Chicken is just chicken until it’s a little drunk, then it’s the best damned bird you’ll ever shove down your throat hole.

Bourbon Grill 1618 E. Colfax Ave., Denver

Chicken is just chicken until it’s a little drunk, then it’s the best damned bird you’ll ever shove down your throat hole. 

When you’re walking down East Colfax and catch a whiff of chicken grilling, follow that siren scent straight to Bourbon Grill. Just a kitchen with a window, it nonetheless prepares the best bourbon chicken you’ll ever have the pleasure of eating on the sidewalk of America’s longest, and classiest, street. Who needs tables when you’re just going to inhale the food anyway?

Once you get to the front of the line — and there’s always a line — it will take all of the willpower you can muster to not dive face first into the piles of perfectly grilled chicken that fill the tiny kitchen. The impossibly heavy Styrofoam container filled to the brim with rice, chicken and two sides, means you’re going to have to decide if you’re going to sit down on the curb or tear into your soul-food feast while standing. 

Bourbon Grill knows its way around a chicken. The boneless dark meat that comprises the dish is juicy and perfectly charred on the edges. That crisp is enough to make you want to be a better person, but then it’s glazed with bourbon sauce and you turn into Gandhi himself. The woody, bourbon flavor and sticky-sweet brown sugar complement the chicken so well you’ll forget where you are and accidently give a bum $20 instead of rudley brushing him off like you normally do. Suddenly there’s nothing in the world matters except your next bite.

Knowing one cannot survive on chicken alone, all of the sides are stick-to-your-ribs, soul-food staples: cajun potatoes fried crispy, nuclear-orange mac and cheese for your guiltiest of pleasures, or spicy noodles, aka spaghetti tossed with cajun spices drowning in greasy delicious. You’re never going to be able to finish this in one sitting, which is totally fine because the cold bourbon chicken chases away hangovers like fat kids chasing an ice cream truck.