For just over a year, the corner of South Gaylord and Mississippi sat dark. Wash Park Grille, the Italian restaurant that anchored that corner for nearly three decades, closed for good in February 2025 after a run that included a partner's death, a tax seizure, and a brief, failed attempt to reopen. If you walked past it on your way to Devil's Food Bakery or cut through on a Sunday loop around the park, you got used to the dead windows.
That corner is loud again. Wash Park Social opened inside the old space at the end of April 2026, and a taco concept was designed to follow a couple of months later around the corner on Mississippi. Read the coverage from earlier this year and you'd assume two separate restaurant stories landed on the same block at the same time. They didn't. Both trace back to the same buyers and the same operator, working out of the same 10,200-square-foot building. What looks like a corner filling back in with new energy is really one ownership group filling in two storefronts at once.
Jeff Estey and Greg Sauber opened Wash Park Grille in 1997 and bought the building at 1096 South Gaylord Street the following year for $1 million. They ran it together for close to a quarter century, along with a sister restaurant next door on Mississippi Avenue called Agave Taco Bar. Sauber died in 2022, and both restaurants struggled afterward. The city seized the property for back taxes in December 2024. The Grille briefly reopened, then closed for good in February 2025, and the building went up for sale that March.
The building sold in October 2025 for $6 million, half a million below the $6.5 million asking price, after broker Jeff Hallberg of Lee & Associates fielded three or four offers on Estey's behalf. Hallberg said Estey "wanted to see it stay a restaurant." At $588 a square foot for 10,200 square feet, the deal covered more than the empty Grille. It also included the shuttered Agave space and a 1,400-square-foot office upstairs.
The buyers were Aaron Grant, a real estate broker who already owned Park Coworking a few doors down and had lived in Wash Park for 13 years, and Kris Johnson, a Hilltop resident in oil and gas who already kept an office on South Gaylord. Grant grew up on a farm outside the Weld County town of Mead and first ate at Wash Park Grille in college. "I've just really always had a strong affinity for South Gaylord," he said. He and Johnson financed the purchase with a $4.3 million loan from Star Mesa Capital, set to mature in two years, which puts a real deadline on whether the double-restaurant bet pays off before refinancing comes due.
Grant and Johnson brought in Bart Hickey, formerly managing partner of the Capital Grille on Larimer Square, to run both ground-floor spaces as separate restaurant brands. Grant said the goal was to "carry forth" the old Grille's "neighborhood tradition, but at the same time do something new."
Hickey spent over two decades in high-end hospitality, including stints with the Capital Grille and Seasons 52, work that helped land his restaurants on OpenTable's Top 100 list nationally. He opened Wash Park Social in the old Grille space at the end of April 2026, after a $1 million to $1.5 million interior overhaul that added more booths and a new horseshoe bar to greet guests at the door. The liquor license carried over from the Grille rather than starting fresh, which is part of why the timeline held.
The menu leans about 75 percent toward familiar plates and 25 percent toward something more adventurous, grilled octopus among them, and the drink list names local partners like Rebel Bread and Laws Whiskey House rather than treating them as garnish. The restaurant seats about 200 people across 35 tables and runs two covered, dog-friendly patios a short walk from the park. A Yelp listing from August 2026 shows it open and serving, describing itself as a wine-focused neighborhood gathering spot, a different pitch than the old Grille ever made.
Here's the part easy to miss if you only catch a headline about a new taco spot on Mississippi Avenue. The Taco Garage, taking over the old Agave storefront at 2217 East Mississippi Avenue, isn't a second operator moving onto the block. It's Hickey again, running a second concept out of the same building he just spent seven figures renovating around the corner.
The space is small, about 700 square feet with room for 48 guests, built around street tacos with house-made tortillas and a bar program centered on agave spirits. Hickey called it "a really cozy, intimate roadhouse vibe" when the plans were announced, and it was designed from the start to trail Wash Park Social by a couple of months rather than compete with it for attention. Two restaurants, two names, two street frontages, one ownership group, one operator. That's not two businesses filling a gap. That's one business filling two gaps at once.
The reason this matters for anyone who actually lives near South Gaylord is the contrast with everything else on the strip. The rest of the block hasn't consolidated the way that one corner just did. These names are still separately owned and separately run:
None of those four changed hands this year. They're the reason the street still reads as a row of independent shops rather than a single managed property, even as the corner beside them just proved how fast that can shift.
The historic district Hickey left, Larimer Square, has been legally protected since 1971. South Gaylord never went that route. There's no regulatory barrier standing between a property owner and a decision to combine storefronts, tear down a building, or convert retail space into something else. The block has kept its character for more than a century because the people who own the buildings have chosen, one at a time, to keep running small, independent businesses out of them. That's a choice, not a rule.
The corner at Gaylord and Mississippi is the clearest recent example of what happens when that choice changes hands, even when the new owner is someone like Grant, a longtime neighbor with real affection for the block. South Gaylord's own business directory currently lists a Wash Park Tasting Room as "coming soon," with no other detail attached. Whether that turns out to be another independent addition or another storefront tied to an existing owner is worth watching, because the corner that just reopened showed how easily one name behind the counter can look like two.
None of this changes what the block feels like on a weeknight walk past the park. Wash Park Social is drawing people in for wine and small plates, and the Taco Garage should do the same for anyone craving something faster around the corner. But if you remember when that corner was just the Grille, it's worth knowing the comeback isn't really two new businesses moving in. It's one.
If you're keeping track of how South Gaylord and the rest of Washington Park keep changing, or you're weighing a move into or out of this pocket of Denver, Doctor Relocation, led by Steve Charlett of RE/MAX Professionals, has worked this market since 1999. Contact Us to talk through what's next for your street.
