Cosmopolitan’s Grilled Baby Octopus with potato salad, duck bacon, chopped egg and roasted pepper oil.

The best thing about the chef taking time off — from his customer’s point of view, at least — is that we get to taste what he learned while he was gone.

At Cosmopolitan in Telluride, this summer that means Baby Grilled Octopus served with a potato and egg salad, duck bacon and roasted red pepper oil. Yes, Cosmo chef-proprietor Chad Scothorn is recently back from Catalonia and you can bet that the new octopus starter at Cosmo is just the first evidence of it that we will see.

Octopus has been popular for the last several years in big cities, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in the region. It’s popular because it is so versatile, so tender, so much fun to eat and it’s sustainably harvested, too, in most of the places where it’s fished.