The bare stall at Denver Central Market still has exposed wires where High Point Creamery's ice cream case used to sit. A mile and a half away on Umatilla Street, the ground floor space that spent more than a year dark under El Five finally has contractors coming and going again. Neither vacancy got filled by someone new to the neighborhood. Both got filled by the people who already run the building.
Denver Central Market opened in 2016 at 2669 Larimer Street with 11 original vendors, and owner Ken Wolf has said the food hall saw very little turnover in its first decade. This year that changed all at once. High Point Creamery's lease, which didn't include a renewal option, expired and Wolf gave the space to Izzio, the bakery that had already occupied two stalls in the market since it opened. Butchers at RiNo closed after Wolf evicted owner Brent Ratliff for falling six months behind on rent, and as of this summer that stall was still sitting empty while Wolf talked about wanting a sandwich-and-sausage deli to take it. Curio, the market's bar, didn't have its lease renewed either. Wolf bought out the previous owners' assets and reopened the space himself as Bar 77, in partnership with Celina Tio, a James Beard Award winning chef from Kansas City who already co-owns The Belfry Collective and Gerard's Pool Hall with him.
Izzio's replacement concept in the old High Point space is called Tiny Rino Treat House, and it's already open, serving gelato soft serve, live-culture frozen yogurt and fruit-forward sorbets alongside the bakery's usual pastries. Wolf has described Bar 77 as the piece that lets him "activate the market for later evenings," pushing Denver Central Market past its longtime identity as a breakfast-and-lunch stop in RiNo. The remaining original vendors, including Vero Italian, Lunchboxx, Tammen's Fish, Crema and Temper Chocolate, have all signed new ten-year lease extensions with Wolf, according to his own account to BusinessDen. The only open question left at the market is what eventually fills the old Butchers stall.
The Space Under El Five Sat Empty For Longer Than a Year
Sushi Ronin closed the ground floor space at 2930 Umatilla Street in March 2025, ending a nine-year run that started on January 2, 2016. That's the same building that houses El Five on the fifth floor, the rooftop tapas restaurant that's been open since May 2017 with mountain and downtown views that made it one of LoHi's better known dining rooms. For a year and a half the ground floor stayed vacant while the building's owners, the Edible Beats restaurant group, decided what to do with it.
The answer, announced in September, is Pip Food + Drink, billed as El Five's "little sister" and built to be more relaxed and lower-priced than the restaurant upstairs. El Five's executive chef Corey Ferguson is developing Pip's menu, described as a wide spread of small plates alongside full entrees, while Denver hospitality bar steward Ky Belk is building a micro-cocktail program meant to get guests trying several drinks in one visit rather than committing to one. Edible Beats founder Justin Cucci has said the design will draw on his own collection of found objects and the group's usual approach of repurposing unconventional buildings, joking that opening Pip is partly a way to "clear out my very packed storage unit." No exact opening date has been set, only a target of this fall.
This isn't Edible Beats' only move in LoHi this year. In early August the group took over Wooden Spoon, a LoHi bakery that was headed toward closure, and Ferguson has said it's now selling out of pastries daily after a slow first couple of weeks. Between Wooden Spoon, Root Down, Linger, El Five, Vital Root over on Tennyson Street, and the incoming Pip, Edible Beats now runs five concepts within a short walk of each other in Highland and Lower Highland, on top of Root Down's original outpost at Denver International Airport.
Two Different Neighborhoods, the Same Decision
Denver Central Market and the Umatilla Street building are ten years old within a year of each other. Both just went through their first real vacancy wave since opening. And in both cases, the person filling the empty space wasn't an outside restaurateur betting on the neighborhood for the first time. It was the operator who already owns the building.
Wolf didn't put High Point's old counter or Curio's bar back out to the open market. He handed one to a tenant he already had two stalls of, and built the other himself with a chef he already partners with elsewhere. Edible Beats didn't lease the old Sushi Ronin space to a stranger either. Ferguson told BusinessDen that he and the rest of the team "thought they were done opening restaurants" until this particular space became available, which reads less like expansion for its own sake and more like a group that didn't want somebody else's concept sitting underneath its own flagship.
That's a different story than either building would tell if you only read the restaurant openings. A market and a building both hit the point where their original tenants started cycling out, and the person who owns the real estate chose to consolidate rather than open the door to whoever showed up with a lease application. Neither Wolf nor the Edible Beats team needed to guess whether a new operator understood the foot traffic, the lease terms or what the neighborhood already expects from that address. They already knew.
What's Actually Open Right Now, and What's Still Coming
If you're deciding where to eat this week versus what to watch for later in the season, the two stories are at different stages.
Open now:
- Tiny Rino Treat House at Denver Central Market, serving frozen desserts alongside Izzio's regular pastry case
- Bar 77 at Denver Central Market, Ken Wolf and Celina Tio's late-night bar in the old Curio space
- Wooden Spoon in LoHi, back in daily production under Edible Beats after nearly closing this summer
Still coming this fall:
- Pip Food + Drink at 2930 Umatilla Street, no confirmed date yet, worth watching Edible Beats' channels for the announcement
- A tenant for the old Butchers at RiNo stall at Denver Central Market, which Wolf has said he'd like to fill with a deli-style concept
The old Butchers space is the one loose thread left at the market. Everything else Wolf touched this year already has a name on the door. Pip is the one still worth checking on before you plan a night around it, since neither the exact opening date nor the menu has been finalized.
What both stories share is that neither block lost anything to a competitor moving in from outside. The people who built RiNo's best known food hall and LoHi's most photographed restaurant building are the same people deciding what replaces what, a decade after they first opened the doors.
Next Chapter Partners pays attention to this kind of detail because it's the texture that makes a Denver neighborhood feel like home rather than a listing description, whether you're deciding where to grab dinner tonight or thinking further down the road about where you'd actually want to live. Start Your Next Chapter.
