Restaurants in Wheat Ridge

Today's Groupon gets you $40 worth of innovative Mediterranean cuisine for $20 at Olivéa Restaurant. Olivéa's award-winning chefs serve dishes inspired by the cuisines of Spain, Italy, and Southern France in an elegant dining room with black furniture, sultry lighting, and warm earth tones, creating an atmosphere that is the scientifically-proven opposite of underwater bowling.Follow @Groupon_Says on Twitter.

Soak up bluesy beats and bites with today’s Groupon. For $10, you’ll get $25 worth of tunes and tastes at Blues on Blake Supper Club. This LoDo eatery, styled after '40s and '50s New York and Chicago supper clubs, won Best New Blues Club on Westword. Follow @Groupon_Says on Twitter.

Dan and Michelle Landes, owners of WaterCourse Foods, describe their story on their website as "one of perseverance and patience." Flexibility has helped, too—when Dan was about to unlock the front door on opening day and Michelle saw that they’d forgotten to stock the register with money, she bolted home to empty their change jar.

Flexibility marks the kitchen as well, which aims to fill plates with so much homey flavor that even carnivores don’t notice there’s no room left for meat. The chefs accomplish this by way of boldly seasoned veggies such as sweet potatoes, smoky mushrooms, and fire-roasted corn, which star in some dishes and serve as accents to proteins including grilled tempeh and country-fried seitan in others. The sense of reveling in the earth’s bounty spills from the plates onto the dining-room walls, decorated with delicate murals of animals and woodland scenes that resemble the results of a collaboration between John James Audubon and Beatrix Potter.

In its journey from lunch-and-breakfast spot to full-blown restaurant complete with bakery and bar, WaterCourse Foods has won acclaim both locally as a neighborhood favorite and nationally as a must-see for vegetarian travelers passing through town. Fodor’s called the portobello Reuben and seitan-based buffalo wings “amazing,” and Westword named WaterCourse 2012’s Best Vegetarian Restaurant while noting that it still hasn’t reached its peak—the place “just keeps getting better” while it “caters to any palate.”

For WaterCourse Foods, resourcefulness means finding new ways to serve not only diners but also the environment. Old fryer oil is shipped off to be converted into biodiesel, to-go dishes come in biodegradable containers, and diners who roll up on bikes or drift in effortlessly on gusts of wind get a 10% discount. Practicing what they preach beyond the restaurant, the Landes family supports local and international causes through programs such as Nonprofit Mondays, giving up to 15% of their Monday sales to select organizations. When they leave work each evening, they go home to their urban organic permaculture farm, run largely on solar power.

Behind Bombay Clay Oven’s castle-like façade lies a gateway to the Mughlai style of Indian cuisine, which features yogurt, cream, fruit, and a wide range of spices lending silky textures and delicately distinct flavors to roasted meats and vegetables. In the kitchen, kebabs of lamb and beef sizzle in the eatery’s traditional tandoor oven, balanced by a lengthy bill of vegetarian fare.

On Fridays and Saturdays, Bombay’s dining room fills with live music, which diners can enjoy from the confines of Middle Eastern–style booths draped in curtains and padded with basmati rice.

Fill up on fare at 5280's editor's pick for Top New Bar with today's Groupon. For $25, you'll get $50 worth of hearty grub and Colorado-based brews at Jonesy's EatBar, a warm and cuddly dinnery that houses an original soda fountain from an original 1950s pharmacy.

When 5280 magazine ran a feature on local chefs’ upscale versions of oatmeal, DJ's 9th Avenue Cafe was the first eatery mentioned. Unlike his peers’ signature concoctions, Chef Devin Stallings’s version pairs a plain portion of organic, irish steel-cut oats with servings of pistachios, dried dates, cranberries, brown sugar, and milk, which diners can add however they see fit. The laid-back, collaborative approach to cuisine is emblematic of Devin’s work at DJ's, which the Denver Post praises for “simple, thoughtfully prepared and relatively wholesome food.”

At breakfast, those wholesome dishes include crab-cake benedicts and french toast stuffed with peanut butter and jelly; a weekend brunch menu expands upon those offerings with housemade chicken pot pie. For lunch, Devin and his team smoke pork in-house before adding it to Cuban-style sandwiches with dijon mustard and sliced pickles, as well as grill half-pound, handmade burgers that diners can crown with their choice of toppings.