Ace

A few weeks ago when we went to Stueben’s for lunch, we looked in on Ace, a new restaurant in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood that’s just down the street from Stueben’s. It’s a different sort of restaurant – not just about food. Once I saw what the deal was, I knew we had to come back.

So this past weekend, we checked it out. We opted for an early dinner and arrived around 4pm. I knew it would be a popular spot and since we wanted to bring the kids, this seemed  a good time. I was right and we easily got a table and the restaurant was only about half full.

We met my parents there and settled into a nice big booth. The decor is sort of industrial and fun to look at. It has a sort of WWII bent to it with what look like pieces of old planes here and there, one used as the hostess stand. It’s very well done.

The food at Ace is small plates of Asian food. You get a bunch and then share, and so that’s what we did. Their steamed dumplings, called Bao Buns at Ace, are amazing. We tried three: beef, chicken and pork. The beef was by far our favorite and we ended up ordering a couple extras. We also ordered some more of their “hot plates:” chicken wings, crispy beef, spicy mango, wonton soup, shrimp dumplings, and some gingery noodles.

There wasn’t anything we ordered that we didn’t like. Ben was particularly fond of these shrimp dumplings – he ate at least 2 of the three that came.Tabby really liked the noodles and the crispy beef.

But besides the tasty Asian-tapas, the other big draw at Ace is their ping pong tables! The entire back room and half their (awesome) patio is filled with ping pong tables that you can rent. You can have your drinks and eats while hanging out playing ping pong. You rent the table on an hourly basis ($15, I think) and you can play all you want. Next time we go, I’d like to do an all adult crowd and sample some adult beverages and take the ping pong tables for a spin.