Denver

Denver's dining record begins with ranching and rail. The city's "cow town" identity came from the ranches that once ringed it and from the stockyards, slaughterhouses, and meatpacking plants of its north side. The Buckhorn Exchange, opened in 1893 at 1000 Osage Street by scout and hunter Henry H. "Shorty Scout" Zietz, is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the city; it holds Colorado liquor license No. 1 and still serves game and Rocky Mountain oysters, a byproduct of ranch-country butchery.

The deeper local repertoire is Hispano. Mexican and, especially, New Mexican arrivals from the 1920s brought green chile, burritos, rellenos, and sopaipillas, dishes that carry more Denver pride than the Denver omelet — itself likely an adaptation of egg foo young, credited either to an early-1900s Denver restaurant or to Chinese cooks in western railroad camps. Into the 1970s the old Auraria neighborhood mixed those kitchens with German, Irish, and Jewish cooking and the Tivoli brewery. Colorado went dry in 1916; the Brown Palace Hotel's Ship Tavern dates to 1934.

Brewing is the defining beverage thread: Adolph Coors and Jacob Schueler in Golden from 1873, Boulder Beer as the state's first microbrewery in 1979, the Great American Beer Festival from 1982, and Wynkoop Brewing, co-founded in LoDo in 1988 by John Hickenlooper.