And over here, especially, the neighborhood and all the people who have their hearts on Campus Lounge and want to make it successful," including the many longtime regulars who bought gift cards during the indoor dining shutdowns in order to help the bar survive. "I think that's the dedication of the staff. "We feel pretty fortunate we're still here," Olson continues. That was a big accomplishment at a time when staffing was a major hurdle at so many restaurants, including Brightmarten, a Bonnie Brae neighbor that closed last month, citing staffing shortages as a driving force in the decision to shut down. We managed through." The team began selling booze and food to go, and even started its own delivery service at one point in order to keep staff working. "We've pretty much kept the same people the whole way through," Olson notes. "It was tough," Olson admits of the timing.
They also gave the menu a retro touch with a salad bar and nightly specials, including a throwback to the original Campus Lounge prime rib deal on Fridays.Ĭampus Lounge take three opened in January 2020, just two months before the first indoor dining shutdown. They brought back the original layout and added some unique touches, including a trio of vignettes from Wes Anderson movies in glass cases along the back wall that were made by Olson and his mother.
Within a few months, Olson and his team gave Campus Lounge one more update, taking on the design and remodeling project themselves, as they had with Recess. It would have been a sad day for most of my Denver friends, just because there's so much history here." "We came in, and it was kind of the last shot to make it happen," Olson says. Dan and Jeff Nickless, along with a third partner, reopened the bar two months later after adding back those TVs, along with plenty of sports memorabilia and a more casual, bar-snack-focused menu.īut in the summer of 2019, Campus Lounge again went dark. In August of that year, it was purchased by a father-son duo with longtime ties to the watering hole. In March 2018, just five months later, the Campus closed once again. When the revisioned Campus Lounge debuted with its new menu, refurbished interior and lack of televisions in October 2017, it got a chilly reception from the neighborhood. Renovations were part of the plan, though, and what was supposed to be a few-months-long project was drawn out over a year. Landes and his partners inked the deal for Campus Lounge in September 2016, telling Westword at the time that the new project wouldn't be vegan or vegetarian-focused. The purchaser? Real estate developer Charlie Woolley and Dan Landes, the original founder and former owner of Watercourse Foods and City, O' City, both pioneers in the vegan restaurant scene. When Jim sold it, everyone was pretty sad." We'd come in here and run around, play games while our parents had a beer. "Most of the owners did, too, and we all hung out here.
"I grew up in this neighborhood," Olson recalls. It was the kind of divey yet family-friendly place that welcomed countless regulars over the decades - including Olson and his family. Wiste, who passed away in January 2018, was a former University of Denver hockey player who established Campus Lounge as a low-key hockey bar. The address has been a bar for over seventy years, and operated as Campus Lounge under owner Jim Wiste from 1976 until 2016. With Recess running smoothly, the team took on a new project in late 2019: rebooting Campus Lounge, a Bonnie Brae neighborhood staple at 701 South University Boulevard - for the third time in three years. "People move to Colorado to be outdoors and to experience all four of the seasons, so I want that to be the majority of the space," Olson says of the Recess design, which he and his team did themselves - a rarity for most restaurants, which typically outsource design and remodeling projects. The beer garden, at 2715 17th Street in LoHi, has since become a go-to for good times, thanks in part to its ample outdoor space. Olson had spent time working in Japanese restaurants, including the now-closed Japon on South Gaylord Street, before opening Recess with a group of friends in late 2015. And there have been quite a few punches over the past two years.
"You just kind of roll with the punches," says Owen Olson, CEO and founding partner of the Recess Family restaurant group, which includes Recess Beer Garden and a new addition, fieldTRIP, as well as Campus Lounge.