Down and Out in Denver

Sometime during our adventure on Saturday night Alastair and I decided that we wanted to go to a mall the next day.  The logic of this decision now escapes me; maybe something to do with holiday shopping? And for some reason we decided to go to the Park Meadows Mall, which we had never visited before.  That’s right, readers, we were off to the suburbs!

After a late start yesterday – too many cocktails the night before – we set out around noon down I-25 and upon our arrival in Lone Tree decided to have lunch immediately.  We walked through the food court – known as the dining hall at Park Meadows – but it was all the usual suspects, and it was also crowded with lots of screaming children.  Consulting a mall map we discovered that a restaurant called the Grand Lux Café was located nearby – though you had to exit the mall to get to it; presumably this is a way of attracting non-mall-goers to dine – and we headed outside to check out the menu.  As we perused it a couple emerged from within; “It’s really good,” said a man wearing a truly unfortunate pair of knock-off True Religion jeans.  That should have been our first hint, but we went in anyway.

The Ceiling at the GLC

The first thing that must be said about the Grand Lux Café is that it is indeed grand and lux.  It’s as if the developers told the designer: “I don’t care what you do as long as it looks expensive!”  And the designer thought, “I know just the thing: gold!  Lots of gold.  And purple, too.  Like royalty!”  The space itself is enormous and covered in gold and purple and bangles and lamps and shiny gilt and faux finishing and any number of other big, fancy, shiny details designed to make one feel that one is dining in sumptuous luxury.  The menu is equally large and just as capacious.  There is no culinary theme to the Grand Lux menu; whatever your little heart might desire can be yours.  Indeed they boast that they have “something for everyone.”  Our waitress, whom I’ll call Lauren, asked us if we’d been to Grand Lux before (why is it that every server now asks this question? The subject of another post), and when we admitted that we were GLC virgins, warned us that portions were huge (her word).  From beginning to end, Lauren was the best thing about the GLC: attentive and friendly without being overly so.

Alastair's Soggy Salad

And she was right about the portions, which were indeed sizable.  The food was ho-hum, but no great surprise there.  I had a chicken salad sandwich with fries.   The sandwich was on the runny side but still reasonably tasty.  Alastair had an overly dressed salad and a lunch portion (still enormous) of spaghetti carbonara.  The carbonara was more “Alfredo with bacon and peas” than a proper carbonara; no clinging egg and cheese here, just sauce.  But really, who cares about the food, which we expected to be pretty standard anyway?

Let’s talk about the people, and here, dear reader, be forewarned: I am about to reveal myself for the snob that you’d probably already suspected me to be.  While most  people there, like us, seemed to have been shopping, there were clearly also groups who had come to the Park Meadows Mall just to go to the GLC for lunch. Big groups of people who ordered lots of appetizers and cocktails and glasses of wine and talked about their planned trips to Cedar Point this summer.  I guess this is something that happens in the suburbs.  It was new to us.  Directly across from me (I faced the aisle; better people-watching) were three tables.  Table one: two gays, one of them wearing what Historiann has told me is an Ed Hardy T-shirt (lots of unnecessary graffiti-like designs).  I couldn’t tell if they were on a date or this was a “morning after” sort of scenario (they ordered breakfast for lunch), but both seemed equally disturbing, given our mall-restaurant location.  Table two: two very pretty bottle-blondes in designer duds who must have taken about a minute and a half to say a complicated grace before diving into their meals.  Now if grace is really that important, aren’t there other places to be at midday on the Sabbath?  And finally, a table of four suburban women who were clearly enjoying a “girls day out” shopping.  That is, of course, what I had expected of the GLC; the gays and the designer Christians surprised me somewhat more.  Once again, however, and as in my trip to White Fence Farm, I am reminded that traveling just a few short miles outside of “the city” (yes, in quotation marks) can make me like Denver that much more.  Add to that our discovery that the men’s selection at the Park Meadows Nordstrom has nothing on Cherry Creek – itself pretty limited – and we returned to Denver with a renewed sense of appreciation.