Tuesday, September 1, 2026

The Top 100 Places to Eat Near Hotel Polaris

  1. The wood-fired oven is the centerpiece here, visible and working hard, the kind that gives a Neapolitan pizzeria its whole reason for existing. The dough is slow-leavened and properly soft, and the menu runs from certified traditional pies to more creative builds you put together yourself. Craft beers and Italian wines round things out, and the staff actually knows the menu. Roomy enough for families, quiet enough for a date night.














  2. Rank 14. Kizaki

    Omakase Japanese

    Toshi Kizaki built Denver's Japanese dining scene over four decades, and this intimate counter omakase is where he's raising his own bar. Around twenty courses move between small plates and nigiri he shapes himself, with Michelin's one-star stamp confirming what regulars already knew. The room is spare and dramatically lit, the pacing unhurried, and the sake pairings handled with care. This is a full-commitment dinner, not a drop-in.


  3. Rank 15. Margot

    Contemporary New American

    Eight seats at a counter tucked inside a shared space, which tells you almost everything about the vibe before the bread arrives. Margot is a multicourse tasting menu restaurant earning a Michelin star on the strength of cooking that reads as both Colorado and everywhere at once. Each guest gets their own individual loaf of olive oil brioche, freshly baked, which sets the tone for hospitality that somehow manages not to feel performative.












  4. The move here is mon nhau, Vietnamese bar food that runs to pork-stuffed chicken wings, snails in salted egg yolk, and fries drowning in brisket and garlic butter. The pho shots, vodka and beef broth, set the tone for everything else. This Harvey Park kitchen and bar keeps the pho and bánh mì around for the cautious, but the menu's whole subtext is that caution is overrated. Bring people you like enough to share a three-liter soju tower with.



  5. A strip-mall Turkish restaurant in Englewood with four tables and portions that could feed a small village. The menu runs through lamb shish kebabs, börek, pita-wrapped gyros, and the layered iskender, all at prices that make you feel briefly guilty. The team runs the room with the kind of warmth that makes strangers feel like regulars. Finish with baklava and strong Turkish coffee, then figure out how to button your coat.





















  6. Rank 48. Ochag Bar & Grill

    Armenian Middle Eastern

    An Armenian and Caucasian grill tucked into an Aurora strip mall, where the khachapuri arrives topped with egg and cheese and the beef dumplings, called khinkali, are large enough to require a small plan of attack. The menu runs from hearty stews and hand-pulled noodles to eggplant rolls stuffed with garlic-walnut spread. Georgian wine, from a region that considers itself the cradle of viticulture, is the right call alongside any of it.











  7. Rank 58. Ototo

    Japanese























  8. A Sicilian family splits the room between a bakery counter stacked with lobster tail pastries and sweet cannoli and a full sit-down dining area with a bar, so you can eat chicken parm and lasagna, then carry dessert home. The savory cannoli, stuffed with sausage, jalapeños, and oozing mozzarella, has earned its own following. Finish with the house limoncello, made cream-style in the Sicilian way, which lands somewhere between a digestif and a milkshake.









  9. The house-made Málört alone tells you something about this place's priorities. Fellow Traveler is a vegan cocktail bar on South Broadway where the drinks menu runs from Chinese baijiu to Hungarian digestifs, and the food manages to be plant-based without announcing it every five minutes. The "Strange Cargo" spirits list rewards the curious, and Westword has called it Denver's top vegan restaurant more than once.






  10. Every mix-in at this Denver ice cream shop is made from scratch, which explains why the flavors change weekly and why people follow the Instagram just to see what's coming next. The team builds their own base, loads the pints accordingly, and sells them for pickup alongside draft beer, which is either a genius pairing or an obvious one depending on how you feel about it. A Westword Best Ice Cream pick two years running.



  11. Rank 95. Dough Counter

    Sicilian/NY-Style Pizza







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Eat Score

The score comes from the awards it's won, weighted by who gave them: a Michelin star outweighs a listicle. When you sort by what's nearby, distance changes the order, never the score.

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    Drink Score

    The score comes from the awards it's won, weighted by who gave them: a Michelin star outweighs a listicle. When you sort by what's nearby, distance changes the order, never the score.

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      Stay Score

      The score comes from the awards it's won, weighted by who gave them: a Michelin star outweighs a listicle. When you sort by what's nearby, distance changes the order, never the score.

        How we score →

        Do Score

        The score comes from the awards it's won, weighted by who gave them: a Michelin star outweighs a listicle. When you sort by what's nearby, distance changes the order, never the score.

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          The Best Place Score rates the area around a point, not any one place. It runs on the scored places nearby: more good stuff within reach, higher score. If it looks low, we probably haven't found enough critics out here yet.