Truffle Cheese Shop to reopen in new location under new ownership

There aren’t many shops in Denver specializing in cheese. There are fewer still with a knowledgeable staff both willing and able to educate customers and help them find the right cheese for the occasion. 

So when the Truffle Cheese Shop closed last October, we lost not only an important and rare source of high-quality cheeses, but also the kind of place that takes the time to explain the complicated world of fromage to customers seeking to up their gastronomic game. 

Now, though, the shop is making a comeback. Denver-based DHP Holdings has acquired the business and plans to reopen the shop in a new location as early as this fall. 

“I always believed there was a future for this business,” says David Walsh of DHP Holdings in a statement announcing the news. “The Truffle has been part of Denver’s food culture for decades, and we felt strongly that a locally owned Colorado business deserved the opportunity to evolve and continue.”

According to the shop’s previous owner, Lisa Morris, Walsh and his wife were frequent customers of the Truffle, and reached out to her about buying the business after reading about the closure in Westword.

“We’ve been talking for almost a year,” Morris says. “He basically bought the branding, our customer base, all our social media. Because the shop was closed, there was nothing else: no fixtures, no coolers, no anything … I think this is an important small business, and I think David is the right person to take over and rebuild it.”

The new ownership is currently looking at a space near downtown for the Truffle’s new location, but declines to provide specifics until the lease is signed.

Morris will continue to be involved “from a creative standpoint,” she says, but will eventually retire once the shop is reestablished.

This marks the fifth ownership for the business. The Truffle was founded in 2001 on East Sixth Avenue; former Potoger employees Rob and Karin Lawler bought the shop from its original owners in 2007 and switched its focus from general specialty foods to cheese specifically. Mark Schwab and his son Joe bought the shop in 2019, and sold it to Morris in 2021. 

Over the years, the shop became an entrenched go-to source for interesting and hard-to-find cheeses, served with a side of deep-seated knowledge from the passionate staff (some of whom even worked on farms, gaining hands-on experience making cheese themselves). 

But last year, Morris closed up shop after the Colorado Department of Revenue seized the store for back taxes. 

“I was filing taxes incorrectly, it snowballed into a large debt, so I had to make a decision about how to resolve that,” Morris said at the time. “With declining retail sales and rising costs of everything (labor, utilities, cheese, tariffs), it just did not make sense to continue with a storefront when the majority of sales were from online ordering.”

After the closure, the space at 2906 E. Sixth Ave. became the home of Chicken Riot, a new venture from the founders of Riot BBQ. Meanwhile, Morris moved her operations online to fulfill orders; she also hosted private events, all while working to resolve the tax debt. Now, Morris and the new owners have been able to “resolve outstanding obligations” in order to bring the business back, according to the announcement.

In addition to seeking a new retail space, the Truffle is expanding operations to offer cheesemaking classes and curated platter delivery, as well as catering and gifting; it’s also hosting wine-and-cheese pairing events. What’s more, it will give Colorado-based producers, makers, farmers and specialty food brands the chance to sell their products on the Truffle website (and eventually in the store). 

“While our focus will always be cheese and all that it can be globally, there are incredible local producers here,” Walsh says, “and we want to help showcase them.”

In that respect, the shop is returning to its original concept of a broader specialty foods store.

“The probability of just a cheese shop is a struggle,” Morris says. “There’s not a ton of Colorado cheese out there. But there’s a ton of really great Colorado products, a ton of cheese-adjacent products. So it will still be cheese, but expanding to more of a market.”