Remembering Denver Restaurateurs Mel and Janie Master

If I were to carve a Mount Rushmore of restaurateurs from the history of Denver dining — but in particular the ’80s and early ’90s — the figures would be Cliff Young, Corky Douglass, Thoa Fink, Noel Cunningham, Blair Taylor and Melvyn Master.

Some of these, as a friend lovingly puts it, “have gone to heaven.”

And now, Melvyn Master has, as has his wife, Janie.

Melvyn — but “Mel,” always Mel — and Janie Master, spouses for some sixty years, rewrote the conventional wedding vow “until death do us part” and joined each other in passing peacefully on September 2 at Pegasos, a voluntary-assisted dying association in Basel, Switzerland.

The Masters’ many years in Denver, in clusters from the ’70s and into the ’90s, bejeweled the city’s dining scene with several…