Before Joe’s Sloppy J’s crossed my radar, I don’t think I’d ever encountered a Frito Pie outside of a school cafeteria or the state of Texas. Well, god bless ’em, Joe’s Sloppy J’s has brought that fine culinary masterpiece to the streets of Denver. And god help me, they’ve set up shop literally across the street from my office.
Sloppy joe’s and Frito Pies rule the menu, and these guys are so rad that they’ve made a point of making some vegan and gluten free options that are just as awesome as the rest of the menu. The vegan version of their awesome chili laden slop (the technical term for it, I learned from Joe), which uses TVP in place of the 100% Angus beef and sweet wood smoked thick cut bacon in the meaty Js, is so good even Joe himself was shocked at just how awesome it was. Even more cool is that they take deliberate steps in prepping the slops separately to avoid any meating up of the veg version.
Messy, Good, Fast, Cheap. Perfect.
A couple months back I hit these guys up and got a vegan pie and Georgina got the vegan J and both were great. Horribly messy, and wickedly delicious. This is not your cafeteria’s Frito Pie. It’s a refined version, for sure, with bold flavors from fire-roasted tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers – which, for the record, they skin prior to incorporating into the sauce since the skin can cause some, erm… digestive distress in some people. Anyway – it’s so freaking good. As the menu shot below shows, you can also get the slop of your choice on top of a National Hebrew hot dog or tucked into some gluten free taco shells.
Good, fast, and cheap as hell. The trifecta of awesomeness in street food. Give these guys a like on Facebook, and find them most weekdays set up for lunch at the SE corner of Grant and Colfax, right in front of Capitol Hill Books – and tell them you heard about them here. They’ll also be slinging their delicious grub at the Dead Prez hip hop event and barbecue on July 2. If you catch em, come back and let us know what you think in the comments!
