Farm-to-Table Favorite Duo Is Ready for Its Next Era

"There was a time during COVID when I was almost done with the restaurant industry. Maybe I'll be a crane operator? Anything. But this is all I know," says Tyler Skrivanek, who started cooking at Duo shortly after it opened in Highland in 2005, then moved up the ranks over nearly two decades before taking over as owner and operator a year ago.

When he arrived at Duo, he'd recently graduated from culinary school and had been working at the now-closed Vesta with chefs like Matt Selby, Brandon Foster, Brandon Biederman, Kenny Turk and Wade Kirwan — "the dream team," Skrivanek recalls.

It was a special moment in the local restaurant scene. "When Duo started, Denver was definitely starting to become a chef city," he says. "Before that, there was Mel's and the Fourth Story. That was the chapter before. This was the next chapter. It was this new era, and I feel like the city was really ready for it, and I feel like it really pushed the city to where it is now."

Spots like Potager and Table 6 are among the other eateries left from that scene — both of which are also now owned by longtime employees who, like Skrivanek, are leading them into their next chapters.

John Broening was Duo's executive chef when Skrivanek joined the team just a month or two into the restaurant's run. "Six months in, the sous chef bailed and was like, 'You can have my job,'" he recalls. "John definitely saw something in me. He gave me so much knowledge. He has a great palate; I think he still has one of the best palates in town."

Over the years, Broening and Skrivanek's roles at Duo shifted. "It seemed like every year there would be a new something thrown at me," Skrivanek says.
In 2008, owners Keith Arnold and Stephanie Bonin opened a second restaurant, Olivea, and after Broening turned much of his attention to that venture, "I was kind of running the fort here," Skrivanek says. "We were doing farm-to-table at that point, but I really pushed it even more. I really started building relationships," with purveyors like Buckner Family Farms, Monroe Farm and Rock River Ranch, which provides the bison that the chef has used in place of beef for years at Duo.

Arnold and Bonin shuttered Olivea in 2012 and moved to the East Coast, where they opened a second Duo in Brattleboro, Vermont; in the beginning, Skrivanek traveled there often as the consulting chef.

Broening went on to open Spuntino with his wife, pastry chef Yasmin Lozada-Hissom (they sold that restaurant to another husband-and-wife team, Cindhura Reddy and Elliot Strathmann, in 2014), and he is now cooking at Three Saints Revival.

In early 2020, Arnold and Bonin sold the Vermont Duo (it changed its name, then ultimately closed). Soon after, the original Duo in Denver was dealing with the pandemic-era indoor dining shutdowns. "We did takeout, we had fried chicken — Duo is known for its fried chicken," Skrivanek says.

But after grinding through that stage, Arnold, Bonin and the restaurant's longtime general manager, Bobby Rayburn, "were ready to part ways," Skrivanek says, and they offered their longtime chef the opportunity to buy the business.

"Maybe this is a sign to just roll with this," Skrivanek recalls thinking, so he began looking into SBA loans. "I got denied four times. Then I went to the big banks, and they were like, no. The minute I said 'restaurant,' they said no."

But with Arnold's encouragement, he kept trying, and after six months, he was able to secure a loan. "It definitely was good teamwork to get the business sold," Skrivanek says of the process.

After taking the reins as the owner/operator, Skrivanek made a few changes — but nothing major. "My biggest thing with Duo is to bring it to the new era," he notes. "I do want to keep some of those roots, because they're really important. I like the classic, timeless design this building has. ... It's not like an architecture firm just came out. You start feeling the patterns that are out there. You start dining in Denver and you're like, okay, I can tell what firm did this."

So instead of putting up a neon sign and a plant wall, he says, "we decluttered a little bit, redid the floors, brightened it up a little bit." Social media manager Nicole Rezner is also working on a refreshed logo that's "a little more modern, a little cleaner."
As for the food, "I've been behind it for years,"  Skrivanek notes. "As cool as it sounds to scrap the concept and make it totally my own, there's a huge risk in that. This has a clientele built in, and I just want to tweak it and bring it into a Tyler era."

That's meant continuing to nourish the relationships with his purveyors and creating new seasonal menus four or five times a year that highlight the ingredients he's excited by. "I like to travel," Skrivanek says. "I travel to food cities and I eat out. Sitting in a dining room, watching service, eating food. That's where I get a lot of my creativity and come up with a lot of my ideas."

When he was last in New York, he noticed that chicories were all over the menus, so he reached out to Anne Cure at Cure Organic Farm in Boulder, who agreed to grow some Castelfranco for him. Another ingredient having a big moment is mushrooms. "Colorado has so many mushroom farms," Skrivanek says. "I use Jacob's Mushrooms and I get all these king trumpets, these oysters. I'll just put them all over the menu. I think it's really cool that we have them."

In the spring and summer, he's a regular at the farmers' market. "I used to do the Boulder Sunday market, but now I get deliveries from Boulder farms," he says. "Now my new thing is the Sunday City Park market, which I think is probably the best market in the city right now."

Through 2023, business was good. "We were still kind of living on a COVID high last year, people were so excited to go out," Skrivanek explains. "Now, people are tightening up a little bit — they're saving for the weekend. We feel it, too — we feel the cost of everything. I think Denver is probably one of the most expensive places to operate a business."

That's made smaller, more intimate spots like Duo more appealing to operators. "In the early 2000s, people were like, let's see how big of a dining room we can get. I used to think I wished this place was bigger. Now, this works," he says.

Of course, new people are still opening sprawling spaces in the Mile High. "People will fly here from Chicago and check out a neighborhood and drop their concept in in two weeks," Skrivanek observes. "Which I'm okay with, but I also don't feel like they're really diving into the community much. But I think that's just what's going to happen when a city grows. It's part of change. You can kick and scream about it, or you can adapt. ... But they're also a whole different game than what we're doing. What we're doing is still feeding a neighborhood and trying to be a neighborhood bistro."

And the plan is to continue doing just that for a long time. "I see myself having two decades of doing this," Skrivanek concludes. "And basically, at the end, this will be pretty much all I've done for the majority of my working career."

Duo is located at 2413 West 32nd Avenue and is open from 5 p.m. to close Monday through Saturday, as well as 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for brunch Saturday and Sunday. For more information, visit duorestaurants.com.