Work & Class doesn’t have a sign out front that you’d spot from a moving car. What it has is a metal door on Larimer Street in RiNo, a room that seats maybe sixty people shoulder-to-shoulder, and a menu that covers more geography than it has any right to — Cuban roast pork, Nashville-style catfish, Carolina-influenced pork ribs — and somehow pulls all of it off without feeling scattered.
I first went on a Tuesday in January, dragged there by a friend who insisted I’d been sleeping on it. She was right. I’ve been back six or seven times since, which for a restaurant in this city is about as strong an endorsement as I can give.
The setup is counter-service with a little bit of chaos. You order at the bar, grab a number, and find whatever table opens up. It’s loud. The room is small and the ceiling is low and everyone around you is having a good time, which makes it louder. If you need a quiet dinner to hold a serious conversation, this is not your place. If you want to eat extremely well for not much money, stay.
The fried chicken — a half bird, crispy-skinned, served with pickled green tomato — costs somewhere around thirteen dollars. The garlic roast pork comes with black beans, rice, and sweet plantains and runs about the same. These are not approximations of comfort food. They are comfort food, cooked by people who clearly know what the real thing is supposed to taste like.
Get the guava BBQ ribs if they’re on the menu. Get the macaroni and cheese regardless. The sides here are not afterthoughts — they’re half the reason to come. I’ve made a meal out of three of them and left completely satisfied.
The drink list skews toward rum, which makes sense given the food. The daiquiris are good and not precious about it. A pitcher of the house sangria shows up at a lot of the tables around you, and for good reason.
Prices have crept up slightly since the place opened in 2014, but it’s still one of the more honest values in RiNo, a neighborhood that has become considerably more expensive to eat in. Figure thirty to forty dollars for two people with drinks, maybe a little more if you go heavy on sides, which I always do.
They don’t take reservations. The line on weekends can stretch outside, but it moves. The best time to go is a weeknight around six, early enough to beat the second wave of the dinner crowd. Parking in RiNo is its own exercise in patience; walking or biking from anywhere along the South Platte corridor is easier.
What stays with me about Work & Class isn’t any single dish. It’s the feeling of leaving full and not quite believing what you paid. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds, and in a city where the dining scene has gotten very good at feeling expensive, it matters more than ever.
