For the past two and a half years, since the Michelin-starred—and Food & Wine’s second-best restaurant in America—Alma Fonda Fina opened in LoHi, chef Johnny Curiel has been leading a revolution. A salsa macha, dry-aged tuna, mole negro-filled campaign to give Mexican cuisine the recognition and reverence it deserves. All the awards, accolades, best-of lists, and impossible-to-get reservations for his restaurants show just how far he’s come, but with Milpero, Curiel pushes that mission one step further.
“In Denver, we still think of Mexican food as being cheap, a value, but it can also be in a tasting menu setting, a story in itself,” Curiel says, who owns all the restaurants along with his wife, Kasie.
Milpero is Denver’s first Mexican tasting-menu-only restaurant, where you don’t order your food; you simply trust that whatever Curiel and his team of ten chefs give you to eat will be delicious. And spoiler alert: it is. Over the course of roughly 20 dishes, the meal travels through different regions of Mexico, showcasing a remarkable range of ingredients, techniques, and traditions. The experience is so intricate and thoughtfully choreographed that a single evening’s menu requires 125 recipes and preparations behind the scenes.
It all happens inside RiNo’s TAXI development, where just eight guests are seated at a time, twice nightly. At $225 a person, dinner isn’t inexpensive, but the price falls squarely in line with Denver’s omakase and European-focused tasting-menu restaurants. More importantly, Milpero makes a compelling case that Mexican cuisine belongs in that company.
“There’s so much that goes behind Mexican food. The sauces, the aguachiles, everything is a labor of love—a mole takes three days to cook. Milpero has given us a stage to have people sit with us for three hours, and we can explain all these things. I feel so great when people say, ‘Thank you for bringing history to the dinner, for the explanations,’” he says.
And it is very interactive, with Curiel there for at least two services a week to lead guests through the tasting and explain the ingredients, history, and process. The first step in getting there, though, is by far the hardest: scoring a reservation. You’ll need to log on to OpenTable at precisely 8 a.m. the first of each month and hope your Wi-Fi is blessed by the Internet gods. (For July, reservations sold out in all of 90 seconds.) If you secure a seat, the hard part is over.
Guests are welcomed with a cocktail or mocktail made with corn grown on Curiel’s 20-acre southeast Boulder farm before entering the quietly dramatic, textured space. The first stop is the cold counter, where nine small plates might include an oyster splashing around in smoked tomato broth, kanpachi aguachile dressed with wild mushrooms and hazelnut oil, or a crisp flauta stuffed with bluefin tuna and dotted with mole rosa and salsa macha verde.
After a quick intermission in the fermentation room, the action shifts to the hot counter, for cooked dishes like a chicharron gordita drenched in crema de rancho and chile arbol salsa, tender chunks of Colorado lamb paired with “burnt” mole and sweet potato gastrique, and a fish taco topped with charred habanero and served on the softest tortilla you’ll ever eat.
Just when you think you’ve reached the finish line, four desserts arrive. On my visit, the takes on spiced hot chocolate, tres leches cake, and sweet fritters were among my favorite bites of the night. And you’re still not done, because then Chef sends you home with short rib chile Colorado burritos for the next day.
Curiel's revolution was never about replacing the taco trucks on Federal, the green chile-smothered burritos, or the foods people already love. It's about expanding the conversation. Milpero shows that the next frontier in Denver dining isn't always discovering something new, but appreciating something that's been here all along.
Milpero: 3455 Ringsby Ct., Denver; MilperoDenver.com