Look at the plans filed with El Paso County for the next Chick-fil-A in Cimarron Hills, and one detail stands out before you even get to the chicken. The building is 2,714 square feet. It has two drive-thru lanes, two exterior canopies, and a 40-seat patio. It does not have an interior dining room. If you want to eat that sandwich sitting down, you're doing it outside, weather permitting, at a table you found on your own.
That's not a knock on Chick-fil-A. It's a pattern. Walk the last twelve months of restaurant news along Woodmen and Powers and you'll find the same shape over and over: a drive-thru lane, a menu board, a building designed to be passed through rather than sat in. Meanwhile the one full-service restaurant that actually closed on this side of town sat dark for more than two and a half years before anyone touched it. That gap says more about how East Colorado Springs is growing than any single opening does.
What's actually gone in along the corridor
The intersection of Woodmen and Marksheffel has filled in fast. McDonald's, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Jersey Mike's, and Bad A– Coffee are all open now, alongside Big O Tires, AutoZone, and a Quick Quack car wash. A 378-unit apartment project is under construction just southeast of the intersection, which tells you the housing is catching up to the retail rather than the other way around.
Count the food options in that list and you get five. Every one of them is built around speed rather than lingering. A Starbucks with a drive-thru, a Taco Bell, a coffee stand you don't get out of your car for. Jersey Mike's has a few stools, but nobody's booking a table there for a birthday.
Then there's the second Chick-fil-A proposed for the Powers Center at Palmer Park and Powers, the drive-thru-only building described above. The Gazette called the broader trend along Woodmen a continuation of "a booming trend of commercial and residential development," and that's accurate as far as it goes. What it leaves out is the shape of that development. It's almost entirely food you pick up, not food you sit down for.
The building that sat empty for two and a half years
Now walk it back to South Carefree Circle, where Jose Muldoon's closed its northeast location in January 2024 after thirteen years, citing financial challenges. The downtown location stayed open. The east side building didn't reopen. It sat there through 2024, through 2025, through the first half of 2026, while the drive-thru lanes multiplied a few miles up the road.
That changed this year. Denver-based Gastamo Group is putting Homegrown Tap and Dough into the old Jose Muldoon's space, its first Southern Colorado location. FOX21 reported the remodel came in at $1.2 million, and the company says the new restaurant will employ roughly 120 people. The Gazette's January reporting pegged the opening for late summer. Homegrown's own site has since updated that to fall 2026, which is a small but telling shift. Even the one full-service project on the books took longer to nail down than the fast-food buildout around it.
Homegrown is a sit-down concept built on hand-tossed pizza and a local beer list, the kind of place designed for people to stay a while rather than grab a bag and go. It's the only project in the last year of East Colorado Springs restaurant news that fits that description. Everything else on the list, from the Chick-fil-A filing to the cluster at Woodmen and Marksheffel, is built for a car window.
Where people actually gather
This isn't a complaint about convenience. Convenience is part of why people live on this side of town in the first place, with quick access to Peterson Space Force Base, the airport, and a straight shot to Fort Carson. But it does mean the places built for gathering rather than passing through are worth noticing when they show up.
Salsa Brava has been serving Colorado-sourced dishes on the east side since 2002, which makes it one of the few full-service holdovers from before the current wave of chain construction. And for seven Fridays this summer, First & Main Town Center did something the drive-thru corridor doesn't: it gave people a reason to park the car and stay put. The First & Main Summer Concert Series ran June 5 through July 17 in the park across from the Cinemark, free and open to the public, five to seven in the evening. The lineup included Rafiel & the Roomshakers, The Runners Band, Steelhenge, SofaKillers, Funkology, Soapdish, and Sun Jr. It's been a fixture there for more than 25 years, which is longer than most of the buildings on Woodmen and Marksheffel have existed at all.
That contrast is the real story here. A quarter-century-old concert series in a parking lot amphitheater draws a crowd every Friday night for two months straight, while the corridor's newest construction is optimized for a transaction that takes ninety seconds. People on the east side clearly want somewhere to stay. The market has been slower to build it than to build somewhere to grab lunch on the way to Powers.
What changes this fall
As of late August, the concert series has wrapped for the season, so Friday nights at First & Main are back to whatever they were before Rafiel & the Roomshakers kicked things off in June. The next visible change on the calendar is Homegrown Tap and Dough, still targeting a fall 2026 opening at 5710 South Carefree Circle. If that timeline holds, it will be the first new sit-down restaurant to open on this stretch of the east side in longer than the drive-thru count above.
It won't be the only new food news, though. The Chick-fil-A filing at Powers Center is still working through the planning process, and if the pattern from Woodmen and Marksheffel repeats itself, it won't be the last drive-thru-only building to get approved either. The corridor is going to keep filling in. The question worth watching is whether Homegrown's arrival nudges that mix even slightly, or whether it ends up as the exception that proves how the rest of the east side has been built.
If you've lived off Carefree Circle long enough to remember what used to be in that building, or you're new enough to the east side that you're just now noticing how many of the new places don't have a front door you walk through, that's the kind of texture that doesn't show up in a listing description. The Johnson Team works this side of town block by block, and if you're curious what any of it means for your own street, or just want a straight answer about what's actually changing around you, reach out any time.
