Mark Ferguson, whose previous experience included a career at Wolfgang Puck's restaurants, named the restaurant after the Solitaire food company, which Ferguson's great-great-grandfather, Chester Stephen Morey, owned in Denver in the early 1900s. The Fergusons completely gutted and renovated the conjoined Victorian mansions that housed Highland's Garden Cafe for twenty years before owner Pat Perry sold the place in 2013.

We named Solitaire Best Restaurant on West 32nd Avenue in 2016 and awarded Ferguson Best Chef the same year. Solitaire was known for dishes that combined disparate ingredients into cohesive delights, like a Mediterranean-inspired plate of which our restaurant critic, Gretchen Kurtz, wrote: "Nothing captures the spirit of the kitchen better than a late-summer dish of charred Spanish octopus with saffron zabaglione, radishes, chorizo and shishitos."