O's Steak & Seafood, Westminster, Colo

Nation's Restaurant News,  May 27, 2002  by Dina Berta

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O's Steak & Seafood at the Westin in Westminster, Colo., opened two years ago with an identity crisis.

The restaurant debuted with the $80 million hotel and conference center -- a joint project between Colorado businessman Tim O'Bryne and Westminster, a city of equal distance between Denver and Boulder.

Originally, the restaurant was named O'Bryne's, after Tim O'Bryne's late father, Leonard.

O'Bryne owns the 369-room hotel and restaurant. Westin Resorts & Hotels, a subsidiary of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., manages the entire property. The city owns the conference center with more than 30,000 square feet of meeting space.

The restaurant's Irish moniker gave the impression that the upscale restaurant was an Irish pub. But that was not the case.

As it served breakfast, lunch and dinner for guests, it was perceived in the community as just a hotel restaurant. But it was meant to be a destination for locals and draw customers from throughout the Denver-Boulder corridor.

The menu was corporate driven, with little local input, says chef de cuisine David Harker. It was heavy on comfort foods that at the time were more popular on the East Coast than in Colorado, says Harker, who grew up in Denver and has worked in metro area hotels and restaurants since he was 14. He attended the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Ore.

"The name was a drawback," Harker says. "People asked if we were an Irish pub. And the hotel setting hurt us. There was a stigma of being an expensive, stuffy, hotel restaurant."

Clearly, something needed to be done. The restaurant has a new name, a new identity, a new general manager and a new menu. It is undergoing a $200,000 interior redesign.

Patrick Kingston, who has managed high-profile, independent restaurants in Denver, was brought in to change things.

"When I walked in here, I thought, This is all wrong -- the decor, the open kitchen," says Kingston, who is general manager. "There was no sense of presence. You didn't feel like you were walking into a dining room, but like you had wandered into a cafeteria."

The menu also had no strong definition, he adds. "The menu needs a strong definition. People need to know why they should go there." O'Byrne and others analyzed the market and decided the one thing this area lacked was a high-quality steak and seafood restaurant, Kingston says.

The restaurant's name was changed, and the bar, formerly the Tap & Grill, has been changed to the O Room. The interior design, a work in progress as the restaurant remains open, will make the 150-seat, high-ceilinged dining room more intimate, with curtains to close off the display kitchen, softer lighting, leather chairs instead of wicker and black tablecloths instead of white. An oyster bar is planned as an entertainment feature to help the restaurant lose that stuffy feeling.

Harker revamped the menu, with input from executive chef Emil Bigler, Kingston and the staff.

"After being here for two years, I had a lot of different ideas about what I thought was going to work," Harker says. "We're focusing on steaks and seafood and core ingredients."

Fresh fish is flown in daily from both coasts. The meat is aged Colorado Angus beef. Unlike the situation at some steakhouses, O's menu items are not just meat on a plate, but composed dishes, such as charred yellow fin tuna in a beet and red-wine essence with lemon thyme risotto or a 14-ounce rib-eye with red onion marmalade, fried onion and tamarind glace.

"We're seeing positive signs from what has transpired," Harker says. "What we're doing with the menu and the food -- it's as good as what elite restaurants are doing or better, but in a more casual setting that's more energetic."

RELATED ARTICLE: Opened: April 2000

Owner: Tim 0'Byrne. Managed by Westin Hotels & Resorts

Cuisine: Contemporary

Seats: 150 in the dining room, 50 on the patio

Entree price range: $17-$50

Estimated food cost: 32 percent

Estimated labor cost: 35 percent

Best-selling dish: 10-ounce, dry-aged New York strip loin with portobello mushroom confit

Slowest-selling dish: butter-poached prawns and warm zucchini salad, smoked paprika and tomato jus

Menu maker: chef de cuisine David Harker

Starters

Pan-Roasted Crab Cakes, Red Pepper Aioli and Fire-Roasted Slaw $12

Hazelnut-Fried Calamari with Lemon Basil Remoulade $9

Soups & Salads

Stout-Braised Onion Soup Gratin with Cheeses $5

Warm Baby Spinach, Roast Portobello, Colorado Goat Cheese, Salmon Bacon and Balsamic Syrup $8

Daily Seafood Selections

Oven-Roasted Cedar Plank Salmon, Honey and Grain Mustard Glaze with Cucumber $18

Cumin-Dusted Mahi Mahi, Pumpkin Polenta and Mango Red Onion Mojo $18

Steaks

16-ounce Center Cut Chateaubriand, Roast Fingerling Potatoes, Broccoli Raab and Bearnaise Sauce $50

10-ounce Dry Aged NY Strip Loin served with portobello Mushroom Confit $22

Other Specialties