Roadside Attraction----Denver's Linger Eatuary: Let Them Eat Crickets (and Other Delights)

My old friend Mike Jackson, who was for nearly three decades the State Architect for Illinois, visited Denver for a conference recently.  As Mike likes old things made new through the application of foresight (he was a champion of preserving historic buildings years before "adaptive reuse" became a catchphrase) and wit (he drove a Bulletnose Studebaker for awhile), I suggested we try dinner at Linger, a restaurant housed in a clever adaptation of the old Olinger Mortuary in Denver's Lower Highlands neighborhood…or LoHi in hipspeak.  Linger's satirical approach to mortality begins before you get inside.  On the roof, the old "Olinger Mortuaries" sign glows in white and blue neon…but the "O" has been turned off, and "mortuaries" has been finessed into "eatuaries."  Linger bills itself as "Denver's finest eatuary."  

Inside, the humor continues.  Water is served in carafes that look suspiciously like formaldehyde bottles cadged from a morgue.  The menu mixes cultures (Latin American, East Asian, Caribbean) and attitudes (vegan to carnivore with a few stops at vegetarian) with cheerful and heedless abandon, and there's the expected range of artsy microbrews as well as a long wine list.  When Mike told me he'd skipped lunch in training for this experience, I decided to drop any concerns about my new boring diet (not even worth describing) and Just Say Yes. We ordered a Bao Bun full of Mongolian BBQ Duck and another called "Dragon" (no reptiles involved, but unagi sauce, tempura avocado, wasabi etc.), a crispy Vietnamese Crepe which shared space in a bowl with lotus root chips, baked bean curd and butternut squash, and a plate of Thai Fried Rice (poached egg over charred pole beans, thai basil, five spice cashews, coconut).  Here's a Dragon Bun:

It was a feast of subtle and memorable flavors, but some flavors were more memorable than others.  Mike's favorite was the Dragon Bun, and I placed it close to the top for sneaky flavor entrapment, like a tune you can't identify but which won't leave you alone.  Maybe the mystery ingredient is the unagi sauce (that's eel); another mystery is what happened to the eel itself, as there was plenty of tasty vegetable crunch but no meat in evidence.  Then there was the Thai Fried Rice, which had plenty of crunch defining the edges of a soft, subtle flavor territory which got even more mellow when you mixed in the poached egg...

There was an order of bacon-wrapped figs which made me glad I'd ditched my diet  Just This Once, and the Vietnamese Crepe which had a secretive, circular character that provided the last bite with a kind of built-in nostalgia for the first.  It turned out to be my favorite.  But Mike stared at the menu; he was still hungry.

"Wow, you really didn't eat lunch, did you?" 

"Here, look at this; you missed the Cricket and Cassava Empanada.  Gotta try it."

Mike took some pictures of the menu and texted them back to his family.  Apparently crickets are not a common menu item in Springfield, Illinois.  I was beginning to regret my Just Say Yes policy…but we ordered anyway.  The menu listed "micro ranch crickets" as a central ingredient in the empanada.  I wondered if the "micro" part referred to the size of the ranch or the size of the crickets.  Maybe they'd be too small to notice, I hoped…

But the v. nice Gen. Mgr. Shannon Jones came over to chat with us, and maybe to buck me up just a bit ("they're a lot like roasted sunflower seeds", she said) and I thought fondly of sunflower seeds (and peanuts and really, anything but crickets) as I took a couple of hopeful swigs of dry cider. Then the informative, ever-helpful waiter showed up with a complimentary plate of toasted crickets to tide us over while we awaited the main event…

That's not a very big picture, but then again they weren't very big crickets.  Big enough to notice, though, so I tried a few.  Yes, they are kind of nut-like and crunchy, but the flavor is not as perky as your average sunflower seed.  Maybe that's because they're not as salty.  We were just getting our minds around these when the empanadas arrived...

These turned out to be less dramatic, with the crickets hidden inside and also in the cricket flour used in the dough.  There's an argument to be made for crickets as a more sustainable source of protein than, say, cattle or pigs, but I think the empanada would be a more effective case in point for that argument if they hadn't also used fried pork belly inside it.  Overall, the taste was mellow and subtle, not unlike a veggie burger, with extra flavor provided by cilantro-lime creme and some welcome crunch from some unidentified toasted seeds (pomegranate?) in the foreground.  When the bill arrived, it was on a mock-up of a toe tag from the old mortuary.  We decided on dessert at Little Man Ice Cream* right next door, and maybe as evidence that the evening of wild experimentation was over, selected a vanilla and a chocolate...

*Footnote:  For notes on Little Man Ice Cream, see "Little Man and Big Dog in Denver" in these posts for May 14, 2016.

Photo credits:

Top:  The author
2nd & 3rd from top:  Linger Eatuary
4th from top:  yelp.com
5th:  Mike Jackson
Bottom:  Mike Jackson