5280 Denver's Mile-High Magazine
Top of the Town
CANON CITY’S most dazzling attraction isn’t the Royal Gorge: It's Merlino’s Belvedere. A family-owned Italian restaurant that's been wowing locals with its house-made pastas since 1946. One bite of tender cavatelli tossed with Merlino’s signature spicy red sauce and even the big bridge fails to impress.
Before opening the restaurant, the immigrant Merlino family enjoyed a reputation for making fresh cider from apples they grew on their farm just outside Canon City Ubaldo “Baldy” Merlino founded that enterprise, but his sons’ restaurant aspirations soon outpaeed apples. The family capitalized on their cider fame by opening an eatery: the Belvedere, or “beautiful acres” in Italian. Early on, Joe and Tony Merlino (brothers) did all the cooking, preparing their own sausages on the premises. These days, Tony’s son Mike runs the show along with his wife, Cathie, and other family members, using the original recipes.
Merlino’s pastas, including the cavatelli, ravioli, and lasagna, are all made fresh in the old apple-pressing room of the cider mill (the family quit the cider bis in 1997). Can’t miss: the fragrant loaves of crusty Italian bread—perfect for mopping up Merlino’s hearty’ pallandill (Italian wedding soup).
The food is excellent, all the more so for its surprisingly low prices. At lunch, enjoy a big honse salad topped with blue cheese and garlic bread with a bowl of fresh pasta for $6.99. Dinner prices aren’t much higher, and even the steaks (which arc still cut and aged on site) top out at SaG, including the bacon-wrapped, 14-ounce filet mignon.
Head to Canon City’ for summertime white-water rafting on the Arkansas, then stop by Merlinos' for the day’s biggest thrill.
Press Release: Business News
For immediate release
14 October 2004
Merlinos' Belvedere Restaurant received a great-unsolicited plug in a recent national publication, John Fielder's Best of Colorado's book. In his new book, the historian and photographer lists his 165 top scenic places in the state along with his favorite restaurants, hotels, hiking trails and bed & breakfasts.
The local restaurant, known for its aged steaks and handmade pasta and sauces, was featured on Pages 91 and 93 of the new publication, with the noted author writing, "If you read the introduction of this chapter, you know that my favorite southern Colorado restaurant is Merlinos' Belvedere. The same family has owned the Belvedere since 1946, serving delicious Italian and seafood dishes, and mouthwatering steaks."
In his introduction to Cañon City and the Royal Gorge Region, Fielder noted, "with aching muscles, either from carrying heavy camera equipment or taking an adrenaline-packed rafting adventure, I always stop at Merlinos' Belvedere for the best Italian food in southern Colorado."
"These folks serve great dinners even if you arrive damp and unshaven, with your tennis shoes still sloshing from your river trip," Fielder wrote.
Merlinos' Belvedere is located at 1330 Elm Avenue in Cañon City; the phone # is (719) 275-5558.
For more information, Call Mike Merlino at (719) 275-5558.
In the February 22, 2006
Denver Post
DINING - a guide to great restaurants in Denver and beyond
Located on the grounds of the now gone Merlino family cherry orchard, the Belvedere is big enough to have its own weather system, but it still feels like you're eating in the gold-flocked family dining room. The menu boasts hand-cut, house-aged steaks as good as you get in Kansas City, Mo., but if anyone has made it that deep into the offerings, we would like to meet them. Most diners get stuck-and we mean that in the best way-in the Italian section, worrying over which combination of noodles to have with what sauce. And note the bottomless salad, on the menu at the Belvedere long before Olive Garden came to be.
Killer Dish: they say cavatelli, we say gnocchi. Either way, the Belvedere's little pillows of potato pasta, indented just enough to hold the place's signature red sauce, are hard to beat.
Tip: House-made gelato flavors change to reflect the fruits of the season.
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March 2-8, 2000
Volume 23, Number 27
Goin' south: Good red sauce can be found in the oddest places. On a recent trip to Cañon City -- not to visit someone in the joint, by the way, but to hike around the Royal Gorge area -- we noticed dozens of billboards along U.S. Highway 50 touting Merlino's Belvedere, an Italian restaurant that's kept things cooking in Cañon City for 54 years. After about the tenth sign, we started wondering if the eatery could indeed be "A Treasured Name in Fine Foods" and "Southern Colorado's Most Distinctive Restaurant" (how much competition could there be for that?), and decided to drop by 1330 Elm Street.
As anyone who likes to hike until it hurts knows, butter-covered construction paper is fabulous when your quads are burning, so we tried to keep that in mind. Still, I'm certain that eating at the Belvedere was one of the better dining experiences I've had in ages. Sure, it was red sauce all the way, but for $50 -- tax, tip and three desserts between the two of us -- we came away stuffed and satisfied.
Joe and Tony Merlino started the Belvedere in 1946 in what is now the main dining room. Over the years, the family kept adding on (and had to rebuild the entire restaurant after it burned in 1992); today there are four dining areas. (We sat in the Grotta, which boasts a cute little fountain.) Joe retired in 1981 and Tony died in 1986, and since then, Tony's son, Michael, has been running the place with his wife, Cathie, and their kids, Adam and Michelle. Michael still does some of the cooking.
And what cooking it is: The menu lists only two dishes that use "imported" (as in dried) pasta, and the rest is made on the premises. So the ravioli is fresh and soft, filled with a delicious mixture of spinach, pork and ricotta, and the spaghetti noodles have that great homemade texture (I got a half-and-half order of each for $12.10). My meal included two huge, marvelous meatballs that were heavy on the meat and light on the breading, as well as a bottomless salad bowl that held crisp, well-chilled, chopped iceberg and tomatoes sporting an addictive, ideally balanced, herb-packed Italian dressing; a generous-sized bowl of blue-cheese crumbles came on the side. (I confess to spreading some of the cheese on the heavenly, soft-centered Italian bread.) Our other entree was the manicotti ($12.05), which included one each of Belvedere's excellent sirloin- and cheese-filled versions.
The Belvedere also makes some of its own desserts, the most notable of which was the gelato ($2.50), an offering that changes weekly. We tried the strawberry-banana, which was not only a true rich and creamy gelato, but was also packed with fruit flavor.
What was most striking about our meal at the Belvedere, however, was how stellar the service was -- unlike the service in just about any place in Denver. Unobtrusive but efficient, our server noticeably timed her interruptions to coincide with our lapses in conversation, and everything we needed was there before we needed it; she didn't feel the urge to share her life story or apologize for being a server, either. We walked out of the place wishing we could clone both the server and the restaurant and stick them in the middle of Cherry Creek North. -- Wagner
Again, for the year 2006 Merlinos' Belvedere was
selected for the "Restaurant of Distinction"
award by the Gourmet Diners Society of North
America. This award recieved for
"... performance, including customer service and
hospitality, recipients clearly demonstrate that they
stand out, far above their competition."
TopRestaurants.com
Selected for 2008 by TopRestaurants.com as
"One of the best Italian restaurants, steakhouses in the state of Colorado. Homemade pastas with original family recipe sauces."
