Now, it's finally back in business.
Co-owners Judson Dymond and Jeremy Malone faced a long road to repair the damage and restore the bar to its former quality. Malone says the team has regularly heard from the community asking when they’ll reopen over what has been a “very long year.”
“Everybody’s been really supportive,” Malone says. “We’re the same bar. We’re just newer. We pride ourselves on sports, service, the right staff and good food. We're just happy to be back through it all.”
The bar is having a grand reopening on January 24 to celebrate being back in business and will offer its usual happy hour specials. Though the owners were sad to miss the Denver Broncos' return to the playoffs, they’re happy to open before the NFL playoffs end.
On Saturday, January 25, the fun will continue when the Sportsbook Bar & Grill hosts an official Colorado Avalanche watch party for the NHL team’s 11 a.m. game.
Customers will recognize the bar space, which has new flooring.
Jeremy Malone
Though the bar’s Highlands Ranch location remained open, 2024 wasn’t exactly a fun year for Malone and Dymond as they rebuilt the Greenwood Village outpost. The dining room was mostly undamaged but the office, kitchen and bathrooms needed to be almost completely redone.
The electrical panels and HVAC system also had to be replaced because of smoke damage; the building, which is over thirty years old, required updates to be brought up to code.
“It was a full rebuild because how old the building is,” Malone says. “They had to pull out every bit of electricity and every bit of plumbing and tear down a lot of walls. Everything from the ground up had to be rebuilt, and then also everything in the roof.”
The owners had hoped to reopen by last fall, but permitting and repair delays kept pushing the date back. Malone says bar regulars will recognize most elements in the space as the insurance company pays for direct replacements rather than upgrades, but he and Dymond used their own money for upgrades to the flooring and bathrooms.
They’d wanted to do so for a few years but never wanted to close the bar for the time it would take to make those changes, so they tried to view the chance to do so as a small silver lining.
“There's a new sound system,” Malone says of the upgrades. “The kitchen is brand new. Every wall, every piece of equipment, the unit, the floor, everything.”
Malone says the owners spent a little under $5 million to restore the bar once all was said and done.
There were two fundraisers after the fire which the owners used to pay the staff for a full sixty days after the fire. They were able to pay their managers for the entire year through insurance and moved most of the tipped workers to the Highlands Ranch location, or called in favors from fellow bar owners to hire those employees.
Malone says they were able to bring around 80 percent of the servers back now that the bar is open again. All the cooks returned as well. Knowing the bar could be as great as it was before kept the owners going through the delays.
“When you get bad news, you just think of the better times,” Malone says. “Those times are still to come.”
Malone has attended the court proceedings for Jerrell Bailey, who was arrested by the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Department for setting the fire that burned the Sportsbook. Bailey has a preliminary hearing in February for charges of burglary, arson, criminal mischief, menacing and theft.
The Sportsbook Bar & Grill is open from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. on weekdays, 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. on Saturdays and 9:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. on Sundays.
