The Corner Office Bar - The Curtis Hotel - Where the Christ can I get a reasonably priced drink in a fancy schmancy hotel bar?

Last weekend, was the first official taste-testing of the Denver. Hotel Bars were the crawl and well, I was definitely pleasantly surprised.

Hotel: The Curtis Hotel (14th and Curtis)

Hotel Bar: The Corner Office

Style: Brady Bunch Chic

Music: Clubby R&B

Girls tart up to look like: Jessica Simpson

Age Range: 20s/30s

Booze Price: Very Reasonable / Cheap Bastard worthy

Signature Drinks: Not Stupid

Food Price: Very Reasonable

Food Creativity compared with deliciousness: Pretty good

Sexy Terror Alert: Yellow, I guess - this criteria is still in progress - could also be Sexy WMDs - at a rating of 3 on the nuclear sexy level or something like that.

Thoughts by my fellow Americans: This place looks like it was designed from a focus group.

Average length of time it took a lady to get ready before her arrival: Two Hours

Let's go straight into it. The bar looked super chic and was fashioned after the 1970s. I never knew the 70s could be sexed up so much. The drinks were surprisingly reasonably priced. The signature drinks ranged from $8-$10 and for cheap bastards, a Schlitz will only set you back $3.

The menu was all over the place - everywhere from euromexasian to kind of three years ago with comfort food such as chicken and waffles and signature drinks like "The Dirty Shirley (an alcoholic Shirley Temple) and the Cherry Coke (Bacardi and Grenadine and Coke). If you ever wondered what too much grenadine does to a drink, you can easily find out by ordering either one of those. On the plus side, I have no problem with too much grenadine especially when the drink starts to water down a little - it goes down real real smooth.

The chicken and waffles, while dated in hipness were delicious and very cheap - around $8-$10. The humus was pretty good, but the pièce de ré·sis·tance in my opinion was the Salami Quesadilla. You are probably saying to yourself right now - what is this crazy meat-aholic talking about? This is what I mean by suggesting you suspend your disbelief. I think the quesadilla was orginally supposed to have chorizo in it but they must have run out of chorizo and just said fuck it - throw in some salami, no one will notice the difference. Well, we did and they are lucky that the salami melted in my mouth like it did because it was glorious. Sometimes I forget to thank Jesus for good things that happen to me. Usually I just blame him for stuff like my root canal without any anaesthetic and my face shingles. Let me take this moment to say thank you Jesus for having the kitchen run out of chorizo so that salami could make love to cheese in my mouth. It was gorgeous.

The Bathroom: Ok, so there has always been something weird about girls and public bathrooms. No matter what kind of girl she might be, as soon as she walks into the shitter she thinks she is Sylvia Plath and will write anything and everything from "Johnny fucks skank whores", to a poem about love, on the bathroom stalls. I am not sure how girls always manage to have permanent markers on-hand unless they plan ahead, but I assume there is some sense of historical value placed on finding your brilliant haiku about vaginas three weeks after having written it. It doesn't matter how fancy the bar, girls love to get drunk and write all over the place. The Corner Office believes it has a solution, which I suspect, while cute, will last about three weeks. One wall of the bathroom is covered in post-it notes so you can write whatever you want on a little post it and then at the end of the night, someone will take them down mocking your stupidity while cleaning the toilets.

The moral of the story is - this seems like a superhip chain restaurant bar - it is very cool and a bit cliche - you might not feel like you belong unless you work at Buffalo Exchange and just so happened to have that super-swank totally 70s looking hipster outfit, that you pretended to hate originally, when the person who sold it to your store brought it in, so they wouldn't think they were cooler than you because god forbid someone should have thought of it first. The food is pretty good, the drinks aren't too expensive and there are tables and tables of girls all kinds of tarted up - hanging out to either celebrate a birthday - or not getting herpes or whatever it is that 20something celebrate when they go out downtown. Nonetheless, I would go back again and not just to eat a salami quesadilla. Plus, you get a thumbs up from the waitress (who is dressed like a cheerleader) if you order a Schlitz.

The End
Mallory

Please let me know what you think about this - too long? Probably