The tide of buzzy new independent restaurants in Denver is high, and rising.

Here’s a partial roster of new Denver places that bowed in 2011: Bittersweet. Row 14. Street Kitchen Asian Bistro. Linger. Charcoal. Wild Catch. Le Grand Bistro. Jelly. Ale House at Amato’s. TAG Raw Bar. Spuntino. Pinche Tacos. Russell’s Smokehouse. Axios Estatorio.

The list goes on and on, with many more due to debut over the next couple of months: Trillium, District Meats, Phat Thai, Crave Dessert Bar… and so on, and so on. It’s enough to make your palate spin.

Denver — optimistic, ambitious, hungry Denver — is fairly teeming with new restaurants, and they just keep coming. What gives?

The National Restaurant Association reported a slight uptick in nationwide restaurant performance in September (the last month for which records were available at press time), and most indicators suggest that 2011 has been slightly better overall for the hospitality business than the three previous years. But Denver’s restaurant scene isn’t just simmering. It’s on fire.

“Denver’s in a good place,” says veteran Denver chef Sean Kelly. Kelly, currently at Lohi Steak Bar (and fresh off a consulting gig with Frank Bonanno’s newest venture, Russell’s Smokehouse), says he’s “more optimistic than ever. I see more business, more revenue out on the streets than I can ever recall. This is a city where something’s happening.”

Local food blogger (and Boston transplant) Ruth Tobias concurs. “I have never seen a town with so many openings so constantly. You would think that Boston would be moving at least as quickly as Denver. I don’t think it is. Things are just exploding here.”

Restaurant consultant John Imbergamo, whose history in the Denver restaurant business reaches back three decades, takes the long view. “We do seem to go in cycles,” he says, citing earlier new restaurant blitzes in the ’80s and ’90s. “Perhaps people are making more noise now.”

Chalk it up to Denver Exceptionalism, says Kelly. “The coasts are more sluggish than we are,” Kelly says. “People are bailing out of Vegas, bailing from the coasts. Established chefs are choosing to come to Denver and open restaurants. That wasn’t happening a decade ago. Ten or 12 years ago, every time a new restaurant opened, I knew who the chef was. Everybody knew everybody. But now, you have established chefs coming from other cities. People want to relocate to Colorado.”

One of those big-name transplants is Tom Coohill, whose Atlanta restaurant Ciboulette was long regarded as one of the country’s best. His eponymous restaurant, Coohills, opens this week in LoDo. “We saw real opportunity in Denver,” he says. “It’s a vibrant city, and there are so many really good restaurants here already, but I don’t think it’s anywhere close to being saturated.”

“We’ve never had this kind of buzz before,” says Diane Coohill, Tom’s wife and business partner.

Imbergamo suggests that the struggling economy itself might be a positive factor. “In tough economic times, real estate prices tend to go down, and there are more spaces available. Contractors are cheaper, architects are hungrier, there’s more used equipment around. And it’s much easier to hire staff in 2011.”

“I think the most important demographic on this particular subject is youth,” Tobias says. “It seems like everyone who opens a new restaurant these days is, like, 30. They seem to have boundless energy for opening more and more places. It’s almost a nervous energy — do more! Do more!”

Kelly sees the dining public as skewing younger, too. “Part of this is generational. People now in their 20s and 30s grew up in families where they went out to dinner four or five times a week — not just on special occasions. This is how they live.”

But the drive for newness has its pitfalls, Tobias says. “Now that everybody has a restaurant, everybody has to have a farm. And a beer brewed on site. And charcuterie made in-house. It seems like everyone has to have the next toy, the next trick. This can be great for diners — when it’s good. I just wish not everything would have to follow a trend.”

Tobias agrees, however, that there’s still plenty of room for more. “There are holes in the market. I would love to see a great Portuguese place or a Turkish place.”

Imbergamo points to a changing neighborhood landscape as another factor. “It’s not like we never had booms, but they were concentrated downtown. Ten years ago, you wouldn’t open a restaurant in Highland. Now, new restaurants are spread out across the city. It’s Denver’s middle-aged spread,” he says.

The media helps fuel the hype, according to Kelly. “The whole media landscape has changed in the past five years. The dining public is so much more informed — you can Google ingredients or reviews directly from your table now. This affects the restaurant scene dramatically.”

Can Denver maintain this pace? “No one has a crystal ball,” Kelly says. “But I believe that more than ever it is sustainable. It’s amazing to me.”

“I think Denver is loving this,” Tobias says. “It certainly doesn’t seem to be letting up.”

Tucker Shaw: 303-954-1958, tshaw@denverpost.com, twitter.com/tucker_shaw