Denver, CO
Five takeaways from Denver’s restaurant report
Marlee Brown serves guests at Trybal African Speakeasy in Denver on Feb. 25, 2026. (Kevin Mohatt/Special to The Denver Post)
Denver’s restaurant scene is in crisis.
So much so that the city, VisitDenver and Austin, Texas-based restaurant financing company InKind commissioned a report to detail the industry.
Denver’s rising tipped minimum wage, which has more than doubled since 2019 and sits at $16.27 an hour, was the biggest complaint of local restaurateurs. But the 67-page document outlined a host of other problems creating an unfavorable environment for operators in the city.
“The energy of the city used to flow through our dining rooms,” a longtime, independent full-service operator said, according to the report. “Now it feels like people go out less often, spend more cautiously, and are more likely to stay home or order in.”
The report was written by Adam Schlegel, who co-founded Snooze A.M. Eatery and Chook Charcoal Chicken, and Dana Faulk Query, the co-owner of Big Red F Restaurant Group. To compile it, they surveyed over 150 establishments, conducted interviews with operators and brokers and analyzed profit and loss statements along with publicly available datasets.
Here are five takeaways:
Denver lost thousands of restaurant jobs between 2020 and 2025
Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that Denver had 6% fewer restaurant sector workers in 2025 than at the beginning of 2020. That’s largely due to a 15% decline in the full-service restaurant category, according to the report.
Before the start of the pandemic, restaurant employment in Denver was growing at a 2.3% annual rate. If it had continued at that rate, there would be 10,000 to 15,000 more workers today than there actually are, according to the report.
Restaurants employ 7.9% of Denver’s total workers, down 8.7% from 2019, and account for 13% of the city’s tax revenue, the report said.
Restaurants would have needed 40% sales growth to offset rising expenses
According to the report, from 2019 through 2024, hourly labor costs increased 50% to 55%, rent increased 23% and cost of goods sold rose 22%. Profits, on the other hand, declined 20%.
Sales increased by 5%, but an analysis by the report’s authors determined that number would need to be in the 36% to 40% range to offset the aforementioned hikes.
The number of guests coming through restaurant doors is also decreasing, the report said. And Denver reported the sharpest decrease of major metros in restaurant spending this past fall.
“This mismatch has left many operators with limited options beyond reducing labor hours, eliminating positions, delaying hiring, or closing altogether,” the report said.
Denver’s costs and prices are on par with New York and L.A.’s
The report said Denver’s dining scene looks less like a middle-America growth market and more like a “high-cost coastal city” without the population size to support it. Though it acknowledged that Denver’s rising wages have closed the cost of living gap compared with before the pandemic, it’s paid the price with lost jobs and other rising costs.
According to the Washington Hospitality Association’s 2025 Cost of Dining Report, Colorado’s menu prices are 5.1% above the national average and Denver’s are about 2.7% above the average for the 20 largest U.S. cities. That puts it firmly in the high-cost tier of American dining markets.
But rather than garnering the growth and attention that “tier one” cities like New York and Los Angeles get, Denver is in the category of “high-wage, tight-labor” cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
“Establishments grew, but employment is up only modestly versus 2013 and down from 2019 in key categories, signaling staffing strain rather than robust job growth,” the report details.
Denver’s scene is lagging compared with the rest of the state
While dining out across Colorado has taken a hit since the start of the pandemic, the report shows that the changes are most pronounced in Denver. The industry hasn’t bounced back on par with the rest of the state, the report says.
With full-service restaurants in particular, employment and the number of establishments has dropped significantly more than the category across the state. Employment across the entire sector dropped 4.3% in Denver from 2019 to 2024 while seeing a 3.3% decline everywhere else in Colorado.
“Collectively, these findings indicate that Denver’s restaurant workforce challenges are not the result of poor management or short-term disruptions, but of sustained cost pressures that increasingly limit employers’ ability to maintain staffing levels, create new jobs, and invest in long-term workforce development,” the report says.
Despite improvements, city bureaucracy still a challenge
Architects, general contractors and operators said that while each individual city department is helpful in a vacuum, the process is fragmented and disjointed. Based on interviews with restaurant owners, those delays can cost up to $70,000 a month between operating expenses and lost revenue, the report said.
That’s despite improvements made to the permitting process by Mayor Mike Johnston, including the launch of Denver’s Permitting Office in May and programs like around downtown express permitting.
Craig Morton, a Broncos Ring of Fame quarterback who played professionally for nearly two decades, died Saturday at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., at the age of 83.
Morton’s family confirmed his death through the organization, which announced the news on Monday.
Morton led Denver to its first Super Bowl appearance in 1977, quarterbacking the team best known for its ferocious Orange Crush defense. That season, at the age of 34, Morton earned the league’s comeback player of the year award and sparked a six-season run with the Broncos.
“He was our leader that year that we went 12-2, the first year he came to Denver,” fellow Broncos Ring of Famer and former safety Steve Foley told The Post. “It was a magical season. He was just tough as nails.”
Morton was hurt throughout the playoffs and Foley said the quarterback was in the hospital before the AFC Championship Game, when the Broncos beat the Oakland Raiders, 20-17, and advanced to their first Super Bowl appearance.
“I don’t know how he even suited up,” Foley said. “He was black and blue and yellow all over his hip. … Man, he came out and had a great game. He was just tough.
“And what a gem of a guy. Oh, yeah. He had the best heart.”
Morton was the first quarterback to lead two different teams to the Super Bowl, taking the Cowboys there in 1970 before later leading the Broncos.
Morton was born in February 1943 in Michigan, but graduated from high school in California and played quarterback in college at Cal. He also played baseball in college. He was selected No. 5 overall by Dallas in the 1965 NFL Draft, five years before the AFL and NFL merged.
Early in his career, Morton started for Dallas over Roger Staubach before Staubach eventually took over the job.
Morton, though, engineered a long and successful career in pro football.
He played in 207 career games over 18 seasons, including 72 games (64 starts) for the Broncos from 1977-82. Morton was 41-23 as a starter and threw for 11,895 yards for Denver.
“He had a confidence about himself. Kind of a swagger,” Foley said. “Our offense picked up when he arrived. We just knew he could win. He brought that to the team. And man, he had an arm. Oh, yeah. He had a gun.”
Morton was inducted into the Broncos Ring of Fame in 1988 as part of a three-man class along with Haven Moses and Jim Turner. Four years later, he was enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Morton’s tenure in Denver helped put the Broncos on the map.
“Absolutely, it did,” Foley said. “It made everybody wake up and say, ‘Who is this team on the interior of the United States?’ Unless you played on the East Coast or West Coast, you weren’t getting much coverage.”
Foley said he last saw Morton in the Champions Club at Empower Field during a game sometime in the past two seasons and said he remembered thinking, ‘Man, he looks great.’” Players from the Orange Crush era were surprised and saddened, then, to learn of the quarterback’s passing.
“It’s a little bit shocking,” Foley said. “He was a beautiful guy.”
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Rocky Mountain sandhill cranes battle warmer conditions due to drought
Wildlife biologist Jenny Nehring and farmer Rob Jones talk about Sandhill cranes and their impact on the San Luis Valley.
DENVER — Zoos are of necessity big gulpers of water, a fact that has some zookeepers in the drying American West working to rapidly upgrade efficiency and reduce unnecessary irrigation or leaks.
Denver Zoo, formally known as the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance, has rapidly reduced its demands on threatened and declining water sources, including the Colorado River.
Among the upgrades is a sea lion water filtration system that allows most of the water to be cleaned and reused each time the pool is drained. That’s saving more than 8 million gallons a year, zoo sustainability director Blair Neelands said. “You can get in there, scrub it with a toothbrush and refill it with the same water,” she said.
Similar upgrades to an African penguin showcase reduced its water use by 95% by largely eliminating what’s sent down the drain. (Like a backyard swimming pool, though, these tanks sometimes still need to be drained and refreshed with new water to reduce mineral buildup.)
“The biggest thing for us is swapping from dump-and-fill pools to life-support systems,” Neeland said.
Another biggie is replacement of a 50-year-old water main with funding of about $3 million from the city. There’s no way of knowing how much that pipe had leaked over the years, but Neeland suspected it was more than a million gallons a year. The savings should become apparent as the zoo tracks its water use over the next few years.
Creating hippo-sized water savings
When The Arizona Republic visited in 2025, the zoo was on the cusp of eclipsing a goal to reduce its water use by half of what it had been in 2018. The zoo had used 80 million gallons in 2024, or about 219,000 a day, a 45% reduction in just a handful of years. Much of the savings had come in the form of smarter irrigation practices and use of drought-tolerant native plants where possible. The landscaping also pivoted to recycled “purple pipe” water from the city, which owns the zoo’s land, restricting potable water to areas where animals really need it.
“When people hear ‘recycled water,’ they get worried about cleanliness and hygiene,” zoo spokesman Jake Kubié said. “But it’s safe for the animals, and it’s not their drinking water.”
Getting past the water conservation goal would mean draining the pool where Mahali the hippo spent most hours lurking with just his eyes, ears and snout visible to visitors. Because he spent so much time in the pool, the water needed daily changes. It amounted to 21 million gallons a year, not to mention water heater bills that drove the cost to $200,000 a year, according to zoo officials. They estimated that Mahali used as much water as 350,000 four-person households.
“This facility is outdated,” Kubié said. “Some day this will become a huge saver of water.”
That day came before year’s end, and it indeed brought a tremendous savings. The zoo shipped Mahali to a new home (and a potential mate) at a wildlife preserve in Texas and drained the pool one last time. Ending the daily change-outs shaved more than a quarter of the zoo’s entire water usage from the previous year. It put the zoo significantly beyond its goal.
Denver Zoo’s water savings are part of a broader waste- and pollution-prevention effort aimed at being a good neighbor in uncertain times, Neeland said.
“Water savings and drought is top of mind for anyone who lives in the Western United States,” she said.
In Phoenix, a different mix of animals
That’s true of the Phoenix Zoo, as well, where zookeepers must maintain landscaping and animal exhibits in a city that baked under 100-degree-plus high temperatures for a third of the days last year. The zoo creates a “respite in the desert,” spokeswoman Linda Hardwick said, but has no hippos, penguins, grizzly bears or many of the other species that would require big water investments for outdoor swimming or cooling.
“We really specialize in animals that will thrive in the temperatures here,” Hardwick said.
The Phoenix Zoo uses most of its water on landscaping. After a consultant’s 2023 irrigation assessment, the staff centralized irrigation scheduling under a single trained technician and employed technologies including weather-based controllers and smart meters. Salt River Project awarded $70,000 in grant funds for the upgrades and several thousand more for training.
The zoo uses about 189,000 gallons a day, she said. That represents a 17% reduction from 2023, or 20% when adjusted for the year’s particular weather and evapotranspiration demand.
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram.
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