Tuesday, July 15, 7:00 p.m.
Members $90, guests $115

At first hearing, the pan-European-sounding Adega has diners ricocheting all over geographic and gastronomic maps trying to pin down the restaurant’s name and its cuisine—no easy task. For the uninitiated, adega means “wine cellar” in Portuguese, and the cuisine, from executive chef and partner Bryan Moscatello, is Franco-inspired innovative American.

But that doesn’t mean he merely cooks American ingredients with a French twist. Moscatello will be the first to say that he’s fond of tweaking dishes, allowing the seasonal, clean flavors to come through. As Denver Post critic Kyle Wagner wrote, “Moscatello rises to the challenge of wooing Denver with his fare—world-view ingredients assembled using classic French techniques, with a whimsical wink-wink now and then that shows he doesn’t take himself too seriously.” In fact, Moscatello takes himself and the whole celebrity-chef phenomenon so lightly, that he refuses to create signature dishes. He says he would become too identified with them, and then he wouldn’t be able to grow. Such devotion to craft and creativity has won over a host of tough critics, among them John Mariani: in the November 2002 issue of Esquire, he named Adega one of the year’s Best New Restaurants in the Country. Mariani cited not only Adega’s food but also its 800 wines, 50 of which are served by the glass. Diane Daniel of Gourmet also liked what she tasted; she featured the restaurant in the magazine’s “Good Living” section.

Moscatello became interested in cooking via, of all things, snowboarding. In 1989 he trekked out to Aspen for the love of the sport, and installed himself in the kitchen of the popular Ute City Banque Restaurant to keep himself on the slopes. In time, the cutting board won out over the snowboard, and he moved on to The Little Nell, where he worked for George Mahaffey. When Mahaffey left, Moscatello stepped up as the executive chef. In addition, he put in time at Rosewood Hotels and Resorts as the executive chef at The Bristol in Panama City, Panama, and at the highly acclaimed Bistro Toujours in Deer Valley, Utah, before climbing the heights in Denver.