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When Rioja chef and co-owner Jennifer Jasinski arrived in Denver from Santa Barbara in 2000, she was confronted with the prevailing culinary stereotype that Denver was a cowtown. “People told me straight out, ‘You can’t serve fish—it’s a steak and potato town,’ ” she recalls.
Undeterred, she challenged that assumption from the start with dishes like monkfish wrapped in pancetta. Today, Jasinski continues to champion sustainable seafood sourced from trusted fishmongers while also spotlighting local specialties like farm-fresh produce and Colorado lamb, which, she points out, is in demand in restaurant kitchens from Paris to Napa Valley.
Now, Jasinski’s efforts—and the evolution of Denver’s dining scene over the last quarter of a century—are featured in a new episode of From Scratch (streaming on the lifestyle-focused Tastemade platform and Apple+).
The show follows actor and adventurer David Moscow (you might remember him as young Josh in the 1988 comedy-drama Big) as he travels the world. The premise: Top chefs present him a meal; he collects the ingredients by hunting, foraging, fishing, and harvesting; and then he boomerangs back to the restaurant to make the dish alongside the chef.
In the fifth season’s Colorado-centric first episode, filmed this past September, Moscow’s journey begins at Rioja in Larimer Square. Jasinski—Colorado’s first James Beard Award winner, who was named Best Chef: Southwest in 2013—prepares two Colorado-inspired dishes for Moscow. The first is a tempura-battered Colorado trout served in a Rocky Ford cantaloupe consommé, brightened with lemongrass and Thai chile, and the second is Colorado lamb plated with Jimmy Nardello peppers, corn polenta, and juicy Palisade peaches.
After lunch wraps, Moscow sets out on a weeklong adventure throughout Colorado to source the ingredients himself—butchering a lamb at Long Shadow Farm in Berthoud, harvesting regionally adapted corn at Boulder’s Masa Seed Foundation (later milled at Moxie Bread Co.’s Boulder outpost), fly-fishing for catch-and-release trout with Minturn Anglers, and reeling in fish to eat at Trout Haven Resorts in Estes Park.
“A lot of shows on TV are only about the chef, but here you pull back the curtain a bit and see all the people it takes to make a meal,” Moscow said during a preview of the episode.
He sets the stage early in the episode with a brief history of Denver’s cuisine, shaped by both Indigenous people and immigrants from around the world. “This history has long been overshadowed by the image of Denver as a steak and potatoes town—but that’s no longer the story,” Moscow said.
By focusing on the story of each ingredient—not just the meal—he’s able to showcase hyperlocal fine dining, highlighting the close relationships Denver’s restaurateurs forge with local farmers and purveyors.
For example, one of Moscow’s first stops is Esoterra Culinary Garden, a 1.5-acre chemical-free, hand-tended garden in Boulder where farmer Mark DeRespinis grows herbs, edible flowers, and vegetables for 45 chefs at some of Denver and Boulder’s hottest restaurants.
In the segment, DeRespinis plucks a tender, sweet Mokum carrot from the ground, explaining that this sweet, snappy variety can’t be grown by most commercial farms because its tops are too brittle for tractors to pick up.
The journey continues at Ekar Farm, a Denver community plot rooted in Jewish values like giving back and “tikkun olam” (a Hebrew phrase meaning “repair of the world”). The garden sends about 20,000 pounds of fresh, organically grown produce to partners every year, providing food for food pantries, pay-what-you-can restaurants, and government-assistance programs.
The farm’s manager, Kevin Oster, walks Moscow through the garden, showing off bounty like a striped German tomato: “It looks like a peach; it almost tastes like a peach.” They then snap off a cantaloupe from a vine that’ll be used for the consommé, completing the shopping list of ingredients Moscow must bring back to Rioja.
Moscow, who grew up in New York but spent his summers in Utah, Montana, and Maine—where he ate berries from bushes and pulled fish from cold streams—said the series is a way for him to truly connect with food. He encourages viewers to pause and think about how many people it takes to create restaurant meals and to get out to local farms for tours and u-pick events.
Ultimately, he said, the Colorado episode tells a story of interconnectedness: “A lot of times you think ‘It’s the West, it’s the mountains.’ There’s a lot of, ‘I did this by myself.’ But in Colorado, it was a lot different.”
Find out if Moscow succeeded in re-creating Jasinski’s dishes by streaming season 5, episode 1 of From Scratch on-demand on the Tastemade subscription service. Also find it on Apple+ and other platforms.
