He traveled the world, worked in steakhouses and made a name for himself in Denver with a fleet of his own food trucks. But to find the inspiration for his first storefront restaurant, Mathew Yamali had only to look down at the red checkerboard floors of his commissary kitchen.
“It reminds me of home,” Yamali, 31, said earlier this month from the building, which is wedged between a nail salon and a mycology supply store at 3890 Kipling St. in Wheat Ridge. He renovated the space last year and opened it as Colorado Hots in November, selling regional specialty dishes from upstate New York.
In Rochester, New York, where Yamali grew up, “hots” restaurants are everywhere. The name refers to the city’s variations on the hot dog — made by a 144-year-old company there called Zweigle’s — with its white pork sausages and red beef sausages.
The hots can also be sliced and piled on “garbage plates,” a comfort food dish that originated at Nick Tahou Hots in downtown Rochester. A full garbage plate comes with hots, a smashed cheeseburger, meat sauce, onions and mustard topped over a hefty bed of home fries and cold macaroni salad. They are considered an iconic dish in the city, according to one exhaustive study.
Colorado Hots has its own “G Plates,” named so by Yamali to avoid any possible trademark infringement on the grub’s original creator. They are nonetheless piles with enough protein to weather a brutal hangover on the shore of Lake Ontario. (New Yorkers prefer to mix and match the toppings on their own plates, he said.)
Yamali dove into his trove of New York memories and allegiances for the restaurant. He uses Zweigle’s sausages and Country Sweet and Boss sauces, just like in Rochester. The meat sauce that tops his garbage plates is rich with cinnamon. Other classic fare from New York includes Buffalo wings, chopped cheese sandwiches and chicken-finger subs.
The wings are brined in pickle juice, fried twice and tossed in a glistening mix of Boss Sauce and butter. Their fragrance emanates from the kitchen of Colorado Hots.
It took leaving Rochester, though, for Yamali to really connect with his hometown.
When he was younger, he would say he was from the more culturally renowned Brooklyn, where his father’s side of the family still lives. He got his first job in the kitchen of a sushi restaurant in Rochester at 14 and worked there until he decided to try living in another part of the country, taking an executive sous chef job at Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille in Centennial.
“I was 21 with a whole French brigade,” he said about leading a team in the kitchen. “Did not like it. Kind of hated it.”
He moved to another steakhouse, the Capital Grille in downtown Denver. At the same time, he built and launched his first food truck, Roll It Up Sushi.
That one truck turned into four, with Yamali adding chicken tenders and smashburgers to his roving fast-food arsenal. His fine-dining interests shifted to traveling, and he visited Asia and South America before COVID-19 placed him back in Colorado.
All this motion made him long for Rochester, he said. After moving his commissary kitchen to Wheat Ridge last winter, the idea for Colorado Hots flickered above his head, and he studied up on hots restaurants and their very specific type of regional cuisine.
Colorado Hots captures some of New York’s fraternal spirit in its decor. A print of the Rochester skyline, a blue-and-yellow New York license plate and vintage Zweigle’s decals rest behind the counter. A Street Fighter II arcade game tucked against a wall promises “FREE PLAY.” Lil Wayne may be from New Orleans, but he’s Yamali’s favorite rapper, and so a blowup of his “Da Drought 3” mixtape cover sits right next to the entrance.
Homesick New Yorkers have started flocking to his restaurant, which is only open Thursday through Sunday as he continues running his food trucks, he said.
“They walk in here like they own the place,” he said fondly. “I get to talking to them … it’s really nice.”