Troy Guard serves up DTC food hall

This story first ran on BusinessDen.com, a BizWest news partner.

DENVER — Grange Hall is now open to the Front Range.

Denver restaurateur Troy Guard opened his first food hall on Thursday at 6575 Greenwood Plaza Blvd. in the Denver Tech Center, where C.B. & Potts brewhouse was previously located for nearly 25 years.

The nearly 13,000-square-foot food hall is home to nine vendors, one of which is a pop-up stall intended for short-term concepts.

Guard, founder of TAG Restaurant Group, is behind several of the restaurants in the space. One is Bubu, his quick-service bowl eatery that already has multiple locations downtown.

Two others are new. Crazy Love Pizza sells square pan, Sicilian-style pies like a Korean-inspired pizza with kal bi steak and kimchi. Rado Burgers features Colorado grass-fed beef burgers with toppings like grilled shrimp, foie gras, duck egg, gorgonzola aioli, fried pickles and Funyuns.

The other vendors include:

• • Eiskaffee, a German-inspired coffee and ice cream shop from the owners of High Point Creamery;
• • Mizu Izakaya, which is opening a new temaki hand roll and sushi concept called Honey Fish;
• • Englewood-based Mediterranean food truck Uptown & Humboldt, which is testing out its first brick-and-mortar location;
• • Crack Shack, a San Diego-based fried chicken concept with locations in California and Las Vegas;
• • J. Dawgs, a Utah-based hot dog seller in the pop-up stall.

The new Greenwood Village food hall is anchored by a micro-brewery called Little Dry Creek Brewery, led by head brewer Ty Nash in collaboration with TAG Restaurant Group’s beverage director Nikki Guard.

It’s named after Little Dry Creek, the actual water source feeding Grange Hall and a short tributary of the South Platte River. It was the water source for farmers who settled in the Colorado plains and began gathering at community centers referred to as grange halls.

Guard and his business partners, Kevin Hawkins, who owns Centennial-based Hawkins Development, and Ken Himel, a senior broker for David, Hicks & Lampert, purchased the property and its brewing equipment for $1.6 million in August 2019, according to property records.

The trio hired Greenwood Village-based Galloway & Co. and Denver-based 4Site Advisors to gut and renovate the old restaurant and brewery, which was built in 1995, keeping just the bar and the equipment. They had planned to start construction last April, but decided to wait out the storm of the pandemic and began this February instead.

The renovation, which Guard said took “quite a bit of money,” includes a stage for live entertainment, rentable space for events, and a new 2,000-square-foot patio overlooking the southwest side of Greenwood Village.

TAG Restaurant Group, which was founded by Guard in 2009, owns 10 restaurant concepts around Denver, including fine-dining restaurant Guard and Grace and TAG Burger Bar. In addition to Grange Hall, the company recently opened a fifth Los Chingones location in Fort Collins and another Bubu restaurant in the Granite Tower at 1099 18th St. in LoDo.

Guard also opened a Los Chingones stall, as well as a new sushi concept called Tiny Giant Sushi, in McGregor Square’s seven-stall food hall.

FNG, Guard’s modern bar and grill at 3940 W. 32nd Ave. in the Highlands, has been closed since July with plans to reopen at the end of the month with a new menu, he said.

By 2026, Guard said, he’d like to have 25 Bubu and 10 Los Chingones locations throughout the U.S. He also wants to have 10 HashTAG brunch spots (there’s one now in Central Park, formerly Stapleton), and five Guard & Grace fine-dining restaurants (there’s two currently, in Denver and Houston).

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