Beau Jo's

We stopped at Beau Jo's in Idaho Springs for lunch after a morning of skiing on Friday. My husband and I each got the salad bar and the split a "one pounder" with sun dried tomatoes and roasted red peppers. My daughter got the chicken nugget kids' meal. The salad bar was pretty typical with all of your basic salad bar ingredients. It definitely was not designed for short people though. I had to just sort of reach into many of the little buckets with the provided utensils and hold up the ingredients to see what they were. I got the ranch dressing....it had that poured-from-a-large-vat taste to it....not bad, just nothing to write home about. If you haven't ever eaten at Beau Jo's, they feature Colorado-Style pizza. Never heard of it? Well, to the best of my knowledge, you can't get Colorado-Style Pizza anywhere but Beau Jo's (maybe it should be renamed Beau Jo's style pizza?). All in all, it is pretty good pizza. It is just very unique--not the kind of pizza I'd want on a regular basis. The crust is a little on the thin side in the middle but the outside part of the crust is huge. It is probably an inch in diameter at the part where you'd hold the pizza to eat it. It is a nice enough crunchy crust. There are bottles of honey on the table for you to dip that big ol' hunk of outer crust in when you are done with the good stuff. I'd never shared a pizza at Beau Jo's with just one adult before, so I've always gotten a pizza that was bigger than the one pounder in the past. I think I prefer the larger sizes of their pizza. When you take that big outer crust and put it around a pizza that is of a small diameter to begin with (maybe 8"?), you just don't end up with much room in the middle for toppings. As a result, the actual pizza to crust with honey ratio seemed even more out of whack with the smaller pizza.


Now the kids' meal...they had a fancy placemat that mentioned that they served hormel corn dog nuggets (complete with the corporate logo), so I have to say, I had low expectations. My daughter ordered the chicken nuggets....I expected them to arrive in the shape of stars or some other disturbing shape. While we waited, I commented to my husband that whenever I see such a fancy kids menu (complete with corporate logos and fun activities on the placemat), I have visions of the salesman for the food distributor saying making his pitch ("If you buy our complete kids' meal package, you'll get the mini corndogs, the macaroni and cheese bites, the premade peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches--just defrost and serve, and the chicken nuggets shaped like space ships. Plus, we'll throw in, at no extra charge, the kids' meal menu placemats and the little packages of 4 of the world's lowest quality crayons!). I'm often surprised when restuarants where the adult food is a far cry from Applebee's have very Applebee's-like kids meals. Kid's meals shouldn't be that hard...just make smaller (maybe less spicy) versions of your grown up food. I've never run an restaurant before, but shouldn't that be cheaper and easier? But I digress....

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with my daughter's chicken nuggets. They were irregularly shaped and appeared to be breaded in some sort of yummy breading that looked homemade. She enjoyed dipping the nuggest in the honey (why not?) and reported that they were good. I tried a bite and I had to concur. They tasted like chicken. Imagine that. The nuggets were served with a tub of tropical fruit, also so pleasant surprise (instead of french fries or chips). Overall, it was a good lunch. Much better than we would have gotten on the mountain and surely cheaper!