an obscure location, on the south side of Canyon a few doors west of 28th St., facing Ead’s News and around the corner from World Market.
  • Laudisio — Genuine Italian in a big, big room in the newish 29th Street area, across from the Apple Store. Lots of fun, and the view from the patio on a summer night: ahhhhh.
  • Bacco Trattoria — On North Broadway, a new place with reliably authentic Italian. Outdoor patio.

Ooo, you lucky tourists who read Boulder Reporter. You’ll be spared a great number of not-very-nice places. Beyond those four, our list of decent Boulder restaurants gets really iffy. Stick with these four.


Your comments?

And as for you, whether tourist or local, we’d love to hear your experiences at any of these four, your tales of other nice discoveries, or horror stories of wrong choices made. Comment form below (no registration necessary).