"It's going to be absolutely next level for LoHi."
That's developer Paul Tamburello, talking about a Cajun restaurant that hasn't served a plate yet. He'd know. The space he's describing sits inside a building he's owned for more than two decades, on a parcel that keeps becoming something else entirely every few years while the block around it stays put.
If you've walked Boulder Street past Little Man Ice Cream this summer, you've probably assumed LoHi's constant restaurant churn is the work of a dozen different operators fighting over the same real estate. On this particular stretch, it isn't. It's mostly one person, running the same 0.3 acres through its fourth or fifth act since 2002, and he's doing it again right now.
A Building That Won't Hold Still
Tamburello bought the parcel from Olinger Mortuary in late 2002. The first move was converting the main mortuary building into Linger, with a neon sign altered from "Olinger Mortuary" to "Linger Eatuary," a detail that earned him the nickname "Godfather of Highland" for pioneering commercial development in Lower Highland and for coining the LoHi acronym itself.
That was only the opening chapter. In 2017 he opened The Family Jones Spirit House inside the same complex, Denver's first distillery-restaurant. In 2025, a gothic-chic basement tapas and cocktail lounge called Dearly Departed opened on the property's subterranean level, leaning directly into the building's mortuary past rather than away from it. Now, in the same week this post is being written, two more tenants are moving into storefronts a few steps from Little Man's original scoop stand: The Acadian, a Cajun restaurant, and The General Store, a gift shop.
Five concepts, one owner, one address, twenty-plus years. That's not a neighborhood absorbing turnover from the outside. That's a landlord who has never stopped renovating his own idea of what the block should be.
What's Actually Moving In
The Acadian comes from chef David Simpson, a Denver native and Tulane University graduate who runs a restaurant group in Bogotá, Colombia. There he co-founded Tremé, a Cajun and Creole restaurant set inside a century-old colonial home, blending Louisiana cooking with Colombian ingredients. He's bringing a version of that template home. The Denver space will run 4,900 square feet with a second-story bar, a rooftop dining area, and an outdoor patio along Boulder Street, with a menu built around jambalaya, truffle tenderloin steak, and Louisiana-style braised short ribs.
Next door, Nicole Haas is expanding The General Store, a gift shop she's run in historic downtown Littleton for eight years. The LoHi location will be twice the size of the original, and the combined stores are expected to carry around 20,000 items between gifts, plants, and frozen meals, with an average sale near $24. Haas has told local reporters the shop will likely stay open until 10 or 11 p.m., and she's exploring a liquor license and occasional produce sales, pending city approval.
Neither business has a confirmed opening date. Both are waiting on Denver's permitting and inspection process, which is the honest answer any local business owner will give you right now if you ask when their doors unlock. Haas has said she expects to open two to four weeks after permitting clears, which is a useful gauge for anyone timing a visit rather than a promise anyone should hold her to.
A Few Blocks Away, LoHi Is Also Getting Quieter
Here's the part that makes this moment more interesting than a simple restaurant announcement. While Tamburello is building something more elevated on Boulder Street, Recess Beer Garden is opening a second location nearby that's deliberately pulling in the opposite direction.
Recess has spent 11 years on 17th Street building a reputation around its massive outdoor patio and its going-out scene, the kind of place where the music runs loud and the night runs late. CEO and managing partner Jason Romero says the new location, sitting down the road from Happy Camper and Avanti, will be twice the size of the original but built for a different crowd entirely: family-friendly, kid- and dog-welcoming, without the 2 a.m. closing time. Romero has said that's actually closer to what the original Recess looked like when it opened, before the neighborhood around it got louder. He's hoping to open this fall, permitting allowing.
Put those two projects side by side and you get a clearer picture of where LoHi is actually headed than either one tells you alone. The same six-block radius is simultaneously getting a rooftop Cajun restaurant with a $24-and-up gift shop next door, and a beer garden explicitly designed to be calmer than the one it's modeled on. LoHi isn't trending toward one identity. It's getting more of both ends at once, fine dining on one block and family patio seating a few doors down, which is a more accurate description of the neighborhood's actual trajectory than "LoHi keeps getting nicer" or "LoHi keeps getting rowdier." It's doing both, on purpose, in the same season.
The Two Dates Worth Knowing About
Beyond the storefront news, there are two things on the calendar that shape how the next two months actually feel on the ground.
The Highland Square Farmers Market runs every Sunday through October 25, 2026, along West 32nd Avenue. It's the last stretch before the market closes for the season, so Sundays between now and then are the remaining window for the produce, flowers, and prepared food stalls that have been part of the neighborhood's weekend rhythm since May.
Highlands Oktoberfest & Market returns for its third year on Saturday, September 12, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closing four blocks of West 32nd Avenue between Irving and Perry Streets. This year adds something new: the inaugural Highlands Bierfest, a ticketed craft beer tasting running 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. with Oktoberfest brews from New Terrain Brewing Co., Cerebral Brewing, and 4 Noses Brewing Co., alongside beverage makers like TooSteppin Hard Ginger Beer and Idlewild Spirits. The rest of the day keeps its usual shape: stein hoisting, keg bowling, a costume contest, and a Kidtoberfest area for the families who'll be at the new Recess location a month later.
Both events are run independent of the Boulder Street building's renovations, but they land in the same short window, which means the next six weeks compress a full season's worth of neighborhood news into one stretch of calendar. That's worth knowing if you're planning around any of it, whether that means a September Saturday on 32nd Avenue or holding out for a jambalaya reservation that doesn't have a date yet.
Why This Particular Kind of Change Matters
Most neighborhood turnover stories are about a dozen small decisions made independently, one restaurant closing here, another opening there, no throughline connecting them. LoHi's Boulder Street corridor is different. It's one person's two-decade renovation project, still running, still adding chapters, and the current chapter happens to be landing at the same moment a completely separate operator down the street is building something that looks nothing like it.
That's not chaos. It's a neighborhood confident enough to hold two different identities on the same few blocks without either one crowding out the other. If you live here, that's probably the thing worth watching more than any single opening date: not what's coming next, but how much room this stretch of Denver keeps making for things that don't match.
If you're curious how these kinds of neighborhood shifts eventually show up in home values and buyer interest on nearby blocks, that's exactly the sort of on-the-ground read New Perspective Team tracks closely across LoHi and the rest of Denver's urban core. Request Your Complimentary Market Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what it means for your own address.
