For one of my dinners during my stay in Denver, Colorado, I decided to go to Uchi in the Five Points neighborhood for omakase.
Uchi had their ten-course omakase listed as “market price,” which I had not seen a restaurant do before (“market price” is generally reserved for individual menu items that are freshly imported on a regular basis and have frequently-changing pricing based on localized supply and demand). When I asked the waitress for the market price of the omakase, she said that it was US$305.50 for two people, which I had also never seen a restaurant do. I’m not sure if she just thought I was poor and was trying to manipulate the numbers so that it seemed cheaper, but she said that it would be just over US$150.00 per person. At that time, I believed her when she said that it was designed for two people, so my friend and I decided to order one omakase.
This might be a good time to mention that it’s actually been about a week and a half since I’ve been to this restaurant and this blog post is a little late, so I don’t quite remember all the finer details of the menu items. Not to spoil the review or anything, but this omakase was so underwhelming and disappointing that I wasn’t particularly in a rush to edit these photos and share my experience online like I do when I go to an amazing restaurant.
As an opening refreshment, we received a non-alcoholic citrus cocktail.
Our first appetizer was tai crudo with New Zealand snapper, lemon, tomato, and other vegetables.
It contained only four fairly thin and small folded slices of fish. The fish was mild and the vegetables were intensely sour and overdressed, so it tasted like I was just eating pickled vegetables instead of a well-rounded crudo dish.
For my drink, I got a zero-proof Spicy Yu made from non-alcoholic gin, yuzu honey, thai chili, and lemon.
Next, we were served a small plate of nigiri. The fish quality was good, but they were cut pretty thin and narrow so each bite wasn’t particularly satisfying.
After the nigiri was a small cut roll topped with minced seafood.
Nigiri and rolls usually come as part of the main courses of an omakase, but apparently we were still in appetizer mode, because we received one oyster each with habanero and mango. The shell of my oyster was chipped (which you can actually distinctly see in the photograph) and some of the shell seemed to have gotten into the oyster during preparation, so I had the great misfortune of having a crunchy oyster.
Next was a sashimi bowl with twelve total thin cuts of fish. This was delicious, and it almost tasted like it was dry-aged because it had an extra deep umami to it, but like everything else, each cut was way too small for it to come close to giving a strong, satisfying, full flavor per bite.
Our first warm dish was mapo tofu with crispy tofu prepared Szechuan-style and topped with shiitake ragout.
Even this was really small, which is silly because you’d think tofu is pretty cheap so they’d at least give you a refreshing portion of this, but I guess not. It had a very unique flavor profile to it, and the sauce added a nice, spicy kick to the tofu. The fried shell was a bit too thick compared to the amount of tofu that was given, but overall, I enjoyed trying out this creation.
Our second warm dish was wagyu over asparagus with a side of garlic chips in house-made sauce.
This tasted good, but again, the disappointing portion size detracted heavily from the eating experience. These cuts of wagyu were sized perfectly if you were to put two pieces in your mouth per bite… but there were only five pieces, so that would’ve gone through this course very quickly.
Afterwards, we got four more pieces of nigiri—bluefin tuna chutoro and otoro. The fish quality was great, but again, the cuts of fish were disappointingly thin and small.
We switched back over to hot dishes and got a lobster bisque.
I feel like a broken record here, but there was barely any soup here. They basically served it in a shallow plate instead of a bowl, so there wasn’t actually much bisque in the bisque. The portion size of the lobster was also tiny, and it felt like I was just eating lobster scraps instead of the actual meat of the lobster.
What little there was to eat, though, was delicious.
Up until this point, I had been questioning whether this omakase was actually supposed to be for two people, or if we had gotten baited by the waitress and my friend and I were splitting one person’s portion between ourselves. After receiving the lobster bisque in a single plate, I decided that I had been right and that this omakase isn’t truly supposed to be for two people.
I’m comfortable enough with the friend I went with, and I trust her cleanliness, so I didn’t mind dunking our spoons into the same soup together, but if I had chosen to dine with someone I wasn’t fully familiar with, this course would’ve been interesting.
From here, our meal service sort of just… stopped.
My friend likes oysters, so she put in an order for an extra oyster, à la carte for an extra US$5.00. After taking her special request, the waitress literally disappeared. We took this opportunity to use the restroom and watch the cooks at the sushi bar prepare other diners’ food, but otherwise, we were sort of just sitting there for what I believe was about half an hour.
Eventually, the waitress came back with my friend’s oyster. As if trying to one-up themselves in how small they can make each dish, they came out with an oyster that was about half the size of the oysters we had gotten as part of the omakase.
After another noticeable wait, we got our tenth and final course of the omakase, dessert: chicory and buckwheat banana cake with white coffee ice cream.
I think this was fine, but at this point, I had been let down so badly by so many different facets of the restaurant that I was mentally done with dinner and wanted to leave.
Here are some decorations from the sushi bar:
Here are some photographs of the dining tables, from the perspective of the sushi bar:
The ceiling of the restaurant had a glass opening with a view of Altius Farms on the floor above.
Here is a view of the outside of the restaurant:
In case it wasn’t clearly implied throughout my blog post, I do not recommend getting omakase at Uchi Denver. I have been to many different chef’s tasting menus and omakase experiences, and I’ve also done a fair amount of “build your own” tasting menus by ordering a large collection of small plates at fine dining restaurants, and I can confidently say that I have never gotten so little value for my money as I did at Uchi Denver.
I think there are two potential solutions that would encourage me to change my mind:
- Keep the omakase as a couples-only experience, keep the price the same, and serve exactly double of everything.
- Keep the portion sizes the same, cut the price in half, and market it as omakase for one.
Otherwise, I would consider Uchi Denver to be a hard pass.