Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe Will Open a Cafe at CSU Spur on January 6

Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe, at 3326 Tejon Street, is more than just a place to pick up high-quality meat and other local products. Through their business, owners Kate Kavanaugh and her husband, Josh Curtiss, have shared their passion for regenerative agriculture and supporting farmers. "When we founded Western Daughters in 2013, it was with a mission to build a bridge between urban and rural communities by bringing in 100 percent grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb and pasture-raised pork and chicken from small local regenerative farms,” Kavanaugh says.

Since it began, Western Daughters has "put over $5 million back into the hands of farmers and ranchers," she adds. "Fifty cents of every dollar spent at Western Daughters goes back to farmers and ranchers. ... This has always been about farmer partnerships to us."

Now the two are expanding that mission with the opening of Western Daughters Kitchen, a fast-casual cafe that will debut in the new Hydro building on the CSU Spur campus at the National Western Complex on January 6, just in time for the National Western Stock Show, which opens the next day and runs through January 22.

"This feels like a place for us to spread our wings," Kavanaugh says, adding that highlighting what regenerative agriculture means across the Front Range has been the focus of the butcher shop, and the cafe is "an opportunity for us to explore that even deeper."

The CSU Spur campus is open to the public, a place where visitors can connect to educational experiences that include a rooftop garden, food labs, a living wall and a Dumb Friends League hospital that offers an inside look at veterinary services. "It's like an interactive children's museum for adults," Kavanaugh notes.
"It's kind of a destination," she notes, acknowledging that the cafe's main customer base will be people who work on the campus. But Kavanaugh hopes that the general public comes in, too. "It's a really cool opportunity to come down and see the way history is being reimagined in an area that historically has been incredibly important to Denver," she says.

As the campus's only food outlet, Western Daughters Kitchen will focus on serving "food that really felt nourishing...but that is also reflective of Colorado's rich agricultural history," says Kavanaugh, who's also a nutritionist. The cafe, which she describes as a "modern chuckwagon," will be open for breakfast, lunch and happy hour, offering a limited menu to start, with expanded options coming in February.

"The menu is bowl-driven. We'll use lots of seasonal vegetables where possible, and all the meat will be from Western Daughters, sourced from regenerative farms," she says. Expect to see a lot of lesser-known cuts, as well: "These are cuts that farmers can't move, and we want to highlight them in a really spectacular way," Kavanaugh adds.

The sourcing of everything, from the salt to the wine and organic spirits, is central to the concept, as is the absence of certain ingredients. "We're really highlighting some of the Western Daughters ethos that people don't know about: We never use seed oils, there are no refined sugars, and we're a gluten-free facility," Kananaugh says. With its location in the Hydro building, water will also be a focus. Almond milk won't be available at the cafe, for example, because it is "a big water hog," she notes.
"This is an opportunity for us to connect these two dots between the health of land with the health of bodies, and seeing where those two things meet," Kavanaugh explains. And while the educational component of the cafe and its approach is important, "the main point is that everything is delicious."

As at the butcher shop, they won't get on "soapboxes" at the cafe to spread information about regenerative agriculture, responsible sourcing and transparency. "But I want all that knowledge to be available to you if you want to tap into it," she says.

Western Daughters Kitchen will also offer opportunities by way of a relationship with Focus Points Family Resource Center, the nonprofit that runs Comal Heritage Food Incubator, which doubles as a job-training program for immigrant women. "We will have a space for the neighborhood to come in and to be a part of this concept from a hiring standpoint, and a part of whatever educational processes they want to go through," Kavanaugh notes.

While opening the cafe is a totally new venture in some ways, it's ultimately a continuation of the work that Kavanaugh and Curtiss have been doing for years. "We're approaching this concept with a lot of curiosity," Kavanaugh says. "CSU has given us this incredible opportunity to showcase all these threads that we put together."

Western Daughters Kitchen will be located at 4817 National Western Drive in the Hydro building. During the National Western Stock Show, January 7-22, it will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. For the remainder of the year, it will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, visit westerndaughters.square.site.