The economics of eating out have some of Denver’s top chefs dismayed, discouraged and looking elsewhere 

Story first appeared in:

Months before the global pandemic, chef Troy Guard opened his first restaurant outside of Denver, a Guard and Grace steakhouse in Houston. Then COVID “kicked our butt,” he said. The restaurant eventually found its place in the city, even landing top honors in a state where beef is just part of being Texan. 

And now Guard, who began building his restaurant empire TAG Restaurant Group in Denver in 2009, is leaving Colorado for greener pastures.

“My wife and I are moving to Houston,” Guard said. “The company will still be based in Denver, but we want to grow more of the company in Houston because it’s a better climate for business and restaurants over there. … Honestly, I love Denver. I’ve been here 23 years. But it’s becoming more and more difficult every year to open restaurants. The last three restaurants have taken way too long by the city to OK, and I’m just kind of over that.”

Troy Guard, chef and owner of Guard and Grace, located in downtown Denver at 1801 California St., on July 26. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)

That’s just one beef that Guard and other top local chefs and restaurateurs have with doing business in the city these days. Higher operating costs were exacerbated by the more commonly known culprits, like inflation, which pushed up the price of not just food, but also construction, insurance, utilities and property taxes. Labor shortages fueled rising wages and new worker benefits, like the state’s paid-leave program.

But there seems to be something in particular with Denver, especially as downtown has struggled to return to its pre-pandemic heyday. Ongoing construction that ripped up 16th Street Mall hasn’t helped. While Mayor Mike Johnston’s pledge to end homelessness has minimized the number of tents pitched along sidewalks, the reputation has been difficult to ditch. For some of the biggest names in Denver dining, it feels like the city just isn’t listening. 

Juan Padro, cofounder of Culinary Creative that operates several Denver restaurants, including Michelin Bib Gourmand winners Mister Oso and Ash’Kara, first ventured out of state in 2019 with Italian eatery Sofia in New Orleans. Now the Big Easy also has a Mister Oso, and soon, another Denver original, A5 Steakhouse.

“We are looking all over,” Padro said. “We have deals that are signed in Denver that we’re going to honor, but generally, I don’t have a strong interest in doing business in Denver right now. I love Denver and want to do business in Denver. But economically, it’s just not feasible.”

How infeasible?

Culinary Creative’s Red Tops Rendezvous, a Detroit-style pizza joint that opened last summer in the Jefferson Park neighborhood, started on a high note, averaging $50,000 a week in revenue, Padro said. But when construction began last fall on Federal Boulevard, making it tough to turn onto West 25th Avenue, where the restaurant is located, sales dropped to $30,000 a week overnight. He said $36,000 was breakeven. 

“And then they ripped up 25th and we dropped to $16,000 to $18,000,” he said. “I’m under no illusion that the city doesn’t have to move forward with projects to enhance the streets and sidewalks for citizens. I support that. What I don’t understand is how the heck do they not have a plan for the businesses?”

Instead of keeping Red Tops open and paying staff, food and other other operating costs, he temporarily closed it in June. It’s still losing money. Padro has loans to pay, plus insurance and other upkeep for the building.

“I’m losing $17,000 a month, but it’s better than losing $50,000,” Padro said.

While he’s rethinking Denver for new restaurants, he hopes to reopen Red Tops, which he said did get a $15,000 grant from the city’s Business Impact Opportunity Fund with United Way. 

“You don’t just get into the restaurant business to make money,” he said. “You get into the restaurant business for community, and because you believe in something. It’s a form of art and entertainment. So as long as the company remains healthy, and the company’s healthy, but, generally speaking, we have other restaurants that are more profitable for sure.”

During a recent weekday lunch hour at the Mercantile Dining & Provision, business seemed steady, but there was no wait to be seated as the clock ticked past 1 p.m. The restaurant, tucked into the northern end of Union Station, was one of the most anticipated openings in 2014. That’s because it’s led by Alex Seidel, the first Denver chef to earn a semifinalist nod in the prestigious James Beard Foundation awards in 2008 for Fruition. He was named Best Chef South West for Mercantile in 2018.

Alex Seidel, owner and chef, inside Mercantile Dining & Provision on July 26 in Denver. The restaurant is located downtown inside Denver’s Union Station. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Business hasn’t returned since COVID, at least not enough to sustain a staff of 100, which Mercantile employed prior to the pandemic. It now employs 30, he said.

“I personally have never worked in a restaurant in my entire 36-year career where it is slower on a Friday and Saturday night than it is the rest of the week,” Seidel said. “What that tells me is that there’s nobody coming down from the suburbs. The people that go out on Friday, Saturday night are no longer coming downtown.” 

It wasn’t too long ago that Seidel was excited about sharing his cooking. “You felt this great responsibility to provide something amazing for the community,” he said. He opened the fast-casual Chook Charcoal Chicken in late 2018 to “bring great food to people and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.” Back then, Chook charged $20 for a whole chicken. More than five years later, it’s $21.95, or 10% higher, less than inflation for the same period.  

“We’re a certified B Corp., we have been trying to do things for all the right reasons, taking care of people and our planet,” he said. “And those restaurants have struggled in this setting. And when I say struggle, I mean they just break even.”

His northeastern Denver commissary, Füdmill, which produces pastries for his restaurants, has struggled to renew its license after the city put the licensing system online to save applicants an in-person visit to City Hall. He admits that this delay could be his fault. His applications had some missing information. But the back-and-forth emails to figure out what was missing has been such a time suck that even a James Beard award-winning chef feels hopeless. 

He took up pottery during COVID and that “has brought some peace to my life,” he said. But, he added, “I am not looking to open another restaurant. (Insert audible gasp from the interviewer.) No really. It sucked the life out of me.”

Denver. Costs. More.

The restaurant business is no picnic even with the fame and foodie fandom that can come with it. Profits are notoriously minuscule, like living from paycheck to paycheck. 

According to an analysis by point-of-sale system developer Toast, restaurant profit margins range between 0% and 15%, but the average is 3% to 5%. Larger corporate-owned chains benefit from shared costs and streamlined operations, allowing a place like Olive Garden to notch a profit margin of 22.8% despite a 1.5% drop in sales at existing locations in its latest quarter, according to parent Darden Restaurants. 

“It’s very, very difficult to make any money,” said John Imbergamo, a Denver restaurant consultant who represents award-winning chef Jen Jasinski’s restaurants Rioja, Bistro Vendome and Stoic & Genuine. “The fact is, you not only have to be busy, you also have to make money. And we’ve had a harmonic convergence of cost increases … that have all hit at once combined with pandemic relief funds, which are now running out or have run out in most cases.”

Jasinski, in fact, with Crafted Concepts partner Beth Gruitch, announced Aug. 2 that Stoic & Genuine will close in September, a decision made based on “changing market conditions” and  coinciding with an expiring lease at Union Station. They’ll also hand over two restaurants to their partners. Adam Branz  becomes sole operator of Ultreia, while Tim Kuklinski takes Bistro Vendôme. Jasinski and Gruitch will continue to operate Rioja in Larimer Square. 

“It was always our plan to turn our businesses over to our partners and let the young, fresh people run these businesses so we can take a little bit of a step back,” Jasinski said. “We weren’t thinking about closing Stoic, but that has more to do with the economy. … The pandemic changed a lot of things.”

Inflation also hit the Denver area earlier than other U.S. cities. The metro area recorded a 9.1% increase in consumer prices in March 2022, several months ahead of the nation. And while Denver’s inflation has slowed —  it fell to 2.6% in May — it hasn’t stopped.

Once raised, prices rarely go down, though corporations do try to nudge revenues higher. In late June, McDonald’s launched a $5 meal deal. It wasn’t enough to improve sales for the quarter, which fell 1% from a year earlier. But CEO Chris Kempczinski said it did the job of “improved brand perceptions around value and affordability,” reported business-news site TheStreet.

And restaurants and all businesses, really, must deal with customer perception, Imbergamo said. Sourcing fresh ingredients, maintaining a trained staff to grill a burger to perfection, and serving customers at the table, costs more than it did a few years ago. The consumer’s “value barometer is a very, very difficult thing to change,” Imbergamo said. 

“For 10 years, we’ve been telling people that a burger is worth $10 or $12. Now it’s $15 and that just doesn’t compute when it comes to the value barometer,” he said. “We can’t move that needle over to where it needs to move very easily because even though consumers understand (that) the price of goods has gone up in the grocery store, they don’t equate that necessarily to restaurants. And if they do, they still don’t care. The fact is they say, ‘Why is my burger that used to be $12 now $15?’”

But not all consumers have pulled back their spending. Guard said he’s seen sales at his lower-priced restaurants slow, but not so much at pricier places, he said. Guests at Guard and Grace, where a 22-ounce Cowboy Ribeye is $140, tend to be out-of-town visitors or business professionals with big expense accounts. 

“At Guard and Grace, which is a high-end steakhouse, we were up. In my opinion, people that go out and dine at the $100-plus check average have the money to do that,” he said. “At our HashTag restaurant, breakfast is a little bit down. … Maybe it’s summer and it’s hit and miss because people are on vacation (but) the first seven years of HashTag have gone up every year. And this year, it’s down, so not flat, but down. That’s kind of a bummer.”

Hop Alley owner Tommy Lee introduced a six-seat Chef’s Counter in February. The chef-driven tasting menu is available only by reservation, which requires a $100 deposit per person. He said 90% of Chef’s Counter customers end up spending around $230. That’s steeper than the average $65 check at Hop Alley, which earned a Bib Gourmand award from the Michelin Guide this year for “good quality, good value.”

“It’s been great because we’re generating a good amount of revenue out of the six seats,” Lee said. “It’s a lot of people from out of town because there are people seeking out these tasting menu experiences. A lot of these customers that are coming to the Chef’s Counter have never been to Hop Alley.”

The economy may be impacting consumer budgets, but restaurants are still opening in Denver, Imbergamo pointed out. According to his unofficial count — he relies on Westword’s weekly “Every Opening and Closing This Week” report — more open each month than close. 

What he doesn’t understand is why established out-of-state restaurants pick Denver, where operating costs, including minimum wage, are much higher. Denver’s hourly minimum wage is $18.29 an hour and will increase to $18.81 in January since it’s pegged to inflation. Many other states, including Texas and Louisiana, default to the federal minimum of $7.25. 

And in the land of restaurants, there’s something called the tipped credit. There are many, many complex rules around tipped credits in Colorado. But the gist is that tipped servers can be paid $3.02 less than the minimum wage, or $15.27. Meanwhile, the states that use the federal rate? The tipped minimum is a mere $2.13 an hour, which hasn’t changed since 1996.

“I can’t stress enough how much that tipped minimum wage increase every year impacts profitability because we use so many tipped employees,” Imbergamo said. “In many restaurants, some restaurant servers, bartenders are making $55, $60, $70 an hour and for them to get $1 raises is, you know, it just doesn’t really make any sense. When you multiply that dollar times the number of hours that we use in a week, in a month, in a year, that turns into a huge number for restaurants.”

The minimum wage and tipped minimum in Denver and Colorado are going up again in January. That will happen every year, as long as inflation exists. Robin Kniech, an at-large Denver city council member in 2019 who advocated for the city to break out in 2019 with its own higher minimum wage, said her support was due to the gap between stagnant wages and escalating housing prices. 

“We talk a lot about a housing crisis in Colorado, but we’ve really had a wage gap. That’s really the underlying thing that has complicated and exacerbated our housing crisis,” Kniech said. 

But she also pointed out that rising wages is just one piece of rising costs of doing business. Commercial landlords have increased rent. Food prices are up. The city policy helps the lowest-paid workers whose income makes it challenging to live in the city.

“What’s really clear (is that) leisure and hospitality employment in Denver is growing,” she said. “It grew at a rate of 5.9% last year. It’s grown every single year since the pandemic — 13.8% in 2021, 19.9% in 2022 and 5.9% in 2023. All of that is along with this wage. Each individual business may be having a variety of adjustments that they are making in this era of making sure that workers can earn closer to what it costs to live in their city. But overall, the industry is growing. It is not contracting.”

The city’s leisure and hospitality workforce has grown since the worst of the pandemic, and so has pretty much every industry, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But at the same time, the city’s estimated 65,322 workers in such occupations is just back to where it was in 2019, as seen in the chart below. 

Kniech, now a Bell Policy Center fellow working on affordable housing projects, said the City Council couldn’t touch the tipped minimum because it was already baked into the state constitution. 

“There was a desire to talk about it and it just wasn’t on the table,” she said. “But I will tell you because I have a little mental file cabinet of the number of restaurant owners who said they could never, or would never, go to a service-fee approach (like in Europe) and that was not happening in America. That it was impossible. That was 2019. And here we are. Many restaurants have adjusted. It’s not just about government policy. It’s also about business practices.”

Dana Rodriguez, chef and owner of Carne and Work and Class, inside Carne located in RiNo at 2601 Larimer St. on July 26 in Denver. At a cutting board, she prepares olive tapenade to be served with achiote-grilled octopus. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Chef Dana Rodriguez may be one of the more recognized names in the local restaurant industry as the chef behind Casa Bonita’s new menu. But at the two restaurants where she is executive chef and owner, she has just 60 employees. TAG Restaurant Group employs about 500 companywide. Culinary Creative Group has 750. Darden Restaurants, which owns brands including Olive Garden and The Capital Grille, employs 190,000 globally.

Policies often apply uniformly to all. Why is that, Rodriguez wondered. She said she appreciated how Mayor Johnston talked last year about helping people who were homeless.

“He said the first thing is to divide. Some is mental health, some is addictions. And the other one is literally like they just want to live their life like that,” she said. “And I say they should look at us in the same way. There are the big corporations, there are the small independents, there are franchises and fast-food restaurants. How can we help them and them and them? The same formula doesn’t work for everyone. That’s the part that we’re missing. They don’t see us for our real needs.” 

Denver improves backlog, wait times 

And then there are delays with building permits, inspections, reviews and business licenses. Before COVID, Guard said, the city provided a time estimate on how long it would take for approvals. Now, it seems like it’s timeless.

“It used to be 90 days. Now, it could be eight months, which my last one was, and I lost my general contractor because of that. I lost my pricing because of that,” Guard said. “Then I have to reprice and then the price goes up and then I have to go to my investors. They don’t want to give me more money. It’s like this complete circus and it’s frustrating.”

City officials acknowledge that things got backed up during COVID. But commercial building permits, in particular, have been a priority of Denver’s mayor. Last year, Johnston pledged to reduce building-permit wait times by 30%. As of the end of July, the average wait time for intermediate commercial projects had been cut by 14% to 30 days. The goal is to get to 25 days by the end of the year, city spokesperson Genna Morton said. Current plan review times are posted on the city’s interactive dashboard.

“Our recent efforts have brought those review times back to what customers were experiencing pre-COVID. There’s opportunity to continue to improve and the city is focused on continuing to bring down those review times,” Morton said in an email. “Overall, our permit review times as of (July 31) are comparable to what our customers experienced 3 to 5 years ago, before the pandemic.”

The city also revamped its food licensing program by moving everything online so applicants no longer needed to show up in person. When the new system launched a year ago last month,  the average wait was 71 days. Now, it’s five, said Eric Escudero, spokesperson for the city’s Excise and Licenses department.  

“We’re seeing the fruit from the changes with the processing times. I mean the vast majority of applications are (completed) within five days,” Escudero said. 

But he understands that the new system may be confusing. Companies that just needed to renew had to start over because the new system didn’t have their old data. Escudero said the department helps anyone who asks.

“If you’re applying for a license and you’ve run into a dead end, you’re not sure what to do or are confused, we’ll meet with someone and we’ll coordinate with those other city agencies,” he said. 

According to city licensing data, the number of retail food establishments has increased in Denver since 2021, but it declined 4.4% to 3,947 businesses this year. (Escudero said older data before 2021 is unreliable.) Statewide, the Department of Revenues’ sales tax data shows that the number of active food services and drinking establishments in Colorado is higher than it was before the pandemic. 

Permit delays have long been part of commercial projects, which include restaurants. But the convergence of inflation, pandemic recovery and a slower summer has just made restaurant operations more challenging, Ibergamo said.

“Restaurants used to be the place that people who didn’t have a ton of money could open, could find a spot that had a grease trap and make some minor changes to the way the place looked and get open,” Imbergamo said. “That’s kind of gone.” 

How chefs decide to increase menu prices

Higher prices are an issue consumers face at nearly every income level. But not all restaurants have effectively shared why menu prices are higher.

Rodriguez gave it a shot: “This restaurant is a $2.3 million restaurant,” she said referring to the revenue at her award-winning Work and Class in Denver’s RiNo neighborhood. “And then when you look at the expenses, it’s $1.9 million. “And you’re like, ‘Why even open?’” 

That’s roughly a 17% profit margin, and her most profitable restaurant, largely because the staff is small with 31 employees. And call her crazy, or uncorporate-like or just someone who wants to do right by her staff and the community. Her workers have benefits. They support one another, which meant covering health insurance for an employee who spent three years fighting cancer and was unable to work.  Customers waiting for a table can order a discounted mixed drink, for $4. But every year, costs continued to rise. 

As the cost of Colorado lamb rose, she pulled it off the menu at Work and Class to avoid raising prices. 

“And people said, ‘What?’ Yeah, now I can serve chicken, pork, veal, the meats that are more affordable. And people who say, ‘What the f—, we want our lamb back’ (and) I say, ‘Are you willing to pay market price?’” she said. “That’s why all the menus now you see market price for oysters, for lamb, for steaks, for caviar (so) you don’t get stuck as an owner feeling, ‘Oh, I’m losing more and more every time.’”

She brought lamb back at double the price. It’s currently going for $64.75 a pound, up from $28.75 a decade ago when the restaurant opened.

Restaurants hate to raise prices though because of customer perception, said Lee, whose restaurants, Uncle and Hop Alley, serve up ramen and regional Chinese cuisine, respectively. But they have to figure out a way to make a business sustainable.

“I was looking at our prices and our ramen has only increased by, I think, $4 in 12 years when it should probably have increased by $10,” Lee said. “We’re lucky, you know. I think our restaurants are relatively busy in general, like every day, and we’ve just had to kind of get creative with how we bend our models to make it work.”

Lee said that right before the interview, he was texting another restaurant owner about how some places are adding a credit-card surcharge to their bills. Among his three restaurants, Lee said he pays “a hundred-and-something thousand” a year in credit card fees. 

“And if you were to pass on that 2%, which the customer would barely notice probably, you could cover your credit card fees. But to a customer seeing that, it’s like, ‘Hey, why are you charging me $1.25?’” he said. “But we can’t just eat the cost of everything that’s going up.”

For him, the restaurant business is a marathon with good years and bad years. He’s had more good years than bad so he feels fortunate. But 2024 may be one of the bad ones. Lee has a business degree so when he started out, he was always thinking about sustainability.  

LEFT: Tommy Lee, owner and chef of Uncle, inside his restaurant’s West Wash Park location at 95 S. Pennsylvania St. in Denver on July 26. RIGHT: Line cook Hilario Gregorio prepares Chinese eggplant inside Uncle. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“At the two Uncle locations, we have open kitchens where the cooks are also helping serve customers. So we can legally put them as part of our tip pool, which helps pay your cooks through a different method and outside your bottom line,” he said. 

In Colorado, wait staff can’t share tips with the kitchen crew unless those workers interact with patrons and provide customer service. In order to pool tips, all staff must earn the full minimum wage, and not just the tipped minimum.

Jasinski said that her restaurants opted to skip the tipped-minimum savings and pay everyone minimum wage so that the kitchen crew, who are doing all the prep and cooking, can share tips. That started after 2019 when the city of Denver approved its own minimum wage, which initially was 7.1% higher than the state. Now, it’s nearly 27% more.  

Padro tested out a service fee at Highland Tap and Burger, the first restaurant he opened in Denver back in 2010. Then they rolled out a 20% service fee at all 18 restaurants that is shared with its nontipped kitchen crews. Customers are told that no tip is required, but some consumers call such fees “sneaky” and vow to never return. One Reddit thread tallied up Colorado restaurants with fees and the restaurant’s explanations.

But it’s really helped the rest of the staff. The restaurants still had to raise prices. At Tap and Burger, it’s still busy but profit has slid, Padro said.

“Volume in our restaurants? For sure, people are there. We have some really busy restaurants. It’s just not translating into profit,” he said. “In 2017, Highlands Tap and Burger did $3.7 million or $3.8 million in sales and a profit of $900,000. Last year, it did $3.3 million in sales and profited $30,000.”

Is it just Denver?

It’s still challenging even for someone like Rodriguez, who has won multiple best-chef awards. Sadly, she said, she made the hard decision to close her first solo venture, Cantina Loca, on April 29. Higher costs for food and labor plus declining number of patrons did in the 2-year-old Loca, she said.

“My employees start working at 8 in the morning to prep. And then at nighttime, come to cook at 4 p.m. but no one shows up from 4 to 6, so you already lose money in the first two hours. And then you make money only two, and lose money the other three,” she said. “That’s when I decided the numbers are not making sense. I put all my savings to save a restaurant and then I say, I’m hurting myself and my other businesses. It’s a hard decision that investors will never understand. And maybe the community will never understand. It’s so sad when people hear you are closing and are like, ‘Oh my God, she was my favorite.’ And I’m like, ‘But where have you been?’”

Of course, Rodriguez is a little … loca. Two months and a few days later, she opened Carne, a globally inspired steakhouse “for everyday” in Denver’s RiNo neighborhood. She says she wasn’t going to do it. She says she probably shouldn’t have done it.  

“I was down. I was sad. And the next day, literally, I’m like, ‘I’m not f-ing done.’ I guess I have this strength that I’m going to keep going whether it is here, whether it be somewhere else,” she said. “This is the only thing I know how to do and I love it.”

The “everyday” menu items may be more expensive than grilling steaks at home. But for the extra service, flavor and overall dining experience, Carne’s menu has dishes that seem tricky to cook at home, like the Argentinian Bife de Chorizo, which at $29 is about the same price as a bacon cheeseburger, large fries and milkshake at Five Guys ($26.37, before tax).

She still doesn’t feel Denver is the easiest place to open a restaurant, even if it took a mere two months to turn the old Il Posto location into a sexy, ’70s-inspired hangout complete with an upstairs lounge with shag carpeting, low-slung seats and Playboy magazines hiding behind a beaded curtain. She considered other states. Nearby cities also tried to woo her.

She picked Denver. RiNo specifically, because it’s an active nightspot that translates into multiple hours of activity. It helped Work and Class, located a few blocks away. Both are open Wednesday to Sunday, mainly for dinner “’til close.”

She wishes someone at the city would just listen “with their heart.”

“I have a fake sign because I’ve been waiting three months for a permit. If they come and they want me to take it down, I have to pay a fine. They are not very helpful in trying to build more businesses,” she said. “It feels like they’re saying, ‘Dana, you don’t need to open another restaurant.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I do need to open another one.’ ‘No, you don’t.’ And I’m like, well then if I close all my restaurants and Troy closes restaurants and Jen closes restaurants and Alex, what do you got in Denver? Do you want just Applebee’s?”

In the past two weeks in downtown Denver, Bonanno Concepts announced a temporarily closing of French 75 on 17th Street (via Westword), Cholon Restaurant Concept’s Bistro LeRoux shuttered on 16th Street (via Denver Post), and the aforementioned Stoic & Genuine is closing on Sept. 1. 

But coming soon, two new restaurants will debut inside the funky new Populus hotel near Civic Center park; South Carolina import Church and Union may finally open on 17th Street (via 303 Magazine); and (ahem) two more from Guard, including a HashTag on 17th Street and Swedish import, Eggs, on Wewatta Street, which Guard is opening with former Avalanche hockey player Peter Forsberg. 

Guard said it’s hard to say if he’d be moving to Texas if the permit delays had never happened. 

“I love Denver. I have the brand here and, yes, we want to continue to grow. But this was just one more push that says ‘Troy, you’ve got to get up and get out of the city and go somewhere else to continue the growth.’ I kept my roots here, but I believe in signs. I don’t know why but this is a sign. It’s time for your family to get up and move and try something new and grow the company somewhere else,” he said.

Jasinski is eager to focus on her first born, Rioja, which she and Gruitch opened in 2004. It’s won multiple best chef and restaurant honors. So, instead of running around operating four restaurants, she’ll return to the kitchen. They just signed a 20-year lease.

“There were times I didn’t cook all week and that was a bummer for me,” she said. “But you know, Beth and I have wanted to do this plan. We’ve taken these people, we’ve taught them and they’re wonderful people and we want them to shine on their own, have new ideas and do cool things like that. Let me get out of the way.”

A new city, new people and new food experiences invigorate many a chef, and that’s probably the sentiment Guard, Jasinski and others felt when they landed in Denver years ago. 

“There’s always a new crop of people who have worked their lives in restaurants and are now looking for the opportunity to do one of their own. And that’s what keeps the Denver restaurant scene vibrant,” Imbergamo said. “The base premise is that it’s an industry that thrives on creativity and opportunity and hard work. That premise remains in place no matter what the economics are. It’s just harder.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.