<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Indigo

Address: 250 Josephine St. Phone: 303-996-9966 http://www.indigodenver.com Style: New American Food: ****(out of four) Service: *** 1/2 (out of four) Atmosphere: *** 1/2 (out of four) Price: $5-$22 Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday-Friday; 5 to 10 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Credit cards: All major Number of visits: 3 Parking: Valet, street, perpetually full lot Noise: Respectfully joyous Smoking: No

The dishes are a creative collaboration between Herz and his chef, former Hilltop Café soup king Ian Kleinman (who has some help from sous chef Ben Alandt). He keeps up the tradition of stunning soups with his daily offering of sweet red pepper and roma tomato ($4), a faintly textured puree of the red vegetables flavored with a dollop of jalapeno-spiked cream. The herb-flecked concoction has depth and interest, and it’s a delight alternated with a few shards of Le Lingue Piemontesi, three feet of Italian flatbread made from wheat flour and olive oil, lengths of which threaten to whack the heads of every diner as they sit down.
Depth and interest just so happen to characterize the whole menu, and so decisions were tough. Should we start with a trio of wontons ($7), each stuffed with goat cheese and sun-dried cherries, sitting atop a pool of yellow tomato puree with an entire yellow tomato on the side? Or calamari ($9) fried in masa, with an aioli deepened by the earthiness of smoked tomatoes? Good choices both, it turned out.

Savory salads
As were most of the salads, including one of fresh spinach ($6) that offered roasted beets and a sweet citrus emulsion, and a fun "chopped" salad ($9), a compilation of evenly diced elements, the ides of which is so popular elsewhere and now just catching on in Denver eateries. In this case, the elements included roasted turkey, sweet corn, romas and romaine, all ready to be combined and slathered with a thick Maytag blue dressing.

One of the best things about Indigo is that several of the already well-priced dishes available at night are also on the lunch menu, which means you can have the Niman Ranch pork tenderloin ($17), with its rub of ground Kona coffee and Dijon, its candied apple risotto and its balsamic reduction-of-the-gods for $12 midday. Same goes for the red-meat trout ($17, $12 at lunch) - a rich-fleshed fish with the color of its salmon cousin but with the meatier taste of wild trout - with its rich, cream-cheesy vegetable-filled crepe, and a miso-glazed salmon ($16, $12 at lunch).

Nights only
Other items are reserved for the nighttime, and they are worth seeking out: a painfully rich risotto ($16) with whole-claw lobster meat and a lemon sabayon; a grilled escolar ($18), its supple flesh cut with a yellow-tomato puree; and a pepper-seared ahi ($20) draped with a ginger-kissed avocado sauce.
The portions are big enough to prohibit dessert, and then when you see the size of them you might cry "Uncle." But at least take a bite of the enormous chocolate almond taco ($5.95), with its Bailey's-sweetened mousse filling, and the Key lime fried cheesecake ($5.95), little logs of golden-crispy goodness.

You can see the color of mint on the whipped cream that accompanies everything, but you can't taste it, one of the few oddities in otherwise fabulous experiences here.</font>