Editor’s note: This is part of our series, Hidden Gems, in which we take a look at those restaurants you should know about but may not. They are either tucked away in strip malls or otherwise off the beaten path. Try them out, and if you like what you eat, pass the word.
It’s tough having the word “scrap” in your restaurant’s name. It implies afterthoughts, discards, castoffs. But the food coming out of Sullivan Scrap Kitchen is no afterthought. It’s among the more interesting and delicious in town.
Yes, chef Terence Rogers — who owns the restaurant with his wife, Holly Adinoff — uses leftover components of various ingredients at both Sullivan Scrap Kitchen and their catering operation, TBD Foods. The goal is to cross-utilize ingredients at both food businesses as much as possible, so that instead of, say, using kale leaves in a salad and discarding the stems, they’re taking those traditionally undesirable stems and blending them up into a delicious pesto. And they’re making those kale stems look (and taste) damn sexy.
Take the lamb carbonara on Sullivan Scrap Kitchen’s current menu. The fresh-made tagliatelle noodles incorporate an herb just made from beat up (but still tasty) herbs that would otherwise be thrown away, plus leftover egg yolks from the whites-heavy meringues.
The sausage comes from lamb trimmings from the prime leg meat served on the catering menu, which just so happen to be perfect for sausage.
The creamy pasta dish gets some crunch from pistachio crumbs, which also make an appearance in the restaurant’s chocolate mousse. It’s this sort of clever thinking that takes Sullivan from a restaurant trying to capitalize on sustainability as a buzzword to making root-to-tip and nose-to-tail eating make sense.
The bruschetta duo is another example of taking culinary rejects (that pesto made with kale stems and seeds, strawberry jam from less-than-attractive fruit) and giving them delightful new life atop buttery focaccia bread.
That same pesto is used in the gnocchi, which changes seasonally based on what they’ve got in the kitchen (but is always on the menu). The gnocchi itself is made from the fleshy insides of russet potatoes—along with bruised herbs that aren’t pretty enough for a garnish—while their tater skins are dried out and turned into a flour that breads TBD’s arancini and Sullivan’s trout cakes.
Or the beef dish, where Rogers takes an ordinary chuck steak, trims it up real nice, seasons it for 24 hours (which you’ll taste in the meat’s “bark”), and then sous vides it for another 24 hours to break it down and get it tender. It’s served with sliced asparagus, crispy morels, charred carrots and a subtle miso red wine sauce.
Yes, it’s hard to be any restaurant with scrap in its name, but Sullivan Scrap Kitchen isn’t exactly a Tuesday night diner, either. While I wouldn’t quite classify it as fine dining—the vibe is casual and they do a Thursday burger night starting at $13 (including fries) to attract families and neighbors—the quality ingredients and culinary techniques do command a higher price. They also do a few different tasting menus, ranging from the Sunday-evening-only three-courser for $40 per person, to a full-on, nine-course feast for $100.
Whether made from food scraps or not, it’s a great dinner at a great restaurant. If you’re tempted to drop into the City Park West spot to see what they’re doing to reduce food waste while creating innovative dishes, well, that would be pretty scrappy of you.
Sullivan Scrap Kitchen: 1740 E. 17th Ave., Denver, 720-242-6292; sullivanscrapkitchen.com