Racist Jokes and Bad Food at Aurora City Council Member Steve Sundberg’s Bar Legends

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It’s the eve of my forty years. What better way to celebrate than having lunch with my drunkest friends at a sports bar owned by a guy who makes racist videos on Facebook?

There has been a lot of talk about Steve Sundberg, the owner of Legends of Aurora Sports Grill and a representative of the Aurora City Council, in recent days. On his promotional videos, he does stereotypical accents. He wears culture like a costume. And for a guy who’s had multiple incidents involving inappropriate comments of a sexual nature, he seems to shoehorn comments about his cock and balls wherever he can.

Imagine if The Office’s Michael Scott were a real person and had access to an iPhone in 2022: that’s pretty much the Sundberg vibe.

The video that caught my eye was a particularly squeaky read of various online reviews in a vaguely Middle Eastern voice. In this one, he enlists his prop department for a scimitar and a slice of bacon because in his world, there’s nothing too much on the nose. He picks out a few reviews that specifically mention him and his beard, and repeats that he’s always humble, always learning.

When I saw him trying to make soup at the wrong table on my pre-anniversary outing, Sundberg struck me as the kind of guy who would be much better served by staying away from his employees.

The eagle has landed, I told my friend Brett, noticing Sundberg’s incompetence as he fumbled around the dining room in jeans and a tucked-in green flannel. Of course, it was the same guy who had called his own bar twenty minutes earlier, prompting the employee he asked to speak to say, I don’t have time for Steve’s shit,” in their breath.

We were the youngest in Legends at thirty, if you don’t count the guy in all the orange Broncos at the end of the vape bar or the construction workers who arrived a minute behind us. There were two tables of septuagenarians playing MaJong at different ends of the dining room, I guess separated by a quarrel that I will never know about. The walls were adorned with kitsch broken by flat-screen TVs and posters printed with fuzzy Legends logos whose resolution Canva can’t improve.

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Leftovers of what is supposed to be Jamaican jerk seasoning.

Jake Browne

We started with an order of bone-in wings mixed with a Jamaican dry rub that would offend anyone on the island. Lacking any hint of Scottish beanies or noticeable warmth, the bland gritty rub sitting heap at the bottom of the basket clearly speaks to this bar’s clientele who fondly remember LBJ’s administration.

Guess it’s just old, like frying fat leaving the wings with a bad taste that my homie Zac swears is like fish. A paltry assortment of celery sticks and baby carrots stand out from every drummer’s basket, with a chunky ranch that evokes memories of an unused ’80s plate of raw vegetables.

The daily special is a large pizza, so the boys take the Snakebite bartenders’ recommendation: bacon bits, cream cheese, roasted jalapenos and cheese with a ranch fillet on top. When it comes to Colorado pizza, I’ve had worse offenders, but there are elements that basically don’t work.

Having a cream cheese base topped with more cheese leaves the whole pie terribly dry except for the thinnest ranch sprayed on top which bears no relation to the one served with the appetizer. The jalapenos aren’t roasted, which actually works and gives the pizza the needed kick and texture, along with the few bits of bacon. Based on the cook on the crust, I’m guessing it’s a frozen Sysco special. To me, it falls somewhere between drunken pizza and the pizza you’d be surprised to find at a gas station, but in a good way.

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The Sysco special.

Jake Browne

If a menu contains an item with the name of the restaurant, I assume it must be a signature dish. Here, the Legend Burger looks like a dry joke. Maybe that’s not fair: the meat ranges from well-done to medium-rare depending on which half you bite into. A hastily applied slice of cheddar is grilled to death on my open-faced burger, exposing the alternately charred and undercooked bacon underneath. The pancake is devoid of any seasoning, as gray and gloomy as a Midwestern February.

A pile of greasy, soft fries lightly dusted with seasoning salt are worth picking for the crispiness, but they’re mostly unsalvageable. The only legend I will tell of this plate is that somewhere in Aurora exists the burrito of microwave burgers: both hot and cold at the same time.

Was it a bad day for the kitchen? Quite possible. Could morale be down with the recent negative publicity? Sure. But I choose to believe that serving such terrible food is just a small act of rebellion by a kitchen staff who have been asked too many times to be part of a video that, despite the assertions of their boss, is not funny at all.

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