Despite its name, a new ice cream shop in Larimer Square is anything but a secret. Hidden Gems, a concept from idea aficionado and entrepreneur Joshua Schmitz, is the latest addition to the downtown hub popular with locals and tourists alike, and it s exploring previously uncharted territory in the world of ice cream.
Schmitz is a Denver native intimately familiar with the city’s food and beverage scene. Bellwether, the spot he gave up on East Colfax Avenue (it s now the Horror Bar), attracted coffee lovers, cocktail connoisseurs and even those looking for a fresh haircut. For Schmitz, combining unlikely concepts isn’t new; it’s a challenge that he takes on eagerly, with enthusiasm and vigor.
April is the cruelest month of all which holds true during a pandemic. For starters, the state government announced the easing of specific COVID-related business restrictions at the beginning of the month, even as cases and hospitalizations were on the rise. And restaurant workers have been dealing with a new wave of mask-holes and other entitled customers demanding their constitutional right to display their willful ignorance in public. Business is indeed picking up in the hospitality industry, but hiring has been tough (queue lazy unemployment sponges trumpeters), and some restaurants had to shutter for a day or two here and there while their entire staffs took vaccination days.
The Edgar Award, as Denver author and Edgar finalist David Heska Wanbli Weiden puts it, is “like the Oscars for crime writers. It’s like our National Book Award.” So it was a big deal when Weiden’s thriller
Winter Counts was shortlisted. It’s an even bigger deal that he’s only the second Native American writer to be named a finalist in the prize’s storied history.
Not that the Edgars are the only organization recognizing Weiden’s work far from it. He’s already won a Lefty Award for Best Debut Novel, and the Western Writers of America presented his book with the Best Contemporary Novel and Best Debut Novel awards. Still pending is a cornucopia of other awards: the Barry, the Thriller, a Colorado Book Award, a Reading the West prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Weiden is going to be busy and he might want to be making space on his fireplace mantel for all those pen-shaped trophies and whatnot.
South Park Hill, one of the wealthiest sections of Denver, could soon have a safe-camping site located within its boundaries. And advocates are hopeful that having affluent Denverites see homelessness up close could help build more citywide empathy for those living on the streets. I actually believe that putting this project in Park Hill is good for the entire city of Denver, because it forces us to have a conversation that we’ve only been having in certain parts of town and identify this as a citywide issue that requires action on all of our parts, says Cole Chandler, director of the Colorado Village Collaborative, which already runs an existing safe-camping site at the Denver Community Church in Uptown.
A Running List of Reopening Plans for Major Denver-Area Venues
Warm weather is on the way. More and more people are getting vaccinated. Here are some places you’ll be able to return to soon because of that. Shane Monaghan •
April 16, 2021
The excitement is palpable. As vaccine distribution continues apace, a somewhat normal summer and fall is starting to look possible.
For more evidence, look no further than all the major Denver-area venues releasing reopening plans. Here, we will keep an updated list of the places you can start going again in the coming weeks and months because while there is still plenty of work to do to get the pandemic under control, it sure is nice to think all of the things we will be able to (hopefully) do together soon.