Colorado Wine Company Teams up With ‘The Wicked Clam’

The seafood truck parked in front of Colorado Wine Company at 2 p.m. Sunday and by 4:30 p.m., three-and-a-half hours before the advertised closing time, every last morsel on the menu had sold out.

By the time Greg Page got there, “all that was left was the lasagna,” said the Eagle Rock native, who has lived in the neighborhood for the past 42 years.

But Page was hardly bitter. As one of 150 to 200 customers at The Wicked Clam’s debut foray into the world of food truck cuisine, he wants the venture to succeed. 

Why would Page care about The Wicked Clam?

Because it’s a nascent pop-up business run by Dave Evans, co-owner of Dave’s Chillin-n-Grillin, widely held to be the best sandwich deli in the Eagle Rock area. And, as Page puts it, he was "Dave's first customer" when he opened the Colorado Boulevard deli in 2004.

For some time now, Evans, a Boston native, has made it known that he wants to open a second restaurant—not least because he says he works his butt off 13 hours a day just to break even at Dave’s Chillin-n-Grillin.

But before launching a brick-and-mortar version of The Wicked Clam food truck, Evans’ business partner, Ghazal Bazrafshan, came up with a brilliant idea: Why not serve a few items from the menu of their proposed seafood restaurant in a cross-promotional venture with the Colorado Wine Company?

And that’s just what Evans and Bazrafshan did on Sunday, taking advantage of CoWineCo’s Lazy Sunday event, where this week’s wine offerings included the delicious and affordable 2009 “Shipwreck” chardonnay from Napa Valley’s Carneros winery. (“Try this with the Chowder,” read a Colorado Wine Company leaflet for customers.)

In fact, it turned out that during the fall and winter, Dave’s Chillin-n-Grillin serves a sumptuous clam chowder cooked in Chardonnay obtained from the Colorado Wine Company. (Until last year, these two fixtures of Eagle Rock were within a few stores of each other on the stretch of Colorado Boulevard just east of the Eagle Rock Boulevard crossing.)

“We used a lot of Jennifer’s wines to cook our seafood with so we though it would be really great to cross-promote with the Colorado Wine Company because they have such great wine and beers,” Bazrafshan told Eagle Rock Patch, referring to CoWineCo’s co-owner, Jennifer Morgan.  

And so it was that this week’s Lazy Sunday at CoWineCo was in many ways the ultimate cross-promotional event—seafood cooked and consumed with CoWineCo wines.

“It’s all a credit to Dave’s” Chillin-n-Grillin, said Morgan. “They did it all—we just did some social media and all that jazz.”

Not surprisingly, Evans and Bazrafshan are considering another pop-up for the Wicked Clam next month outside Colorado Wine Company—or elsewhere in Eagle Rock. “And we’re going to do it a few times and then hopefully we can find a brick-and-mortar place in the Eagle Rock area eventually,” said Evans, clearly pleased with Sunday’s turnout.

Asked precisely where in Eagle Rock he was hoping to set up his second restaurant, Evans replied that he’d prefer not to be too far from Dave’s Chillin-n-Grillin. “But I’d go out of town, too, if I had to,” he said.