Walk up Tejon on a Friday in late summer and something feels different around 44th. The old center of the neighborhood, the one built around Odie B's and Chubby's on 38th, is still busy. But the block that used to be a quiet run of small shops and one supper club now has a cocktail bar drawing its own crowd, a ramen address that changed hands without going dark, and a full-service restaurant under construction across the street.
If your mental map of Sunnyside stops at 38th Avenue, the news has moved six blocks north. In roughly eighteen months, four distinct food and drink operators have opened, changed hands, or broken ground on a stretch of 44th and Tejon that had none of them before.
The shift north, in eighteen months
For years the walkable Sunnyside evening meant 38th Avenue. Odie B's sandwiches, Chubby's smothered fries at 1:00 a.m., breweries a few blocks off. That corridor is intact. What is new is a parallel one running along 44th between Tejon and the western edge of Chaffee Park, dense enough that residents can walk between three or four operators in a single evening.
The turning points, in order:
- May 2025: Semiprecious opens at 2839 W. 44th Ave., a cocktail bar built on a single technical premise, every drink served at or just above freezing. The operator is Michael Capoferri, a former Campari ambassador who ran Los Angeles bar Thunderbolt before choosing Denver for his next build.
- May 2025: The 5,700-square-foot building at 2915 W. 44th, formerly Sunnyside Supper Club, sells for $2 million to restaurateur Suraj Aryal after a foreclosure. It had traded for $3.1 million in October 2021. Aryal is opening a third location of Spice Kitchen, his Indian and Nepali concept, in the space.
- November 2025: Cliff and Cara Blauvelt open Boombots Pasta Shop at 2647 W. 38th Ave., sharing a kitchen with the original Odie B's. Odie B's runs breakfast and lunch, Boombots takes the evening. The menu has five pastas including a dirty martini bucatini and a cavatelli stroganoff, and, as Denverite reported, the owners describe it as a pasta shop rather than an Italian restaurant.
- March 2026: Ebisu Sushi and Ramen Star holds its grand opening at 4044 Tejon St., in the former Ramen Star space that Takashi Tamai built starting in 2019. Tamai sold the business in February to Myong and Chef Soon Choi, who are running sushi alongside ramen.
Four operators, one bar, one pasta shop, one ramen address, one full-service restaurant under construction. The math only works because the foot traffic between them does.
An evening on the new corridor
For residents who want the walking order, here is how the stretch reads from south to north:
- Start at Odie B's or Boombots Pasta Shop at 2647 W. 38th Ave. for early plates.
- Walk north on Tejon to Ebisu Sushi and Ramen Star at 4044 Tejon.
- Continue to Chaffee Park at 44th and Tejon, the neighborhood green that hosts the annual music festival.
- Turn west on 44th to Semiprecious at 2839 for a cocktail.
- A few doors down, watch the buildout at 2915 W. 44th where Spice Kitchen is going in.
That is a contiguous seven-block loop with four current stops and a fifth arriving. Eighteen months ago it was one supper club that had already stopped paying its mortgage.
Why Semiprecious matters more than a new bar usually does
New cocktail bars open in Denver every month. Semiprecious is worth pausing on because it explains what changed on 44th.
Capoferri did not open the bar because 44th had a scene. He opened it in a renovated 1950s furniture showroom on a block that had no evening foot traffic to inherit. His pitch, in interviews around the opening, was that he was not shoehorning a Los Angeles concept into Denver but building one for the city, filtered through an aperitivo lens. The technical premise, cocktails engineered to serve at or just above freezing, is the kind of thing that draws people from other neighborhoods, not just the block.
That distinction matters for what came next. A block that pulls people in from Berkeley, LoHi, and Highland can support a $2 million restaurant purchase down the street. A block that only serves its immediate residents cannot. Aryal's decision to take on the former Supper Club building, in an environment he openly described as tough on margins because of interest rates, labor, and food costs, was a bet on the corridor Semiprecious had already started to build.
Boombots and the incoming Ebisu are the confirmation. Once a corridor exists, operators who would not have signed a lease on 44th two years ago start looking at it.
What Chaffee Park is doing this fall
If the food corridor is the private-sector version of the neighborhood's shift north, Chaffee Park is the public one. A few things to know for the next several weeks:
Sunnyside Music Festival, Saturday, September 12, 2026. Free, family-friendly, at Chaffee Park at 1901 W. 43rd Ave., noon to 7:30 p.m. Attendance in recent years has run past 8,000. Expect live music across multiple stages, food trucks, kids' programming, and local vendors. Street parking only; the festival has been explicit that there are no meters or public lots being reserved, so residents on nearby blocks should plan accordingly.
Fundraiser pints in the run-up. Denver Beer Co. has been running a summer fundraiser series with the festival, with a dollar from every pint and two dollars from every pint of the limited-edition Sunnyside Music Fest beer going back to festival programming. Events have been rotating through the Olde Town Arvada, South Downing, and Platte Street locations.
La Raza Park. The park along 38th, long a community gathering place tied to Chicano movement history in Denver, reopened this past May after roughly a year of renovation work with a new playground and basketball court. If you have not walked through since the reopen, it is worth a Saturday morning.
Ciancio Park still has its two hard tennis courts a few blocks north, and Aztlan Recreation Center is the neighborhood's indoor anchor, with the outdoor pool that gets residents through July.
The 38th anchors have not gone anywhere
None of this displaces the older Sunnyside. It layers on top of it.
The Wolf's Tailor, still the only two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Colorado, sits inside the neighborhood. The Original Chubby's is where the smothered fries have been for decades. On the drinks side, Crooked Stave, Diebolt Brewing, Waldschänke Ciders, and the twenty-year-old Bonacquisti Wine Company all sit within Sunnyside's boundaries. The Monkey Barrel is the go-to for live music and games on a weeknight. Sunny's, Bacon Social House, The Universal, and Moon Racoon Baking Co. cover the morning shift.
The practical read for residents is that the neighborhood now has two walkable food-and-drink concentrations rather than one, connected by a short walk up Tejon. Choosing an evening plan used to mean choosing which corner of 38th. Now it means choosing which avenue.
What this means if you live here
A few observations that only apply once you have watched the corridor form:
The corner of 44th and Tejon is doing work it did not do two years ago. If you own on the blocks between 38th and 44th, particularly on Tejon, Pecos, Osage, or Umatilla, the ten-minute walk radius from your front door now includes materially different options than it did in early 2024. That is a change in daily-life value that does not show up on a portal.
The pace is not slowing. A vacant 5,700-square-foot restaurant space does not get bought at $2 million by an operator running two other locations if the read on the corridor is bearish. Watch the block between Semiprecious and the incoming Spice Kitchen through the fall.
The festival is the tell. A neighborhood that draws 8,000 people to Chaffee Park for a free Saturday in September has the density of foot traffic to sustain what is opening around it. That is not a coincidence, and it is not new. What is new is how much of that traffic now has somewhere to go the other 364 days.
If you have been thinking about how the changes on 44th affect what your home is worth, what to buy, or how to time a move within Sunnyside, The Denver Group lives in these details for a living. Let's connect.
