LoHi Restaurant Row Changes: What Actually Shifted

Walk past 3200 Tejon Street today and you'll find Jacques, a French restaurant, occupying a two-story building that started life in 1890 as a house. For twelve years before that, the same address was LoHi SteakBar, one of the first restaurants to plant a flag when the neighborhood was still called "emerging" instead of "established." It opened in 2010 in the former home of North Star Brewing. It closed for good on June 15, 2022.

If you've lived in LoHi long enough to remember ordering the flatiron steak there on a Tuesday, you probably assumed the closure was about the restaurant. It wasn't, not really. What happened at 3200 Tejon is the clearest paper trail in the neighborhood for a mechanism that's been quietly reshaping every block of the corridor: commercial rent moved faster than the kind of restaurant that made LoHi feel like a neighborhood in the first place.

The Corner That Explains Everything

LoHi SteakBar was chef-owned. Managing partner Joe Pettenger and executive chef Taylor Drew bought out founder Sean Kelly in 2014 and ran the place with a farm they owned together in Arvada and Yampa, supplying produce and meat back to their own kitchen. It was the kind of operation built around volume and repeat business: a happy hour running twice a day, steak frites priced for a weeknight, brunch with bottomless mimosas.

When the lease came up in 2022, Pettenger and his partners didn't renew it. He told BusinessDen the decision came down to a mix of pandemic aftershocks, staffing shortages, and rising costs, and that after weighing it all, it was "good of a time as any for all of us to take the next step."

That's the version everyone in the neighborhood already knows. Here's the part most people missed: two years after the restaurant closed, the building itself sold.

What The Building Sale Actually Says

In 2024, the owner of the SteakBar building sold the roughly 4,700-square-foot property for $3.85 million, more than three and a half times what he'd paid for it in 2008.

That's not a footnote. That's the actual mechanism. A restaurant built around $6 happy hour drinks and affordable steak frites can carry a lease when the corner is worth $178 a square foot. It's a much harder model to run when the same corner is worth $819 a square foot. The tenant who can afford that math isn't necessarily the tenant who can afford to sell a $28 entree twice a night. It's the tenant who can charge more per seat, turn fewer covers, and lean on a different kind of customer entirely.

That's exactly the shift you can trace up and down Tejon and 15th Streets over the past three years.

Two Doors Down, The Same Math Plays Out Differently

Chef Johnny Curiel opened his first solo restaurant, Alma Fonda Fina, in LoHi in December 2023. Less than a year later, after Alma Fonda Fina became the only Colorado restaurant to earn a new star in that year's Michelin Guide, Curiel and his wife and business partner, Kasie, opened a second concept right next door: Mezcaleria Alma, which debuted to the public on November 16, 2024.

Mezcaleria Alma isn't competing on affordability. Its bar program stocks more than 120 agave spirit expressions, and within a year of opening it landed on the New York Times' list of the nation's 50 best restaurants and Bon Appétit's roundup of the year's best new restaurants. That's a restaurant built to draw people in from across the metro, not just the block it sits on. It's a fundamentally different bet than the one LoHi SteakBar made in 2010.

A few blocks over, the same pattern shows up again. KUMOYA opened October 12, 2023, in the former Tony P's space at 2400 W 32nd Avenue. It's a partnership between sushi chef Corey Baker, a Denver native who has personally opened fifteen sushi restaurants around the city, and Max Mackissock of the Culinary Creative Group, whose portfolio includes A5 Steakhouse and Bar Dough. KUMOYA runs a kappo-style, chef-curated dining format, and it adds an automatic 20 percent service charge to every check. That's not an accident of pricing. It's a structural choice that only makes sense once you accept that this stretch of 32nd Avenue is now built for a different kind of transaction than the one LoHi SteakBar was running.

Three storefronts, three different cuisines, one shared answer to the question of what it now takes to hold a lease on this corridor.

The One Holdout That Proves The Point

Not every business on the corridor made that same bet, and the exception is worth knowing about if you actually live here. Postino LoHi, at 2715 17th Street, occupies what the wine bar itself describes as the "artfully revamped Denver Bookbinding Company's old digs." It still runs $6 glasses of wine and $6 pitchers daily until 5 p.m., and a bruschetta board with a bottle of wine for $25 after 8 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Postino just marked its 25th year as a company with a house party at the LoHi location on August 8, 2026, complete with a Y2K playlist and limited-edition anniversary wines. It's still standing on the same corridor as Mezcaleria Alma and KUMOYA, running the same volume-based happy hour pricing it always has. That contrast is the clearest evidence that the shift on Tejon Street wasn't inevitable for every business. It was a choice some restaurants made and others didn't, shaped by how much rent each one had to clear.

The Two Blocks People Still Mix Up

If you've ever told a friend to meet you "at the LoHi street festival" and ended up half a mile from where they were standing, you're not alone, and it's worth sorting out once and for all. LoHi's own street event, the Spring BAZAAR, closes a full block at 32nd Avenue and Tejon Street, right in the heart of the neighborhood. The 2026 edition ran April 18, with more than 70 local makers and craft cocktails from Mile High Spirits, and it's been a LoHi fixture since Denver BAZAAR started the event in 2014.

The Highlands Street Fair is a different event in a different district. Its 43rd annual run happened June 20, 2026, stretching along West 32nd Avenue between Perry and Irving Streets, several blocks west of Tejon and centered closer to Highland Square, the shopping district around 32nd and Lowell. Same avenue, same general neighborhood family, different corridor and a different set of businesses behind it.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

None of this is a story about LoHi getting worse or better. It's a story about how a neighborhood's restaurant identity gets rebuilt from the ground up once commercial rent crosses a certain line. The businesses that can clear that line tend to look like Mezcaleria Alma and KUMOYA: chef-driven, nationally covered, priced for destination dining rather than a Tuesday night. The ones that can't tend to close the way LoHi SteakBar did, quietly, after a lease expires and nobody renews it.

If you've noticed that a night out on your own block costs more than it used to, or that the restaurant that used to anchor your happy hour routine isn't there anymore, this is why. It's not that the neighborhood lost interest in casual, affordable food. It's that the real estate underneath that food got too expensive to support it.

If you're curious what that same shift in commercial rent says about the value of your own place in LoHi, Tatiana Torres has spent enough time on this corridor to walk you through it. What's My Home Worth?