The Disputed Omelet

The Denver omelet has a hometown in its name and almost no agreement on how it got there. At its core the dish is simple: eggs cooked with ham, diced onion, and green bell pepper. For much of the twentieth century it was actually eaten as a sandwich, the Denver sandwich or western sandwich, served between two slices of toast.

The breadless omelet version came later. The theories about origin scatter. Some historians point to Chinese cooks on railroad crews and in logging camps who may have adapted egg foo young into a portable filling.

A nineteen oh seven account names two Denver restaurateurs as competing inventors. No record has settled it. One researcher quoted in Colorado Life magazine even suspects the sandwich was invented in the Midwest and was only dubbed western because of its ingredients.

The honest answer is that a practical egg dish probably emerged from several different hands at once, and Denver was simply the city whose name stuck to it.