Danielle’s Scratch Kitchen in Castle Rock is more than just a restaurant; it’s an experience steeped in love and dedication to the craft of cooking. The latest episode of Pinpoint Colorado, hosted by Rachel Maines, offers a behind-the-scenes look into what makes this establishment a standout favorite in the local community. During her conversation with co-owner Todd Walker, the essence of the restaurant’s charm is unraveled through stories of passion and commitment to quality.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fev0uVbWzyo?si=Qph0zQfEYkrhPRIJ&w=560&h=315]
At Danielle’s, everything is prepared from scratch using the freshest ingredients possible. This dedication to scratch-made cooking not only sets the restaurant apart but also ensures a unique dining experience that guests won’t forget. Todd Walker emphasizes that it’s not only about the quality of the food but also about the love infused into each dish. The co-owners’ philosophy is simple and profound—serve good food crafted with love and passion.
The restaurant’s offerings revolve primarily around Italian-American cuisine, with a menu that speaks volumes of their commitment to quality and authenticity. Guests are treated to dishes like the beloved southern fried chicken with a bourbon gravy sauce and their exquisite wild salmon. It’s the taste of home-cooked meals elevated with culinary artistry that resonates deeply with the patrons.
A key factor that contributes to the success of Danielle’s is their team. Their approach to staffing mirrors their approach to cooking—nurturing talent from within. Many staff members start young and grow with the restaurant, learning the ropes and evolving into skilled artisans who understand the importance of consistency and care in delivering a dining experience.
Atmosphere plays a critical role at Danielle’s, with a beautiful patio that offers a retreat-like setting. A dining space that isn’t marred by traffic noise and offers serene views is part of what makes the restaurant so inviting. The patio is not just a seating area; it’s an embodiment of the restaurant’s philosophy of relaxing, enjoying good company, and partaking in exceptional food.
A commitment to serving clean, gluten-free food has also carved a niche for Danielle’s among health-conscious diners. The initiative started when an early chef had a celiac son, making it a personal mission to cater to those with specific dietary needs. This attention to detail and inclusivity has strengthened the bond with the community, reinforcing Danielle’s status as a go-to spot for flavorful, mindful dining.
Danielle’s Scratch Kitchen is a local treasure that stands as a testament to what can be achieved when a restaurant prioritizes quality, community, and heart. It thrives not because it’s a place to eat, but because it’s a place where guests feel at home, enveloped in warmth and exceptional culinary craft. For those yet to experience it, this episode of Pinpoint Colorado is a tantalizing invitation to taste the love.
Join us on an intriguing journey as we explore the depths of Danielle's Scratch Kitchen, a culinary gem in Castle Rock, Colorado. Host Rachel Maines sits down with co-owner Todd Walker for an insightful conversation that delves into the philosophy and essence of what makes their restaurant so unique. From scratch-made dishes to a guided commitment to hospitality, we uncover the elements that have made Danielle’s a beloved local favorite.
00:00:43 Introduction to Danielle's Scratch Kitchen
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SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Pinpoint, Colorado. I'm your host, Rachel Maines. This week, we're featuring Danielle's Scratch Kitchen in Castle Rock. It's a local restaurant that's known for its scratch-made menu, warm hospitality, and inviting atmosphere. Coming up, I'll sit down with restaurant co-owner Todd Walker for a behind-the-scenes look at what makes this restaurant so special. Let's go inside. Well, thank you, Todd, for letting me come down here. I love this restaurant. I've been here one time before, and it's just really unique.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, thanks for coming down. We're real proud of what we've done here. We're real proud of the food we serve and the way we serve it and think that it's something very special for this little corner of Colorado.
SPEAKER 02 :
And there's only one restaurant like this in the nation.
SPEAKER 03 :
That's right. That's right. Right here.
SPEAKER 02 :
What are some of the key things you're like, this really makes us stand out, makes us be unique?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. I think, number one, we're a scratch kitchen. So everything we possibly can bring in fresh and fresh. and bring in here, we bring in the best ingredients, the freshest ingredients, and our chefs do their magic to put that all together here to serve what we think is the best food around. And that's probably the number one thing is the quality of food. But if I were to say anything else, it's that as a restaurant, we really have two what we call rules in our restaurant. The first one is that we love people. And not just our guests, but for sure our guests, but also each other. And we think that shows in our cooking. My business partner, who's our food guru, always says he can tell if something's cooked with love or not. And you can taste the love in the food. And that's very Italian. He's very Italian from Long Island. And so there's that spirit, I think, in the restaurant of we're going to love people. And then our second rule as a restaurant is everybody has to try. So if we love people and we try, we think we create something really special here for the folks down here in Castle Rock.
SPEAKER 02 :
I love that. And Colorado is a unique state, and we're a foodie state. And so it's fun to be here, I'm sure, as a restaurant owner and in the restaurant business. Describe your cuisine.
SPEAKER 03 :
It's Italian-American. And so we call ourselves Casual Fine Dining. But most of our food is Italian. real real um like i said the best ingredients and and and you know put together with with uh um over just years of putting it together putting our menu together to kind of to kind of craft a menu that that everyone loves and that the food is, you know, just even looking at our reviews, you can kind of see that the food really is what makes this place special. It really is what makes, you know, it's a restaurant, right? So that's what you want. You want great food. And that's what we've really done over years of just not settling and just setting that high standard of food and the quality of our food and the taste of our food.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we love food. We're foodies here in the atmosphere, too. And what you created in terms of the atmosphere, I say, is unique as well. Soon the patio is going to be opening, which is great. And you were mentioning prior to us doing the interview that your patio is quite unique.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, it's a beautiful patio. One of the things that makes it unique is it's really hard to find a patio that's as big as ours that isn't by a road where it doesn't have traffic. It's just kind of got a beautiful, peaceful, calm, especially in the spring and summer when it's so green out there. It's really beautiful and just a wonderful place to eat and have drinks and spend time together.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Yeah, it's nice to sit on the patio and have a nice glass of wine and some good food. So that's something to look forward to this summer for sure. What's your favorite thing or couple items on the menu that are your favorites?
SPEAKER 03 :
I think our southern fried chicken. We do this with a bourbon gravy sauce that is just absolutely fabulous. Our halibut right now is pretty good and something that everyone will really love. I mean, our goal is to have wild food, and every one of our dishes should be a wild dish. Every one of our dishes, when you take that first bite, should make you go, oh, wow, that's amazing. That's really good. And so everything on our menu is fabulous. You know, I really like our wild salmon. I think our salmon is just as good as it gets. And, you know, the way we plate it, cook it and everything is real good.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, being a scratch kitchen, too, and having the vendors that are just perfect vendors. How did you guys go about searching your vendors?
SPEAKER 03 :
A lot of time. Like that's a great question, because that really is, you know, part of the secret sauce is figuring out what what is not every vendor has everything great.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
So you have to, you know, you know, find a bakery up in Denver that's going to. that's going to bake for us and you know we and some of it we do ourselves but you know finding a bakery that will you know bake our ciabatta bread and and make sure it's fresh and and made just for us um some of that kind of stuff and finding the different venues with with that may only have one or two ingredients that that are right for us but that which is very particular about you know having and having in in-house to make our dishes right
SPEAKER 02 :
And Colorado, like we were saying and we were alluding to, is a foodie state. So I'm sure we have more options than a lot of states here. And we have good food. And people here care about the food. They care about having healthy food. Food source, too, is really important. Mm-hmm. Here.
SPEAKER 03 :
Clean food. And so our food is clean. We're very good at gluten-free. It's something that we really specialize in. Way back, one of our early chefs had a celiac son, kind of put us on that path, and we've just kind of gone with it. And it's something that we really specialize in. We do almost everything on our menu we can do gluten-free. So anybody out there that's gluten-free, we're a great option for them because it's something that we know how to do and we do very well.
SPEAKER 02 :
yeah that's very important here in colorado um with the chefs you alluded to that but how do you pick your chef i'm sure it's of course someone who knows how to cook very well but what other aspects do you look for in a chef well we we're again what's a great question because that's also the secret sauce of a restaurant is to make sure you have the right chefs and we're fortunate we have a head chef that has is pretty much homegrown so he came here started out on our grill
SPEAKER 03 :
um went to saute became a sous chef um and then has been our head chef now for about five years he's been with us about eight years so we've only been open 10 years so we yeah so we've we're very fortunate that we have uh someone that's been with us through all of our evolution you know through all of our growing pains and all that stuff and knows our dishes knows our food and helped develop a lot so yeah we're really really fortunate like that and then of course um uh, my, my business partner and his father, they're what I call my menu gurus. They're the ones that, um, that really flesh out our menu and develop our menu. Uh, uh, they've been in the restaurant business, you know, 40 years. And so they're, they really know their food and are able to, um, kind of just make sure it's, it's the techniques are all really important. It's really, cause if you just do one little thing wrong, though, you change the whole dish and just getting that, that, that balance, that, that flavor balance.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
on each and every dish just right every time. That's the hard part is that those chefs and those cooks don't get used to it, but they stay passionate, and they are. They stay passionate about making great food, and that's really what we look for. We look for people that want to cook the best food, that want to cook great food, that aren't just looking for a job but are really passionate about cooking, and that's really the team we have back here.
SPEAKER 02 :
And that would be fun, too. I can imagine, you know, I'm not much of a cook, but I could imagine being a chef. It's like art and being able to present it to your employers and say, hey, you know, this is a new dish and I paired it with this and these kind of spices. You know, that's really art.
SPEAKER 03 :
And to do it the same way, to make it look amazing and do it the same way where every single time is just what you want and perfect is an art form. It really is an art form, more so than a lot of things because it's so much intuitive. And even though you can do it as a recipe and everything, when you're cooking, it's very intuitive how they're doing it. They're putting the same amount of ingredients in, but they're tasting, they're testing, they're getting each dish. Because every dish is scratch made. It's not like we're cooking everything and preheating everything and then just warming it up for people, which is what a lot of your like, you know, cookie cutter franchises are doing. They're just shipping in food, warming it up, serving it. Everything's cooked directly from scratch right there in the pan. And that that really is an art form.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and that's a lot of hard work. You have to have somebody who's so skilled. And, you know, something I really haven't thought about before is if I come here and I have my favorite dish, and I'm one of those people that I always want to eat my favorite dish, like, and find my favorite. And whenever I go to that restaurant, I always order that because I don't want to miss out, you know, if I order something that's not, like, my absolute favorite. Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
I run into that all the time, and I always am trying to get people to break out. Because once they do, they go, oh, this is my new favorite. Then they try something else, and they're like, oh, this is my new favorite because our food is so good that there's always more than one thing on our menu that you'll love.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that's good to know. And every time you want it to taste the same. You don't want to be like, oh, that's different than last time.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.
SPEAKER 02 :
What do you look for in terms of your staff? What type of personality or certain characteristics that you look for? Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, along the same lines, I look for people who are caring because our first rule is we love people. And if I find somebody that has a good heart, then they're going to love people. And that's going to show in how they take care of our guests. That's going to show in their attention to detail and all of that. And then people who actually... actually care about the food actually care about cooking actually care about or if they don't if they're not in the in the back in the kitchen but they're up front that actually care about hospitality that actually care about taking care of people and giving people a great experience and so that's what i look for and we one of the things that's cool about us is uh we hire you know so many so many of the of the people we hire are young people right here in colorado yeah even teenagers you know we have teenagers that um They'll come to us when they're 15, get started, and we'll be the only job they have all through high school. And they go up to college. I just got a message a moment ago from one of my college kids that's up at, I think he's at Boulder. I don't think he's in Fort Collins. Oh, that's where I went to school. Oh, cool. Yeah, he's up there. And he just messaged me back saying, hey, I'm in town for the weekend if anybody has a shift because he'll work for us this summer. But he was with us all through high school. And we have a bunch of kids like that. So it's fun to not just... Not just say, hey, support local, but to actually be local, to be the kids growing up here, to be the, you know, my servers are local people that most of them have grown up here. And it's just a, it's good to like be a Colorado restaurant. Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
In every sense of the way you are.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
The scratch kitchen. That's right. The people you hire, being in the community. And you do make a difference being a staple in a community as a restaurant. You know, you're making a difference.
SPEAKER 03 :
That's right. And no, it's so fun because we'll have people that will come in and have their first date here and then come back and do their anniversary dinners here. You know, they want to sit in the same table. They have their first date. And, you know, it's fun to do all that because because we really feel like this is our home. This is this is our home. This is our community. This is our people. You know, so you want to you want to be good to your people.
SPEAKER 02 :
Of course. Yeah. Every in every sense of the way.
SPEAKER 03 :
That's right.
SPEAKER 02 :
What are some of the things that you guys do training-wise to kind of... Obviously, you're looking for that heart, that friendliness, love people. But anything in particular that you do training?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, it depends. It depends on... Yeah, one of the things we like to do is... I'll tell you about one of my cooks. His name's Roman. Roman started with us at 16 in our dish pit as a dishwasher. At some point, we moved him over to our salads, and then we moved him up to grill, and now he's a saute cook, and he's been with us now for... seven years. And, uh, so, so raising them up is, is one way, one way that we do that. And we really like to do that in our kitchen and our, in the, when it comes to our servers in front of the house, I want the best. I want people with experience. I want people that, that already are great to come in and bring that good heart that have just been looking for a home that they can bring those skills in. So that's, uh, that's, that's kind of how, how, how, what our heart is there.
SPEAKER 02 :
And then just the mixture of both. That's right.
SPEAKER 03 :
And just teaching people that we're passionate about loving people. It's not just words. It's not just a slogan. We're passionate about loving people. And so that's one of our great questions that we ask each other is, are we doing that in love? Are we cooking in love? Are we serving in love? Are we making drinks in love? And if we do that, we get the excellence that we're passionate about.
SPEAKER 02 :
And then you enjoy your job. And that's why also the people stay here because I can imagine the restaurant industry, the turnover is huge usually. But here people are staying here long term.
SPEAKER 03 :
The average turnover in a restaurant is seven months for an employer. And our employees have been here years and years and years. And when we have an opening, people want to come and work here because they know of us, they know we're good and they know we care. And, you know, that's what you really want is you want to work someplace where the people care so then you can care. It's so much more enjoyable to serve people and cook food and be hospitable when you care.
SPEAKER 1 :
Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, and when everyone, the whole team cares. Yeah. And so that's really the spirit of Danielle's is we really do want to be, you know, the local, a local place right here in this little corner of Colorado, but that is also... passionate about giving our people, the people here, the very best, the very best food and the very best service that we possibly can.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, you can definitely see that. And I'm looking forward to ordering some future entrees and I'll take some suggestions from you, but for the listeners and the viewers, your website, so they can check out the menu.
SPEAKER 03 :
Just go to danielescratchkitchen.com and our menu's right on there. You can see everything, our drinks, our menu, everything you need.
SPEAKER 02 :
And then the hours.
SPEAKER 03 :
So we're open on, we're open Tuesday through Sunday from 1130 until eight or nine o'clock on the weekends. We're open at nine or we take our last table at nine. And on Mondays, we're only, it's the only day we're not open for lunch. We open at four o'clock and we're open until, we take our last table at eight o'clock on Mondays.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you so much. This has been a great interview. Thank you so much for coming down here. Great place, beautiful ambience. It's amazing. Food's amazing. People are amazing. So thank you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Thank you for coming in.
SPEAKER 02 :
My thanks to Todd Walker and team at Danielle Scratch Kitchen for joining me today. To learn more and make reservations, go to daniellescratchkitchen.com. And to watch past episodes of Pinpoint Colorado, just go to pinpointcolorado.com. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time.
