The entire month of March was filled with uncertainty, both before and after the indoor dining shutdown went into effect. But even as the industry was being upended, some places still managed to open — though not all of them are still around.
Roaming Buffalo debuted its Golden location that month but last year, owner Rachael Webb decided to pull back and focus on the original Downing Street outpost, which recently celebrated its ten-year anniversary. Fox Run Cafe, which opened in March 2020, had a successful run on East Colfax before it closed in October after owner Lucien Reichert decided he was ready to do something new. The space is now set to become a second location of Bakery Four.
Other restaurants that had planned to open that month simply postponed their debuts...and some gave up on their plans altogether.
So the restaurants that opened the month of that first shutdown and survived five years definitely deserve special praise. The list includes La Machaca de Mi Amá on East Colfax Avenue in Aurora, the Molecule Effect on South Logan Street, Nosu Ramen in Golden, and Tai Tai Japanese on East Hampden Avenue, the sister restaurant of the now-closed Sushi Sasa.
Also among the survivors are a pizzeria and an ice cream shop that credit community support for getting them through the last five years. Here are their stories:
Joy Hill
"We worked on the space for two years," recalls Joy Hill co-owner Julia Duncan-Roitman. "The opening process was the most stressed out I've ever been. It was so incredibly physically hard, mentally hard; I was chronically stressed."The bar and pizzeria with a rooftop patio made its debut at 1229 South Broadway on March 2, 2020. "We hired a whole staff and trained them and got through our opening — I don't know how. Then I remember the harbinger of COVID was Tom Hanks," she says, referring to the news that the beloved actor had been diagnosed with COVID, becoming the first public figure in the U.S. to contract the virus.
"Then it was like, okay, the Nuggets aren't going to play in March Madness. And then Minneapolis, Minnesota, shut down [restaurants] and I was like, okay, we're gonna get shut down," she remembers.
Which, of course, is exactly what happened. The original vision for Joy Hill was a cocktail bar that just happened to have really great pizza. "We were really naive," Duncan-Roitman admits. "We weren't even gonna do takeout — we didn't even have pizza boxes."
But takeout pizza got Joy Hill through the first indoor dining shutdown — and the second.
Now, the restaurant is known for its sourdough crust pies, which are among the best in town. "I'm just super grateful," Duncan-Roitman says. "We have just an amazing customer base and the community support. We really bonded with our guests and with our neighborhood. Now we're doing weddings all the time and big events and important milestone events in people's lives. That, for me, is a big takeaway; the community just really embraced us in a way that got us through."
MyKings IceCream
Le’Day Grant always loved sharing sweet treats with her friends and family, so after deciding to open her own ice cream shop named after her son, she went through the licensing and permitting process — only to have second thoughts about opening as the pandemic loomed.But with encouragement from her grandmother, she took a leap and opened MyKings in a strip mall at 2851 Colorado Boulevard on March 1, 2020. When indoor dining was shut down, she pivoted to catering to keep the business afloat. Since then, she's carved out a special place in the community through her work with local schools.
Grant's bright smile is just one highlight of visiting the shop, where she sells a wide range of treats that can be fully customized with mix-ins, from dessert nachos with waffle cone "chips" to Colorado Boulevard Shakes and Mile High Floats.
“If you think of something, if you dream of something, if you really believe in something, I feel like you should go for it,” she told Westword ahead of the shop's five-year anniversary. “I feel like a lot of people fail by not doing what they want to do."
