Locally-Owned 16th Street Mall Pizzeria Is Closing

Chef Nicholas Kayser was excited to open a restaurant on the 16th Street Mall. "The revitalization and renaissance down there in LoDo is gonna be exciting," he told Westword in May, when he debuted Eat'Ya Pizza at 1530 16th Street. The location had been open briefly as another pizza concept, Sofia's, and was an Illegal Pete's before that.

Less than a year later, Kayser is closing his Roman-style pizzeria. "It's a tough market right now," he says. The news comes on the heels of the loss of two other locally-owned restaurants in the area, chef Lon Symensma's LeRoux and the original location of YumCha, which is still operating in Central Park.

Eat'Ya Pizza will shut its doors for good at 4 p.m. on Thursday, February 13.
"Unfortunately, the business itself is not sustainable in the current landscape of what LoDo has to offer," Kayser wrote in an announcement about the closure posted on Instagram. "This is not easy for anyone, however, we have not found a way to make the restaurant be successful to a point where we can continue operations any longer. This is by no means a reflection of our staff, our product, or the environment that we have built and were so proud of to open last summer. This has everything to do with the current landscape of Denver, and the hardships of the economy at the current time."

This is the second restaurant closure in less than a year for Kayser, who was the executive chef at Vesta when it shuttered in 2020. He went on to open his first concept, Rooted Craft American Kitchen, inside Avanti Boulder later that year, bringing it to LoDo with a standalone brick-and-mortar outpost in 2023.

But after facing a lawsuit from the Edible Beats group over its name, Rooted LoHi closed just before Eat'Ya Pizza made its debut.

Kayser still operates Rooted Craft Kitchen at Avanti in Boulder.