Downtown Fine Dining Restaurant Becomes Event Venue, Launches Guest Chef Dinner Series

One of the city's best fine-dining restaurants has been transformed into an event venue that will also host a monthly guest chef dinner series. It kicks off with Carolina Zubiate, who works at Yuan Wonton, where she's been cooking Peruvian fare for her Chifa Night pop-ups.

On Sunday, March 30, Zubiate will serve a six-course menu rooted in Peruvian flavors at the Regular, which opened in July 2023 at 1432 Market Street. Each dish created for the dinner is a tribute to an important woman in her life in honor of Women’s History Month, and reservations are now available online.

Sydney Younggreen and her husband, chef Brian De Souza, opened the Regular in the summer of 2023. Originally from Iowa, Younggreen, met Peruvian-born Souza while working at Her Name Was Carmen in New York City. After a few more restaurant stints, they traveled the world as private chefs before settling down in Boulder in 2019 to be closer to family.

They always had a vision of opening their own restaurant, so they launched a sixteen-course-tasting menu at their house during COVID and called it the Guest. “So the Regular was meant to kind of be the counterpart to the Guest, kind of more a concept where you could come enjoy and be a regular,” explains Younggreen.

They found a 6,000-square-foot space in downtown Denver and “when we got here, it was a concrete box, and Brian and I selected every single detail in here and designed it with the help of Roth Sheppard Architects,” Younggreen notes.

Like many restaurants, the Regular's space was available for private buyouts and corporate events. Over time, that side of the business took off. Additionally, the couple was “approached by a couple of opportunities to potentially move our restaurant, the Regular, to another location in the city that might be a little bit more conducive to our vision for the Regular as a fine-dining kind of restaurant. ... In a smaller venue, something closer to forty or fifty seats,” Younggreen explains.

So in February, they officially converted the Regular to an event venue. The dinner series was Younggreen’s idea to give emerging, breakout chefs a platform and space to showcase their craft and talent. For Younggreen, it was about paying it forward. “It’s something we really appreciated when we were up-and-coming cooks in New York,” she says. “People in our network would have restaurants that would be closed on Monday or Tuesday and we would get the opportunity to go in there and do a one-night ticketed tasting menu, and the space would sell liquor and we would get to sell the tickets for the food and it became a really cool way for Brian and I to explore our creativity and just share our cuisine with the world.”

So now, that’s exactly what she and Souza want to do for other chefs. They envision a monthly dinner with different guest chefs who will have complete freedom and creativity in putting together the menu. For each dinner, the Regular will be open to the public by reservation, offering a set tasting menu with an à la carte beverage list.
Zubiate, the chef for the inaugural dinner, was born in Peru and realized food was her future when her family moved to the U.S. when she was thirteen. “It’s when I realized that [food was] all I knew how to do — I knew how to cook and I knew how to create memories,” she says. “I missed the feeling I had when my grandpa would put food in front of everyone and the faces that everyone got and all the interactions so I think that’s when it clicked.” After being part of the ProStart program in high school, she was hooked.

Her dream was to go to the Culinary Institute of America but as a DACA recipient, she lacked the access to funding that would have made it possible. Instead, “I just bought the books and I read them front-to-back,” she says. She found work at a Hilton Homewood Suites and after a couple of other restaurant jobs, she found her way to D.C., working for chef Carlos Delgado at Causa, a Michelin-starred Peruvian restaurant. Delgado was the one who opened Zubiate’s eyes to how the homestyle Peruvian dishes she grew up with could be elevated into fine dining.

Carapulcra, for example, is a traditional Peruvian stew made with dehydrated potatoes, pork or chicken, peanuts and spices and is typically served in ceramic pots. “I remember the first time [Delgado] ever plated it for me, he had gotten these tiny, beautiful versions of the same ceramic pots that you cook at home with, and he put in the stew and a small piece of pork belly on top,” she says. “And he had smoked the dish so when you opened it, it looked like you were opening a beautiful, warm stew and you got this smokiness from the char of where it would be cooked outside in Peru like on an open fire grill. And it blew my mind.”

About ten years ago, Zubiate left D.C. and moved to Denver where she “started from zero here," she recalls. "So I started serving, I started doing banquets, and then I eventually worked at Uncle. I made my way into a sous chef and that’s where I met one of my coworkers who told me, ‘We should do a pop-up together.'" They ended up doing a ten-course dinner, which opened Zubiate's eyes to new ways of sharing her cuisine.

After a year away from Denver, she came back and became a line cook at Yuan Wonton, working for sous chef NgocAnh Nguyen, who will be her right-hand woman at the dinner on March 30. The women who inspired the dishes she's creating for the meal at the Regular include one of her mentors, Penelope Wong, the owner and chef behind Yuan Wonton and a current James Beard semifinalist.  For Wong, Zubiate is creating a shumai that Yuan Wonton offers on Fridays, but she’s filling it with a Peruvian stew she loved growing up.
Another dish is inspired by a Peruvian chef who Zubiate met during a recent trip to Cusco. To honor the region and the chef, Zubiate is making a tiradito, a crudo with a base of huacatay (Peruvian black mint) and Chicha de Jora, a traditional Peruvian corn beer, along with a sauce the chef taught Zubiate how to make. Other dishes will be inspired by her mentors, her coworkers and her mother. "I just really, really hope she’s really proud of me,” Zubiate says.

"I'm super looking forward to this," she adds. "I think it’s going to be a great opportunity. The space is beautiful so I think it’s a big opportunity and blessing that they’re allowing me to. They’re welcoming not just me but my food into their venue.”

The lineup for future guest chef dinners at the Regular includes Pinche Umami chef Michael Diaz de Leon on April 27. "We’re in talks with Manny Barella for May and Justin Freeman, former chef of the Greenwich as well. ... Then we’ve got a long list of other chefs that we’re working with to get them slotted throughout the rest of the year,” says Younggreen.

The Regular Event Center is located at 1432 Market Street. For more information, including reservations for the guest chef dinner, visit theregulardenver.com.