[Check back often to get a quick suggestion on Denver dining]
Most restaurants don’t make it a year before folding, so when you stumble across one that’s been around for 38 years, curiosity compels you to seek out the secret of its longevity. Sadly, most writers on the Denver restaurant scene, myself included, have a tendency to gravitate towards the new, glitzy, hip eateries, but this week we took a step back in time and dropped by Garramone’s Pizza & Italian, an Italian restaurant on the west side of town.
Garramone’s is anything but new, glitzy and hip. It’s located in an oddly arranged strip center on the southeast corner of W. Jewell and Garrison. And it faces the wrong direction, so you can’t see it from either street. You either know it’s there or you don’t, and obviously the regulars do. On a Tuesday evening, there was a steady stream of people dropping by for their regular fix of pizza, sandwiches, and traditional Italian dishes, most of them pasta based.
Dated as it is, there’s something charming and nostalgic about Garramone’s. Wider than it is deep, the restaurant consists of three separate dining areas filled with booths and four-tops. The napkins are paper, and the china is classic restaurant-white, reminding me of so many casual mom-and-pop Italian restaurants that I’ve dined in over the years.
The menu is solid Italian home-cooking, and it too brought back a flood of memories—ravioli, spaghetti, lasagna, egg plant parmesan and the uniquely-Denver dinner-canoli. The appetizer list offers classic favorites like calamari, breaded zucchini and cheese sticks. We opted for the Deep Fried Ravioli—crunchy, cheese-filled pillows served with ranch dressing for dipping. Our choice of entrée was simplified by the inclusion of two combination platters, which gave us the opportunity to try a small taste of a variety of offerings. The first platter consisted of the oversized ravioli, a cannelloni, and a giant pasta shell stuffed with a ricotta cheese mixture, the whole topped with a house-made marinara sauce. The second combo also had the cheese-filled ravioli, along with thick, home-style spaghetti, and outstandingly good house-made sausage and meatballs with more of the marinara sauce. That sauce, incidentally, is a bit on the sweet side, which also seems to be a characteristic of Denver Italian.
All dinners come with soup and salad, the soup a nicely turned minestrone, and the salad a classic garden salad with a choice of dressing. Portions are generous, so go hungry and, even then, you might well end up taking some home to enjoy the next day. Which simply means you can enjoy your evening all over again 24 hours later.
Garramone’s Pizza & Italian
9168 W. Jewell (southeast corner of Jewell and Garrison)
303-985-8711
