Editor's Note: This story and headline have been updated to reflect the results of the Michelin Guide award ceremony.
Basta, a wood-fired Italian restaurant tucked inside an apartment complex in East Boulder, has been recognized by the prestigious Michelin Guide. The historic food guide and awards have come to Colorado for the first time ever.
The Michelin Guide, which is both a book and a smartphone app, is best known for its star rating system. The separate Bib Gourmanddesignation recognizes restaurants for “good quality, good value cooking.”
The nine recipients include Basta, which opened off of Arapahoe Avenue in 2010 and is the only Boulder restaurant on the list. The space is simple: piles of wood at the entrance and in front of the windows, white and black bowls and plates, wood-topped tables with black legs. The open wood-fired oven blazes bright in the corner.
Chef and owner Kelly Whitaker, who now owns six locations including restaurants, bars and a bakery in Denver and Boulder, describes hearing the Bib Gourmand news two weeks ago.
“It was very, very special,” Whitaker said. “Basta was an exercise in sacrifice and what it takes to get a business going and off the ground. And so with that, I spent a lot of time in front of that oven. So I was one of those believers that you had to be in the kitchen to be like the “real chef.”
According to reporting by the New York Times, Michelin inspectors only considered restaurants in Denver, Boulder, Aspen, Vail, Snowmass and Beaver Creek. Restaurants in Aurora, for example, won’t be part of the first-ever Colorado Michelin Guide — this includes Annette, a restaurant just over the Denver border whose owner was named the Best Chef in the mountain region last year by the James Beard Awards.
During Tuesday night's ceremony, five Colorado restaurants received one Michelin star
- an award for outstanding cooking that takes into account quality of ingredients, mastery of techniques and consistency across the entire menu over time.
"This type of award, its your farmers, its your community, everyone gets to share it," Whitaker said of the star awarded to the Wolf's Tailor, one of his other restaurants in Denver. "Last night, seeing everyone's faces, my chefs were so proud. And today their resumes changed."
At Basta, which was notified of the Bib Gourmand award weeks before the ceremony, entrees are cooked in the wood-fired oven. As he checked on a lasagna with ricotta, mozzarella and parmesan oozing out of the sides, chef de cuisine Jose Rodriguez also kept an eye on Shishito peppers and a half chicken.
Working in a small space in front of the oven, along with Basta’s pizza chef, Rodriguez explained that restaurant staff get the fire going around 11 a.m. By 5 p.m., the temperature rises to around 600 degrees and can get as hot as 1200 degrees as the night goes on.
“You don’t have a way to control the fire so seeing how fast a protein or a pizza is cooking and adjust from there,” Rodriguez said. “It’s really easy to burn something. Right now, me and [pizza chef] Ben are going to be dancing with each other.”
The wood-fired half chicken is a popular entrée, one that the Michelin review highlighted.
“So you cook it on the skin, on the cast iron the whole time. And for about eight, nine minutes. Then you flip it over and it gets that top from the flame and you just get this beautiful crispy skin and it's got this sea salt on it and it's roasted,” Whitaker said.
The chicken is served with creamy rice polenta and today, with baby swiss chard.
“The carcasses, we throw them in the oven, and they get roasted. So we pull those out and we do a mirepoix which is celery, onion and carrots,” Rodriguez said. “We do a chicken stock out of those. We let it go for two days… that’s the sauce that goes on top of the chicken.”
Rodriguez has been at Basta for seven years; cooking with a wood-fired oven is his passion. He remembers growing up in Jalisco, Mexico helping his grandmother make lamb birria, a stew, in a clay pot over a fire.
“As soon as I come in and we start drying the wood, that essence brings back memories,” Rodriguez said. “Maybe that’s why I got into cooking. All of the smells, the techniques.”
