After a several month-long process, our team found that less than 1% of Denver restaurants (16 restaurants total) serve foie gras.
Overview and Methodology:
From September to December 2025, we reviewed online menus of 1,808 restaurants in Denver searching for ‘foie gras’, a controversial ingredient made by force-feeding ducks and geese until their liver becomes fatty and diseased.
To find the percentage of Denver restaurants that sell foie gras, we used the following equation:
Known Denver restaurants that sell foie gras /
Total number of Denver restaurants =
Percentage of Denver restaurants that sell foie gras
RESULTS:
Known Denver restaurants that had foie gras listed on their regular, seasonal, or holiday menu at the end of 2025: 16
Total number of Denver restaurants at the end of 2025 (source): 1,808
Percentage of Denver restaurants that sell foie gras: 0.88%
Ensuring Accuracy:
Every business on this list went through two checks before it counted: an automated pass, then a manual review.
The starting point was Denver’s business licensing database, covering every food service business in the city. Pro-Animal Colorado led this research over a two month period before the holidays, the most popular time of year for foie gras sales (research conducted in late 2025). We utilized an LLM to crawl websites of every food service establishment in Denver searching for the phrase ‘foie gras’. A “Yes” required the menu to say “foie gras” directly; anything unclear was marked “Maybe” rather than guessed.
Each business’s own website or menu was checked first, then reliable secondary sources like social media pages, Yelp, Toast, and Google reviews.
Every ‘Yes’ or ‘Maybe’ was then manually checked by someone from our team, confirming the dish, the price, and whether it was seasonal or not. Each confirmed entry was date-stamped, so it can be re-checked later again down the line.