Buffalo Bill of Fare : American Bison Is No Novelty on Denver Restaurant Menus, Where It’s Growing in Popularity. Try the ‘Hump Roast.’

Time was when the first thing locals showed visitors to our area was the city-owned buffalo herd, grazing in a mountain pasture just west of town. On the way back home, we’d probably drop by the Buffalo Bill Museum on Lookout Mountain to check out the exhibits that showed how turn-of-the-century marksmen hunted bison to near extinction.

No more. Now the first experience on our impress-the-tourists tour is to give them a taste of buffalo. Literally. The Denver area boasts at least a dozen restaurants that serve everything from burgers to “buffaritos” to prime rib of buffalo. Visitors can purchase buffalo salami or ground buffalo to take home from most city supermarkets. They can buy buffalo skulls, rugs and hides for decorating their homes and themselves.

Buffalo--actually American bison--is big business around here.

No wonder Ted Turner and Jane Fonda show up in Denver so often. Under the guidance of Colorado bison producer and consultant Brian Ward (who ranches just north of Denver), the Turners have built the largest buffalo herd in the world--more than 4,000 head--in only three years. The cable TV tycoon splits the herd between two ranches: one in Montana (near Bozeman), the other in New Mexico (near Truth or Consequences), with a few left over for his plantation in Florida, near Tallahassee.

Other celebrities are getting involved. Burt Reynolds is a bison owner. So is Gene Autry.

Denver is also headquarters of the American Bison Assn. and boasts two major buffalo meat suppliers in the area (Denver Buffalo Co. and Rocky Mountain Natural Meats Co.). A third, larger supplier, Rocky Mountain Bison, Inc., has 2,700 head in the area bordering the Great Sand Dunes National Monument in the southern part of the state. Bison sales have become the biggest money maker at the National Western Stock Show that draws the international ranching crowd to the Denver Stockyards Coliseum every January. This year, crowds watched as a 2-year-old bison bull was sold for an astonishing $10,000 and a yearling heifer brought an unprecedented $7,000.

The first thing novices learn when they order “buffalo” from a U.S. restaurant menu is that what they get will probably be American bison, which is not a true buffalo. At least it’s American bison if it ends up as melt-in-your-mouth, sweet-flavored lean meat priced about 40% more than a comparable cut of beef. Outside the United States, what is called buffalo may well be water buffalo, which is generally tougher and not as tasty as American bison.

Whatever the semantics, Denver restaurants list it as either buffalo or bison on menus and serve it in many guises. At The Fort Restaurant in Morrison--a tiny mountain community about a 20-minute drive from downtown Denver--historian-owner Sam Arnold has been serving every inch of the animal for 30 years. He says his upscale restaurant serves about 200 buffalo a year. The kitchen uses everything from the bone marrow ($7.95) and tongue ($5.95) for exotic hors d’oeuvres to the hump, as a balance to the more conventional entrees of prime rib, tenderloin and sirloin steak. The hump roast, enough to feed six, runs about $120 and requires that the restaurant be notified two days in advance.

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Elsewhere, the Mountain Man Steak House in Commerce City--about two miles north of Stapleton International Airport--has been serving buffalo in a kitschy Old West setting for about 15 years. Bison ranchers tend to hang out at the rustic Mountain Man. (“Bison people are a lot like their animals: fierce, independent and they cluster together,” explained Harold Danz, executive director of the American Bison Assn.) Try the Mountain Man’s “buffarito” (a burrito filled with shredded bison and red chile, $6.95), or Trapper’s Stew ($6.95 for all you can eat), if you aren’t up for a juicy steak ($17.95 for a 10-ounce steak dinner).

Another bastion of Old West dining, the Buckhorn Exchange in downtown Denver, serves buffalo prime rib ($28 per serving) or a combination of bison and elk tenderloin ($30). The decor is still much the same as it was at the turn of the century when Buffalo Bill Cody was a steady customer, and the restaurant makes for a memorable evening, if you don’t mind eating under the glassy gaze of hundreds of mounted animal heads that decorate the walls.

The Denver Buffalo Co. is the young professional’s choice for fine bison dining with an attitude. Stylish, under-30 diners devour 12-ounce bison strip steaks ($29.95), buffalo chile verde con carne (a combination of green chiles, buffalo and potatoes, $3.95) and buffalo ravioli ($4.95). Or they drink bartender Rob Drewery’s Buffalo Horn Martini. Mix 1.5 ounces Absolut vodka, 1 ounce Bombay gin, a drop of dry vermouth, shake, then serve straight up, garnished with an olive, a twist of lemon and freshly cracked pepper. If you can handle two of those, you’ll begin to think you can round up a bison.

This downtown restaurant complex is a study in total marketing. First, it grows the animals on the 13,000-plus-acre Sweet Ranch, south of Denver; then it serves them at the restaurant and adjoining deli. DBC also sells about a ton of bison meat a month to Japan, where buffalo jerky is particularly popular. Byproducts, such as skulls (about 10 a month go mostly to interior designers and artists), mounted heads, rugs and hides, are sold in the Trading Post gift shop, where you can also order gift boxes of bison steaks for mailing. Vests made of woven bison hair lined with bison leather, and everything from paintings to jewelry to gleaming metal coffee tables decorated with bison motifs, are other items. Most of the goods can be ordered from a DBC catalogue.

Other dining choices in the downtown area: Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine (try the bison strip steak, $22.95); Marlowe’s on the Sixteenth Street Mall (tasty bison cheeseburgers, $7.75), and the Rocky Mountain Diner (bison meatloaf, $8.95). Tante Louise, an upscale French restaurant about a 10-minute drive east of downtown, is known for its bison osso buco ($25.50). Round the Corner, a franchise of burger places, sells “buff” burgers ($4.85-$5.25) in its suburban Denver locations. And Cafe Jordano, a hole-in-the-wall Italian family restaurant in a Lakewood shopping center--about a 15-minute drive from downtown--offers eight kinds of buffalo scaloppine daily (about $8-$9). “We serve buffalo because we don’t like the way they raise veal,” explained Cafe Jordano owner Elise Heitman.

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Nutritionally, buffalo/bison has lower cholesterol, lower fat and about half the calories of its beef counterpart, according to a 1988 study funded by the American Bison Assn. However, it is pricey. Tenderloin often runs more than $25 a pound at the market. A six-ounce filet mignon, considered by many the tastiest cut, will set you back $25 or more in a good restaurant. Prime rib, the best seller, goes for a little less.

Since the meat is on the lean side, it is easy to overcook, so experts recommend that it not be ordered well done. “The proper way is to cook the meat light medium, or less. I prefer my prime rib on the rare side,” said Bob Dineen, president of Rocky Mountain Natural Meats Co.

As for those who worry about endangering bison as a species, the ABA’s Danz says: “Bison is not a threatened species. I recently completed a census where I mailed out cards to 1,800 known bison owners. I know there are at least 130,000 bison in the U.S. and of that total, nearly 90% are in private herds. Public herds number 13,136 bison. Tribal herds total another 3,599. The balance are in private herds, anything from one animal to over 4,000.”

Or, as Donna Skougor of the Denver Buffaclo Co. suggested: “We process 100 bison a month versus the beef industry slaughtering 125,000 cattle a day.”

GUIDEBOOK

Where Bison Roam

Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine, 2520 West 23rd Ave., Denver; telephone (303) 433-3386.

Buckhorn Exchange, 1000 Osage St., Denver; tel. (303) 534-9505.

Cafe Jordano, 11068 W. Jewell Ave., Lakewood; tel. (303) 988-6863.

Denver Buffalo Co., 1109 Lincoln St., Denver; tel. (303) 832-0880; mail order, tel. (800) BUY BUFF.

Marlowe’s, 511 16th St., Denver; tel. (303) 595-3700.

Mountain Man Steak House, 5797 Quebec St., Commerce City; tel. (303) 287-9771.

Rocky Mountain Diner, 800 18th St., Denver; tel. (303) 293-8383.

Tante Louise, 4900 E. Colfax Ave., Denver; tel. (303) 355-4489.

The Fort Restaurant, 19192 Highway 8, Morrison; tel. (303) 697-4771.

Rocky Mountain Natural Meats: mail order, tel. (800) 327-2706.

Round the Corner: call (303) 427-1415 for locations.