I debated between four and five stars, but landed on five. Rōmyō was on day three when we visited, they were refreshingly candid that they were still working out some service kinks, and most of what I would change felt much more like calibration than a reason to knock the restaurant.
More importantly, I am really glad this restaurant exists. The Italian-Japanese idea feels like the restaurant I remember Wolf's Tailor promising when it first opened, and also picks up a thread that has been missing in Denver since Bones closed. Rōmyō grew out of Frank Bonanno's itameshi pop-ups at Luca, and the menu actually commits to the premise rather than sprinkling a little miso on Italian food and calling it fusion.
We somewhat accidentally ended up here before a concert, not starving and mostly wanting to try a few things. That turned out to be one of my favorite things about the menu. I often struggle with menus broken into eight different categories because constructing a coherent shared meal starts to feel like homework. Here, we pretty casually put together a progression of dishes that made sense, shared easily, and never felt like we had accidentally ordered three appetizers and two entrées from different restaurants.
The cacio e pepe ramen was probably the best bite. Butter, miso dashi, pecorino, ramen, black pepper. It sounds obvious once someone does it, which is usually a good sign. My only complaint is that it needed substantially more pepe. The pepper should be doing enough work that you genuinely get both sides of the mashup rather than primarily eating an excellent cheesy ramen.
The chawanmushi with mushrooms, egg, and Parmesan mousse was also excellent, particularly when you got the mousse in the bite. The problem was that there was not quite enough of it to carry through the whole dish. Again, very fixable, and the best bites were great.
The lamb skewers were probably the clearest place where I thought the kitchen still had a decision to make. The glaze was delicious and the lamb itself had very good flavor, but the texture landed awkwardly between rustic and refined. If the goal is rustic, I would char the hell out of them and lean into it. If the goal is refinement, they need cleaner butchery or a more tender cut. Right now they are caught a little in between.
Those sound like criticisms because they are, but they are pretty nitpicky ones for the third night of a restaurant whose underlying ideas already work. The menu is interesting without being exhausting, the fusion actually has logic behind it, and several dishes already feel like things I would come back specifically to eat.
Five stars partly for the meal we had, and partly because this feels like a restaurant that is going to get better quickly. I am very curious to see where it is six months from now. read more