Central Park Dumpling Restaurant Shutters

Lon Symensma’s first restaurant in Denver, ChoLon, remains a downtown staple after fifteen years in business. Known for its French onion soup dumplings, it has even expanded and now has locations at Sloan’s Lake and Denver International Airport

But another one of his concepts, the more casual dumpling-centric YumCha, has had a less stable run. In 2021, it replaced Symensma’s Cho77 on 16th Street — a pandemic pivot that paid off…for a while. But in January, six months after shuttering another one of his eateries on the ChoLon block, Bistro Le Roux, he closed the original YumCha.

By then, though, another YumCha had opened, replacing the ChoLon at 10195 East 29th Drive in Central Park in October 2024. At the time, Symensma told Westword that as part of the swap, “We shrank the dining room and kitchen in Central Park to make room for a commissary kitchen that will produce all of the dim sum for our company and the airport.”

This summer, the Central Park YumCha Dumpling & Noodle was rebranded as YumCha Beer Garden, serving “beer garden classics like burgers, wings, fried pickles, flatbreads, small bites — all with a signature YumCha twist and a dash of Asian flair,” according to its website.

But the new strategy only lasted a few months. Now, YumCha’s only standalone location is closed. “Central Park was never profitable for us, we could never make it work,” Symensma says. “We pivoted a couple of times, tried different concepts, but right now is the time to cut out the noise and focus on what works.

The concept will live on, though. In June, YumCha was added to the lineup at Milk Market, the Dairy Block food hall that this summer added two other stalls, Lucky Bird and Konjo Ethiopian Food. The scaled-back menu at YumCha Milk Market includes mains such as a banh mi burger and a selection of dim sum and dumplings, including ChoLon’s famous French onion soup variation and a newer take inspired by General Tso’s chicken that’s dubbed General Cho’s.

That is one of several licensing deals Symensma has entered into. ChoLon now has a location at DIA and will also serve at Empower Field events, with another yet-to-be-announced partnership currently in the works. “We’ve found a lot of success in those,” Symensma notes, which frees him up to focus “my personal energy on [ChoLon] downtown and getting some buzz there, and supporting the team at Gusto,” his Sloan’s Lake Italian concept, which he says has been a hit.

As for the now-vacant Central Park space, “I hope they can find a new tenant there that can find success,” Symensma concludes.