Walk west on Colorado Avenue past 25th Street on almost any afternoon and you'll see the same storefront you've always seen for Monse's Taste of El Salvador, except now there's a second door on the west side of the building with a sandwich board out front advertising the day's cake flavors. No new sign yet. Just boba, empanadas, and gluten-free cakes coming out of a space that used to be a smoothie counter tacked onto the original pupuseria.
Then drive ten minutes north to Garden of the Gods Road near Centennial and you'll find something that looks nothing like that: a restaurant with no history in this city at all, occupying a strip-mall suite between a Chipotle and a nail salon, having opened its doors for the first time in Colorado Springs back in April.
Both of these count as "new" on the Westside this year. They are not the same kind of new, and the difference tells you something about how this part of the city actually grows.
Same Family, More Square Footage
Monse's Sweet Kitchen is the latest expansion from Tim and Monse Hines, who have spent the last few years turning one Old Colorado City address into a small cluster of concepts without ever really leaving it. The sweet kitchen itself sits at the front of their building at 15 S. 25th Street, in a space that used to be leased out for baked goods and smoothies. Monse had been making gluten-free cakes for a long time, according to reporting in the Gazette's Table Talk column, and wanted a dedicated place to sell more of them alongside Latin-influenced smoothies with boba, passion fruit popping pearls, and Colombian empanadas made in-house.
That instinct to build outward from a single footprint rather than franchise somewhere new is a pattern with this family. They already run Best Coffee Lounge on North Tejon Street. They are working on a second Monse's Pupuseria in the former Saigon Cafe space downtown. A renovation of Mountain Shadows, a longtime Old Colorado City restaurant, has been in progress as part of the same push. None of it involves opening in another city or bringing in an outside brand. It is one operation quietly filling in the spaces around itself.
Ask Tim Hines about the sourcing philosophy behind any of this and you get a version of the same answer he gave years ago about the original restaurant: "We chose to work harder instead of smarter." That is not a tagline built for a press release. It is closer to a description of how this corner of Old Colorado City has actually expanded, one adjacent lease at a time, run by people who already had a stake in the block.
A Few Minutes North, a Different Kind of Arrival
Japon opened on Garden of the Gods Road this spring as the second location of a Denver restaurant, following a soft opening on April 3. It is a straightforward sushi and ramen menu, built around tonkatsu ramen, chicken karaage, and a Hawaiian poke bowl, in a stretch of road that already has no shortage of Japanese food. Nara Sushi & Grill, Jun Japanese Restaurant, Chiba Bar, and Haru Ramen all sit within the same general search radius, which means Japon is not filling an obvious gap in the category. It is competing directly inside one that was already crowded before it arrived.
That is a different growth pattern than what is happening a few blocks south. Nobody spent a decade building relationships on Garden of the Gods Road before opening this location. A company based in Denver identified a corridor with rooftops and traffic and decided to test it. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether Colorado Springs diners have room in their rotation for one more ramen bowl. Whether Monse's Sweet Kitchen pays off depends on whether the same regulars who already trust the pupuseria will also trust the boba.
| Historic Old Colorado City | Garden of the Gods Rd corridor | |
|---|---|---|
| Recent addition | Monse's Sweet Kitchen, grafted onto an existing restaurant | Japon, a first-time entrant from Denver |
| Who's behind it | A family that already owns the building and several nearby concepts | An out-of-state operator opening its second location anywhere |
| What it's joining | A single-owner cluster built one lease at a time | An already dense strip of sushi and ramen competitors |
The Rituals That Don't Depend on Either
Whatever happens with either business, the weekly rhythm of the historic district isn't waiting on it. The Saturday market at Bancroft Park runs from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. with more than 80 vendors and a rotating lineup of food trucks, and it has been running long enough that regulars know to get there early for the good produce. First Friday ArtWalk happens the first Friday of every month, rain or shine, from 5 to 8 p.m. along Colorado Avenue between 23rd and 27th Streets, pulling together more than a dozen galleries including Hunter-Wolff Gallery and the Michael Garman Museum, with Second Floor Studios tucked up an easy-to-miss staircase for anyone willing to look for it.
This August has its own small texture worth knowing if you live nearby. Oddball Store Music and More, the instrument and collectibles shop at 2413 W. Colorado Ave, marks its third anniversary on Wednesday, August 12. Front Range Barbeque, a fixture of the art walk food circuit, was still closed for renovations as of this spring, so anyone who hasn't checked back recently may want to confirm before building a First Friday route around it. Neither of those facts changes the character of the neighborhood. They are the kind of detail you only know if you actually walk these blocks instead of reading about them from a summary.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this requires you to pick a side. The historic core keeps building on relationships that predate any of us, the Hines family reinvesting in a block they already know rather than gambling on a new city. The Garden of the Gods corridor keeps testing whether outside money can compete in categories that are already full. You get both within the same ZIP code, and neither one cancels the other out.
What's worth noticing is the direction each one is heading. A neighborhood where growth comes mostly from people who already live and work there tends to hold its character even as it adds square footage. A corridor where growth comes mostly from companies testing a new market tends to shift with whatever chain decides to try next. The Westside currently has both running side by side, which is part of what makes it a strange and interesting place to actually live in right now.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these things because you love this part of the city, that's exactly the kind of local knowledge The Johnson Team pays attention to every day. We watch which blocks are reinvesting in themselves and which ones are still figuring out what they want to be, because that's the difference between a neighborhood that's holding steady and one that's about to change. If you ever want to talk through what any of this means for your own corner of the Westside, we're an easy conversation away.
