Denver, Colorado-Highland Tap & Burger

What: Highland Tap & Burger

Where: Lower Highlands-Denver, Colorado

Overall: Highland Tap & Burger is located in the trendy lower Highlands area. It is a great place for catching a basketball game, but it is not your typical local sports bar. You can grab a gourmet burger or have an amazing piece of mascarpone cheesecake. It is basically a sports bar plus. There are plush leather booths, and they are using the top quality ingredients that all the top restaurants in Denver are using, but at the same time they have 17 flat screen TVs. 19 out of 20 beers on tap are Colorado Beers (their Gins and Vodkas are also from Colorado), so they do feel a responsibility to buy local, but they do not claim to be local-they just feel it's responsible to buy as much as they can locally, and hire as many kids as possible from the local surrounding area. They are open Monday from 3pm-2am, Tuesday-Friday 11am-2am, and Saturday-Sunday from 10am-2am. 

The Menu: Highland Tap & Burger has various menus. They have a weekend late night menu, a football brunch menu, a lunch menu, dinner menu, and a happy hour menu. They offer a wide array of appetizers including an artisan cheese board, and Modus Hoperandi Mac N' Cheese (all the rage with the locals). They offer sandwiches, but what they are known for is their gourmet burgers. 

  

The Service: Everyone was incredibly friendly offering suggestions on what was the best on the menu (which were very consistent), and we got the pleasure of meeting one of the owners, Juan, and hearing about their ideals for HIghland Tap & Burger which was very cool.

The Food: We started out ordering Stranahan's Barrel Smoked Chicken Wings, (a recommendation) and they were unbelievably delicious. The chicken literally fell-off-the-bone, and had an incredible smoky taste accented by their signature tap sauce that was so good, Riar wanted to bathe in it. We then moved on to our entrees, Riar ordered the TAP BURGER with the fried egg. It was literally almost a foot tall, and the pulled pork was a unique twist on a classic bacon cheeseburger. The fried onion rings were sensational! The culmination of all the ingredients (including real cheese and not the kraft singles nonsense) amounted to the perfect bite. Erin ordered the Shroom Luva's Burger(which was awarded with the People's Choice award at the Denver Burger Battle). She ordered it with the shaved foie gras. It was such an intense taste of the best burger I have ever had the please of eating. Usually I can eat about 3/4 of such a large burger, but the Shroom Luva was SO delectable that I just kept on eating. One thing we must not forget to talk about is the french fries. Usually the two of us don't finish all of our french fries, but that was not the case at HTB. The french fries are handcut from the highest quality potatoes, and seasoned to perfect. YUM were they good! To finish dinner off with a bang, we order the Mascarpone Cheesecake. The mascarpone made the cheesecake lighter than your typical run-of-the-mill cheesecake, and although we were throughly stuffed, we ate the whole darn thing! It was so good! In terms of drinks, Riar recommends the Lefthand Breweries "Milk Stout Nitro", and Erin recommends the Denver Donkey-these are strong. (Please drink responsibly). GREAT VALUE.

Overall Rating: 10/10

Additional Quotes that we enjoyed from Juan:

"Local bars are a community centric place. We wanted this to be a destination." 

"We thought Is it going to be a sports bar or is it going to be a restaurant? We did not want it to be a sports bar per say, 'fine dining in between the bun' is exactly what we accomplished." 

"In general, most of the people who come in here are young professional and networking groups, but we do have one of the largest women's craft beer clubs in the nation."