The Restaurant Show KEZW 1430 AM 4/5/02

Little Holly's Asian Café

For the second time in two weeks we found another really outstanding new Asian restaurant in Denver. This time it's Little Holly's Asian Café in Highlands Ranch. My longstanding beef with Asian restaurants, especially Chinese and Vietnamese, is that their menus are so lacking in imagination. I often jokingly suggest that I suspect they simply photocopy each other's menus, producing uniformly boring food that gives you little reason to venture further than the Asian restaurant up the street from where you live.

So, it's nice to discover a restaurant like Little Holly's where different, exciting specials find their way onto the menu each evening, and even regular menu items have a flair and intensity of flavor that make this restaurant worth the drive from anywhere in the metro area. We tried several dishes, including the Holly's Shrimp in a light ginger sauce and the Basil Chicken along with a variety of appetizers. All were great, but the hands-down winner for excellence in flavor and texture was the Sea Bass in a delicate house sauce. If the name Little Holly's sounds remarkably similar to Little Ollie's, the award-winning Cherry Creek restaurant, there's a reason, since John Ye, the guiding light behind Little Ollie's, is also the man responsible for Little Holly's. What's really heartening is that the bar has been now been raised as far as quality and creativity in Asian restaurants is concerned. It will be fun to see if others take up the challenge and take us to even higher levels. One can only hope.