The Best Restaurant in Boulder You Have Never Tried

“Best” is naturally relative to your own palate and some of our readers surely have been there but Wild Standard at 1043 Pearl Street is an amazing restaurant that we, at least, had not tried before this week.

It is sort of amazing that Wild Standard has not become more popular, given its famous owner (Bradford Heap, of Colterra and SALT) and prime location. But there are a few things that might have kept you away:

• The Name: What does Wild Standard mean anyway?
• The Seafood Focus: Until recently, the restaurant focused only on seafood, which does not always please everyone in a dinner party.
• The Service Style: Also until recently, the restaurant was based on a dim sum model in which waiters brought around small bites to tables for diners to select those they wanted.

Whatever it was, Bradford Heap decided to make some changes. In late July he announced Wild Standard would drop the dim sum system in favor of traditional ordering off the menu and add meat to the menu with “Land and Sea” as the restaurant tag line.

Since we had never visited during the previous incarnation, we can’t judge the change. But we can tell you we experienced one of the most delicious meals of our year this past week. It was so good, we wrote about it in a separate post.

Also excellent was the service (we had a charming waiter from Brazil named Tiago) and the ambiance. Prices are not low with entrees ranging from $16 to $29 but as the general manager Micah explained to us, securing the best ingredients sometimes means paying a lot for the raw materials.

We heartily recommend a visit to west Pearl to dine at Wild Standard.

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Wild Standard invited our two writers to dine on the house. We gladly accepted. The views above are entirely our own and not influenced by the restaurant’s generosity.