On April 1, 2026, a 900-square-foot storefront in Suite 101 at Broadmoor Towne Center started serving plate lunch. L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, the largest Hawaii-based restaurant chain in the country, opened its third Colorado Springs location at 2130 Southgate Road, its seventh in the state overall. Franchise owner Ron Chadwick Jr., who took over one of Colorado's original L&L restaurants back in 2014, now runs six locations across the state plus a couple more in northwest Nevada.
If you live in Old Broadmoor and think of "new restaurant near the neighborhood" as something that happens at the resort down the road, you'd have missed this one entirely. It didn't open at The Broadmoor. It opened at the shopping center a mile away, in a strip mall that's been quietly cycling through tenants while the hotel's marquee dining room has kept the same identity since the 1960s.
The Pad Sites Turn Over. The Anchors Don't.
Broadmoor Towne Center, off Highway 115 near Lake Avenue and Southgate Road, reads as a fixed piece of the neighborhood's furniture. Home Depot, Ross, PetsMart, Michael's, Ulta, Big R, T-Mobile, Chipotle, Qdoba, Old Navy: these are the anchors, and none of them are going anywhere. But the smaller pad sites at the center's main entrance operate on a completely different clock. A commercial leasing flyer for the property lists that same anchor roster alongside two names marked "coming soon": Kids Empire, an indoor play center concept, and Hobby Lobby. Neither has an announced opening date yet, but both are already on the tenant list next to L&L, which means this one stretch of Southgate Road has picked up at least three new occupants within roughly a year's cycle, not counting whatever else moves through the two restaurant-ready spaces the center still lists as available.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live nearby and haven't paid attention to the strip mall in a while. This isn't a shopping center adding one new tenant. It's a shopping center running through its rotation faster than most people clock, because the anchors give the whole place a look of permanence that the smaller units don't share.
A few specifics if you're planning a stop:
- L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, 2130 Southgate Road, Suite 101, open Sunday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 10 p.m.
- Kids Empire and Hobby Lobby are both listed as coming soon at the center, with no opening date announced yet
- The center's four other Colorado L&L locations are in Aurora, Boulder and Denver, out of more than 230 nationwide
A Mile Away, Nothing Has Changed Since the 1960s
Walk into The Broadmoor's Golden Bee and you're standing in a pub that was built in London, dismantled, shipped over, and reassembled at the resort in the 1960s. It still runs the same formula: yard and half-yard ales, a nightly pianist, singalongs. Down the path, the Penrose Room holds the distinction of being Colorado's only Five-Star, Five-Diamond restaurant, a title the property has defended since long before most current residents moved to this side of town. Summit, the resort's first free-standing restaurant, has held its American Brasserie identity for years. The hotel itself opened in 1918 and has kept both a AAA Five-Diamond and Forbes Five-Star rating longer than any property in the country.
None of this is static because nobody's paying attention. It's static by design. A five-star resort protects its restaurant identity the way it protects its golf courses, because the whole value proposition depends on consistency guests can count on decade over decade. That's a different business model than a strip mall pad site, where the tenant just needs enough foot traffic to make the lease work, and if a concept doesn't land, the space turns over.
So the neighborhood actually runs two separate food economies at once. One changes on a scale of decades, wrapped around a hotel that has every incentive to keep its restaurants exactly as they were the year you first heard about them. The other changes closer to the pace of a lease cycle, tucked into a shopping center most residents drive past without registering as a place where anything new happens.
Two Food Economies, One Zip Code
If you've lived in Old Broadmoor for a while, you've probably developed a mental map of "where to eat around here" that's anchored on the resort. That map is not wrong. It's just missing half the picture. The Broadmoor's restaurant list is the part of the neighborhood's food identity that never moves, which makes it easy to assume the rest of the food scene doesn't move either. But the actual churn, the part where new options show up that you haven't tried yet, is happening at the Towne Center, where a Hawaiian plate lunch spot just filled a vacancy and an indoor play center and a national craft retailer are both already on the lease sheet waiting for a build-out date.
There's also a steadier layer in between the two extremes. NaRai Thai has run its Broadmoor location for years, alongside a second branch in Rockrimmon, without needing a resort's five-star budget to stay put. It's proof that not every business in the neighborhood's dining scene is locked into one of the two clocks. Some restaurants just find their footing and hold it, which is its own kind of stability worth noticing.
If you want to catch the next change before it's old news, the move isn't checking the resort's event calendar. It's paying attention to which pad site at Southgate Road has plywood over the windows, because that's usually the first sign something new is a few months out.
We wrote about the other half of this same tension back in August, when we looked at how the resort side of Broadmoor runs on its own separate schedule. That piece was about calendars. This one is about kitchens. Together they make the same point from two directions: the name "Broadmoor" covers more than one clock, and knowing which one you're looking at changes what you expect to see change.
If you're weighing a future move in or out of this part of Colorado Springs, or you just want a neighbor's-eye read on how Broadmoor Resort Community and the surrounding area actually function day to day, Precision Spaces tracks this market the same way we track everything else, daily, with specifics instead of guesses. Reach out when you're ready for that kind of read.
