New Downtown Nightclub Aims to Elevate the Dance Scene

Ventura Morales, co-owner of XSO Night Club, has extremely ambitious goals for the latest addition to the Denver dance scene.

“Our vision is to become Colorado’s best nightclub,” Morales says, “and to try to make it a place where, if you visit Denver, you have to go to XSO.”

The venue’s location is certainly high-profile. XSO is located at 500 16th Street, Suite 322, on the third level of the Denver Pavilions, in a sprawling space that measures approximately 12,000 square feet. The interior, which can accommodate 800 fun-seekers, is posh and upscale, reflecting an outlay that Morales and his partner, Esteban Murguia, estimate at $4.7 million.

A sizable chunk of this investment has been poured into production resources that Morales believes will set a new standard for Mile High City nightspots. “We’re using DAS Audio, which is based in Spain,” Morales notes. “They make some of the best sound systems out there. The acoustics are incredible, and the system works great for DJ events or even live bands. And the lighting company we’re using is ADJ,” a firm from the Netherlands, “which produces incredible lights and beams and all that stuff.”

XSO is the first nightclub Morales has launched, but he’s hardly a novice when it comes to keeping customers happy. He’s part of the family behind 3 Margaritas, a restaurant chain with around twenty independently operated eateries in Colorado, Wyoming and Washington, including an outpost at 519 16th Street. But Morales emphasizes that XSO is a completely separate entity, with a very different aesthetic — one that he hopes will rival the offerings from the finest after-dark spaces not just in the United States, but across the globe.

The concept’s roots are long. “Esteban had this vision twelve years ago,” Morales points out, “but he didn’t think the time was right. Then, two years ago, he and I started working on this idea together.”

By then, he continues, “we’d been through nightclubs all over the world. A lot of our inspiration came from clubs in Guadalajara, which are the top in the world when it comes to production — and the bottle service there is crazy, amazing. Other places we looked to were Miami and Las Vegas, which have some of the best nightclubs anywhere — at least one in each city that could be rated that high.”

Neither Morales nor Murguia saw a local operation at a similar level.

“Some of the nightclubs in Denver were lacking in different areas — cleaning, service and overall production,” Morales contends. “So we took the best from each of our favorite places around the world and combined those ideas. That’s how we came up with XSO.””

With these thoughts in mind, Morales and Murguia secured the Pavilions setting, with construction, remodeling and renovation kicking off in early 2025. The build-out included a design for what Morales describes as “two big music rooms. One is mostly focused on reggaeton and Latin music, and the other one is focused on house, electronic-dance music and techno. So you can decide which room equates to your needs — and you can go back and forth if you want to.”

Even though the club staged a gala grand opening on October 4, a lot of moving parts remain. “We’re still hashing out a lot of things,” Morales concedes. “We want to have the nightclub Thursday through Sunday, but we also want to have a restaurant-type of happy hour every day of the week. That way, there can be a quieter time for drinks, handcrafted cocktails and appetizers from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., and then it shifts into a full nightclub experience.”

Despite the deluxe accoutrements, Morales wants XSO to be accessible to everyone — hence no entry fee on Thursdays and affordable covers of $15 on Friday and $25 on Saturday; Sunday prices will vary based on the event. “We want everyone to feel welcome,” he says. “We don’t want anyone to feel like they don’t belong here. We want them to feel comfortable and have a good time, so that afterwards, they can remember, ‘I loved going there on my birthday,’ or whatever the occasion is.”

At the same time, though, he emphasizes that “we want to try to compete in the big leagues versus the best clubs in Vegas or anywhere. We strive to be one of the best nightclubs in the U.S.”