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Opening season

New food and beverage businesses set up shop in Durango

Want some good news?

The Great Recession may be taking its sweet time ending, but local entrepreneurs aren’t waiting. In recent weeks and months, Durango got its first local, honest-to-goodness deli with home-cooked meats, its first craft distillery, its first vegan and raw take-out place and its first restaurant dedicated to down-home Southern food.

Risk-taking is alive and well in our town, to say nothing of excellent eating and drinking.

And the businesspeople who create our food and drink, no matter what style, find inspiration in using the freshest local and regional ingredients. It’s their way of contributing to this community, whether that means greens grown in Mancos, pigs farmed in Bayfield or grain harvested in Salida.

A recurring theme in each of these new ventures is their owners’ desire not just to make a living but to do good for their customers. You can order a sandwich with no additives or preservatives at Three Peaks Deli & Grill, buy a birthday cake for your dairy-allergic niece at Earth Girls Goodies, drink vodka made from sweet corn hand-processed in small batches at Durango Craft Spirits and sip tea sweetened with molasses at Yardbird Eatery.

And if you doubted that times are indeed getting better, look no further. Durango foodies have even more local restaurants, bakeries and breweries to choose from. Animas Brewing Co., the town’s sixth craft beer pub, is up and running and doing a slamming business in the old For the Birds building. Doc Hathaway’s Café, opened by veteran restaurateur Jon Park on Main Avenue, is serving up comfort food favorites. Baker Streak, a new custom-order bakery, is off the ground, too, at bakerstreak.com, while an established one, the Pie Maker, will open its own storefront in Cortez on March 2.

As always, local foodies are the lucky ones. Eat up!

Yardbird Eatery

Buttermilk fried chicken, ham braised collard greens, cheddar grits – where am I? South Carolina?

Nope, just off Main Avenue in downtown Durango at Yardbird Eatery, the creation of well-known local chef Neal Drysdale and restaurant manager Annie Drysdale.

Chefs always want to strike out on their own (that’s just the way it is) and after five good years at Seasons Rotisserie & Grill, Neal was ready to launch his own venture. He called in his former business partner (and former wife) Annie, and the two brainstormed about what kind of restaurant Durango needed next.

Fine dining? No, too many already here. Sandwich shop, like Poppy’s, which used to occupy the space? No, it didn’t work. The two got hungry after all this thinking and went for a quick bite of fried chicken from a local grocery. It was good, hot and satisfying.

Bingo.

While Neal grew up in Monte Vista, his father Ed was reared on a sharecropping farm along the White River in Arkansas. The cook in the family, he treated his children to his own childhood foods like beans and cornbread, ham and biscuits and, of course, fried chicken.

“He loved to cook,” Neal said. “This food is Americana. It brings back great memories of my father.”

It will bring back for you memories of your grandmother’s buttery mashed potatoes and fluffy biscuits and perhaps your bacon-crazed brother’s twist on mac and cheese. Most everything is sourced locally or regionally and made in-house.

I don’t care how good a cook your grandmother was, she didn’t make fried chicken like this. Neal brines the bird for 24 hours in a solution that includes lemons, garlic, chiles, salt and pepper, drains it, and brines it for another 24 hours in buttermilk before frying in peanut oil, a Southern staple. The 48-hour fried chicken – who knew?

“It’s fine dining, but people don’t know it,” Annie said.

Yardbird Eatery, from-scratch Southern, 139 E. Fifth St., 259-1377, open 11:30 a.m.-8 p.m Monday-Saturday.

Earth Girls Goodies

One by one, girls ranging in age from 7 to 70 filled the tiny entryway of Earth Girls Goodies to place their orders.

One was allergic to wheat and looking for breakfast muffins. Another, with a daughter dressed as Minnie Mouse in tow, wanted a sweet treat for a friend who couldn’t tolerate dairy. A grandmother needed Valentine’s goodies to satisfy three youngsters, all with different allergies. A pregnant customer became enamored of a vegan orange ginger cheesecake because it contained no gluten, no dairy and no soy, none of which she can eat.

If you don’t believe Americans are suffering from a compromised food system, think again.

Emyrald Sinclaire and Kirsten Gum, experienced cooks with backgrounds in raw and vegan nutrition, certainly have.

“We’re doing this to help people feel good again. They have so much chronic pain, inflammation, allergies,” said Gum. “It’s more of a mission than a business.”

It must be, because cooking for the gluten-free, Paleo-friendly, vegan, raw and soy-free take-out place is just one of three jobs each holds. Both also teach yoga and wait tables at local restaurants.

But three days a week, you can find them cooking away in their kitchen behind Your Flesh Tatoo, chatting with customers as the air fills with the scent of cumin zucchini soup and chocolate mint ganache. (Try it, you’ll never know it’s avocado that makes it so creamy.)

You can dash in and pick up a spring roll for lunch, a crunchy mix of peppers, zucchini, cabbage and carrots wrapped in rice paper and served with a delicious tamari-based dipping sauce. You could try out one of their salads made from the super-food of the moment, kale, or a health food fanatic’s favorite grain, quinoa. Or you could do as most of us did that Friday before Valentine’s and scoop up a sweet for a special sweetie that requires no effort of your own and no worry about illness-inducing ingredients like wheat, milk or eggs.

If you have food allergies and you still like to eat, Earth Girls are here to help.

Earth Girls Goodies, organic eats, delicious treats, 1849 Main Ave., 403-5720, open 8 a.m.-1 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Durango Craft Spirits

She managed a country club and he ran a local inn, but that didn’t stop Amy and Michael McCardell from opening a business they knew nothing about. In Durango, it rarely does.

And in Durango, it often leads to success, so who’s to knock it? The two are trying their hand at creating the town’s first homemade liquor from scratch, buying the corn and other grains from Colorado farms and applying their self-taught skills to the ancient craft.

And you know what? It’s mighty tasty stuff – softer, smoother and sweeter than most any commercial vodka you’ll try. Michael, who brews while Amy runs the tasting room and gift shop, named it Soiled Doves after the Durango prostitutes whose city fines helped build the town’s first police station and public school.

They got the idea for the enterprise when a county code enforcement officer told them that during the silver market crash, out-of-work miners made moonshine and hid their stills in the surrounding mountains. So it’s fitting that Michael’s next hand-crafted offering will be an un-aged 90-proof whiskey, hopefully ready for bottling this June.

No matter what they’re serving, locals seem impatient to try it. On a brilliant, warm afternoon, the spacious bar was lined with women drinking the Butler, a mix of vodka, grapefruit and pomegranate juices, and men enjoying Silver Mountain Mules at 1 p.m., a full hour before the distillery officially opens.

In the renovated space that once held the Back Stage movie theater, you can see Michael’s operation through an enormous glass window and often, Michael himself, tending to one of the various stages of mashing, fermenting and stripping distilling requires. If you like the free taste they offer you, you can buy a bottle of Soiled Doves to take home.

Amy’s love is retail – girls do love to shop – and her dream is to expand the small gift shop she runs next door. Michael’s love is whiskey, and his dream is this: A man from Dallas asks a friend visiting Durango to “bring me back a case of that bourbon, will you?”

Durango Craft Spirits, distillery and tasting room, 1120 Main Ave., Suite 2, 247-1919, open from 2 p.m.-8 p.m. weekdays and later on weekends.

Three Peaks Deli & Grill

After watching four restaurants close in four years in the North Main Avenue property she manages, Gillian Arnwine could take it no more.

The former journalist, medical assistant and businesswoman just knew she could make a go of it in the strip mall across from the high school. But what, she wondered, did Durango need?

Channeling her husband’s love for a meaty, manly Philly cheese steak, the answer arrived – a great local delicatessen.

“It was my duty to the people,” she said, jesting. “I love a good sandwich, and we really didn’t have that in town.”

She knew what to do – cook and smoke the meats in-house, create a killer green goddess dressing and an amazing Reuben and the rest would take care of itself.

And it has. The Reuben and Philly cheese steak are best-sellers. Everyone from high-schoolers to construction workers comes by for lunch or to pick up a pound of their amazing turkey breast (the best in town, honest) or even to have a lunch meeting at one of Three Peaks’ commodious tables.

General manager Matt Sutton has taken the concept of simple, healthy and homemade to new levels, crafting everything himself, from jalapeño coleslaw to pulled pork. Next, he’s planting a garden so he can use the tomatoes, lettuce and peppers in his soups and salads.

“I hate preservatives. I hate all that stuff,” he said. “I love making good homemade food.”

Now that Three Peaks is going well, Arnwine can bask in the satisfaction of succeeding where other have failed and in pleasing Durango’s sophisticated, food-centric residents.

“I knew I could make it work,” she said.

Three Peaks Deli & Grill, 2411 Main Ave., 422-8204, open 10 a.m.-7 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. weekends.

phasterok@durangoherald.com



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