On one short stretch of North Tejon Street, three businesses opened this year within about a block of each other. Stoney's Bar & Grill opened at 118 N. Tejon in the historic DeGraff building on Sept. 1. The Ice Cream Lab moved in two doors north at 122 N. Tejon. Lolley's Ice Cream opened at 216 N. Tejon with a grand opening on May 16.
That makes one sports and music bar and two ice cream shops. Over the same months, downtown lost a seafood house, a neighborhood bistro and a wine bar. The new places downtown this year are casual places built around games, music and dessert. The places that closed were built around dinner.
The 2026 Ledger, Side by Side
The Gazette keeps a running list of downtown openings and closings, and it calls that list nonexhaustive. In a Sept. 2 story, the paper named the restaurants that opened downtown in 2026: Lolley's Ice Cream, The Sportsbook Bar & Grill, Stoney's Bar & Grill, Monse's Taste of El Salvador 2 and the Ice Cream Lab. Here is that list next to the closures.
| Business | Address | Format | 2026 status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lolley's Ice Cream | 216 N. Tejon St. | Ice cream | Opened, grand opening May 16 |
| The Sportsbook Bar & Grill | 402 S. Tejon St., Suite 100 | Sports bar | Opened, grand opening June 5 |
| Monse's Taste of El Salvador 2 | 20 E. Colorado Ave. | Salvadoran restaurant | Opened, grand opening June 23 |
| The Ice Cream Lab | 122 N. Tejon St. | Ice cream | Opened over the summer |
| Stoney's Bar & Grill | 118 N. Tejon St. | Sports and music bar | Opened Sept. 1 |
| Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar | 11 S. Tejon St. | Seafood and raw bar | Closed, last day Aug. 30 |
| TILL Neighborhood Bistro & Bar | 616 S. Tejon St. | Dinner bistro | Closed, confirmed in September |
| Vine & Wheel | 616 S. Tejon St. | Wine bar | Closed, confirmed in September |
| 707 Pizza Co. | Downtown | Pizza | Closed |
Four of the five openings are sports bars or ice cream shops. Monse's is the only one built around a full restaurant menu. It opened in the former Saigon Café space, run by business partners Monse Hines, Tim Hines and Humberto Cabrera, according to Side Dish. All four closures were sit-down restaurants or a wine bar.
Every Closing Was a Dinner Room
Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar opened at 11 S. Tejon in January 2020. Its menu had a chilled raw bar, oysters, crab cakes, mussels and lobster. Its owner, the Boulder-based Big Red F Restaurant Group, told The Gazette why it was closing:
"After six and a half years — a long and disturbing trip down COVID Road, our current recession that isn't a recession, and a challenging Colorado restaurant climate — our Colorado Springs Jax location has closed."
The group's Jax locations in Boulder, Denver's LoDo and Fort Collins are still open, and the company said it has no current plans to open another Jax in Colorado Springs.
The closures at 616 S. Tejon show the pattern more clearly, because only part of the building closed. Three businesses shared it. Garden of the Gods Market and Café handled mornings and brunch, TILL served the dinner crowd later in the day, and Vine & Wheel ran as a separate wine bar. The Gazette reported that TILL and Vine & Wheel closed while the Market and Café stayed open. The owner, Altitude Hospitality Group, said it would extend the café's hours and turn the TILL and Vine & Wheel rooms into private event space.
So the daytime business at 616 S. Tejon gets longer hours, and the dinner business becomes event space that guests book in advance. The building still serves food. It no longer has a restaurant you can walk into for dinner.
The Formats That Opened Can Live on Thin Margins
The Colorado Restaurant Association figures cited by The Gazette explain a lot of this. After labor, overhead and food costs, operators keep about 3 cents or less of each dollar spent at a restaurant. Colorado menu prices run about 5.1% above the national average as operators try to cover rising costs. Colorado Department of Labor and Employment data show the state lost 498 eating and drinking establishments between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025.
At those margins, it helps to know your concept already works. Most of this year's openings are brands that proved themselves somewhere else first:
- Stoney's Bar & Grill opened in Denver in 2010. The Tejon location is its first in Colorado Springs.
- Lolley's Ice Cream came to downtown from Monument. Owners Shelley and Dustin Sapp turned former office space at 216 N. Tejon into their second shop.
- Monse's Taste of El Salvador 2 is a second location, as the name says.
- The Sportsbook Bar & Grill came downtown as an expansion. Co-owners Jeremy Malone and Judson Dymond opened on the ground floor of SpringHill Suites in June.
- The Ice Cream Lab moved. Owner William Yeager took over the old Munchie's and Michelle's building, where Michelle Chocolatiers & Ice Cream once operated.
Jax had three other locations and closed here anyway, so format matters as much as track record. A sports bar fills up around game schedules, and an ice cream shop runs on quick, cheap visits. Neither depends on people booking dinner reservations.
More Neighbors, Fewer Dinner Tables
This shift is happening while downtown's population grows quickly. At the Downtown Partnership's annual breakfast in September, CEO Chelsea Gondeck said more than 5,000 residents now live downtown, up from 2,574 in 2024. She also said 24 new businesses had opened downtown so far in 2026, with more than a dozen more in the pipeline, as reported by The Gazette. The Partnership has also given 11 downtown businesses more than $330,000 in grants this year for signage, lighting, opening inventory and marketing.
New businesses and new homes are going up in different parts of downtown. Most openings are along Tejon, between Moreno Avenue at the south end and Colorado College at the north end. Most new and planned apartments are along the southern and southwestern edges, near Weidner Field and the South Nevada corridor.
The south end of Tejon is closest to those apartments, and it has seen both sides of the trend. The Sportsbook opened at 402 S. Tejon. Farther south, TILL's dinner room at 616 S. Tejon became event space.
The City Council approved the 230-page Elevate Downtown plan in May, after 17 months of work and public feedback. It will guide downtown development and investment for the next decade. Which kinds of restaurants fill the empty spaces will depend on individual operators and their leases, one building at a time.
Three Empty Spaces and One Reopening Before the Holidays
Downtown's best-known dining spaces have not been refilled yet. As of late October, none of these has announced a new tenant:
- 11 S. Tejon St., the former Jax Fish House, closed since Aug. 30.
- The former 707 Pizza Co. space. The Gazette lists it among downtown's closures.
- The Perk Downtown, which has been empty since it closed in 2024.
One longtime spot is back. The Gazette reported that Borriello Brothers at 215 E. Platte Ave. reopened under new owner Daniel Outlaw, a former manager, after closing for about two and a half weeks in September.
Not every new business is food. Easy's Records & Vintage, The Karaoke Studio, The Green Magick Vault and Dice Guys/Ice Guys are also on this year's list of downtown openings and announced openings. For dinner downtown this holiday season, there are fewer full-service rooms to choose from than there were in January. For more on how dining options are changing elsewhere in the city, see our read on the restaurants near Old Broadmoor and our Colorado Springs neighborhood guide.
Rob at Precision Spaces follows downtown leases, openings and vacancies as part of his daily market monitoring, because what happens on the block around a home affects its value. If you own near Tejon or are thinking about the south end of downtown, contact Rob for a precision market plan.
