The storefront at 1691 Central Street has gone through Central Bistro, Candela Latin Kitchen, Northside Eatery + Market, and El Chingon Bistro since roughly 2014. The most recent of those, El Chingon Bistro, was seized by the state in May 2024 over about $44,000 in unpaid taxes, according to reporting that BusinessDen published on the corner's history. That's four concepts in one stretch of Central Street, each with its own run before the next one moved in.
The fifth tenant is Blossom by SYC, and it opened bigger than anyone planned. Early reporting on the buildout put the room at 75 to 85 seats. When it actually opened this year, the space held 130. That's not a rounding error. That's an operator who looked at a corner with a long tenant history and decided to build past the original numbers.
Four Names, One Address
Central Bistro, Candela Latin Kitchen, and Northside Eatery + Market each had their run before the space passed to the next concept. El Chingon Bistro came most recently, and its tax seizure is a matter of public record. Four operators have worked this 3,300-square-foot room over roughly ten years, and Blossom is the fifth.
That track record is why Blossom's arrival is worth more than a standard opening announcement. Sherry Crossland, the operator behind it, isn't new to Denver. She's the founder of One Concept Restaurant Group and SYC Concepts, and her portfolio already includes Go Fish Sushi, Miya Moon, Chubby Fish Sushi, and the Bronze Empire. She's also the person who brought Kung Fu Tea to Colorado before selling that business to focus on SYC. Someone with that many concepts under her belt had other corners to choose from in this city. She picked the one with the longest tenant history on the block.
The Seat Count Nobody Announced
Blossom's kitchen is run by Executive Chef Adam Chan, who trained at TATE Dining Room in Hong Kong, a two-Michelin-starred kitchen, and later worked at Ever under Chef Curtis Duffy in Chicago. The menu runs dim sum, Sichuan dishes, and a tableside Peking duck program, with an average ticket that pre-opening estimates put around $80.
None of that explains the jump from a planned 75 to 85 seats to an actual 130. What it suggests is that somewhere between the lease signing and opening night, the read on demand changed. A restaurant group doesn't add roughly 50 seats to a build because they're hedging. They add them because they expect the room to fill. If you've walked past 1691 Central on a Friday night lately, you've likely seen exactly that.
Why Curiel Went Next Door Instead of Down the Block
The other signal on this stretch of LoHi came from chef Johnny Curiel, and it's easy to miss because it happened quietly. Curiel opened Alma Fonda Fina, his first solo restaurant, in LoHi and earned a Michelin star within roughly a year. When he decided to expand, he didn't open a third LoHi address. He opened Mezcaleria Alma on November 16, 2024, literally next door to Alma Fonda Fina, at 2550 15th Street.
Two rooms, one kitchen team, walking distance apart. Alma Fonda Fina stayed the home-cooking anchor. Mezcaleria Alma became the small-plates and agave-spirits room, with a bar stocked with roughly 160 bottles spanning mezcal, tequila, and lesser-known spirits like sotol and raicilla. If you've got a group where half wants a full sit-down dinner and half wants to graze at the bar, that's now a single block to solve for instead of two.
What Curiel didn't do is open a third LoHi banner. His next new concept, Mar Bella Boqueria, a Spanish coastal-inspired restaurant, is headed to Cherry Creek instead, operating under his Fonda Fina Hospitality group. Read those two decisions together and the pattern is plain: when an operator has already proven a concept works in LoHi, the move is to deepen the footprint on the same block, not multiply addresses across the neighborhood. New banners go elsewhere.
The Rest of the Corridor
A few blocks over, KUMOYA has held steady with one concept since opening. Chef Corey Baker, a Denver native who's opened fifteen sushi restaurants over two decades including stints at Sushi Den and Sushi Sasa, launched KUMOYA on October 12, 2023, in partnership with Max Mackissock of the Culinary Creative Group. Nearly three years later, it's still running the same dry-aged fish program that drew early attention, sourcing from the Toyosu and Fukuoka markets in Japan. In a corridor where storefronts change hands every year or two, three years without a concept change counts as an institution.
The corridor isn't only food right now. The Tamburello building on 16th Street, the one next to Little Man Ice Cream and its 26-foot milk-churn sculpture, is getting a new tenant that has nothing to do with dinner reservations. The General Store is expanding out of its original Littleton location, where it operated as General Store 45, into a LoHi storefront focused on gifts, Colorado-made goods, and the kind of browsing you do on a walk rather than a dedicated shopping trip. No opening date has been announced yet, but the rebrand from General Store 45 to The General Store is already done.
Earlier this month, the neighborhood ran its third annual Highlands Oktoberfest on W. 32nd Avenue, the same street that anchors most of this restaurant density. None of this clusters here by accident. The Highland Bridge, the 325-foot pedestrian span that opened in December 2006 and cost $5.2 million to build, put LoHi within a direct walk of Union Station and downtown. That bridge is the reason foot traffic here can support an operator taking a risk on 50 extra seats or a chef betting on a second room next door instead of a third address across town.
A corner that has changed concepts several times in a decade now has a fifth tenant that opened bigger than planned. That is worth watching on Central Street this fall.
If you're weighing your own evening around what's actually open on Central Street right now, or you just want the current state of play on any block in LoHi, Chriss Bond keeps close tabs on which corners are still finding their footing and which ones just proved they've arrived.
