After moving through a revolving door of operators, a local restaurant group is hoping to land on the winning recipe for one of Boulder, Colorado's most challenging food-service sites.
The Buff House, a sports bar concept catering to the University of Colorado Buffaloes fan base, will make its debut at the property at 2860 Arapahoe Ave., filling a longstanding vacancy and counteracting the residual pandemic-era impacts that strangled the local restaurant industry. The nearly 5,600-square-foot lease will reignite a space after years of gathering dust, helping it to earn a 2026 CoStar Impact Award for lease of the year in the Denver market, as judged by real estate professionals familiar with the market.
While it is located along one of Boulder's primary thoroughfares, the property has faced a panoply of hurdles that made it challenging to land a tenant willing to invest in reactivating it. The swoop-roofed Arapahoe Avenue building was developed in the late 1960s as a Big Boy, a casual dining chain that has since closed a majority of its locations to concentrate on its Midwestern real estate portfolio. The building later became a Hooters and Harpos, a local sports bar, but as seen in other markets across the country, the arrival of the pandemic crippled the industry and made it even tougher to fill the architecturally iconic space.
The operators behind the Buff House, however, are far more optimistic.
With plans to open later this year, the new sports bar is expected to serve as an anchor for the Boulder area and will fill a significant hole in the local restaurant scene.
"Boulder can be a notoriously difficult city in which to start a business," CoStar Impact Awards judge Liz Leder, a vice president with SVN, said of the deal. The new restaurant will "make a great new hangout for generations of Buffs."
About the project: Tebo Properties, the Boulder-based real estate firm that owns the Arapahoe Avenue property, agreed to a 10-year deal with the Buff House operators. The deal included a free-rent period in which the new tenant could finish out the space. The new sports bar will be a gathering place for sports fans and the broader Boulder region, filling the gap created by a number of neighborhood closures since the pandemic.
What the judges said: "Transitioning from a Big Boy to Hooters is already a unique challenge in any marketplace," said CoStar Impact Awards judge Lance Somerville, a broker associate with Real. "The leasing team overcame several obstacles in an effort to reposition the property for success. Anytime you can take a classic property like Big Boy or Hooters and transform it into a unique, locally owned attraction is a success."
They made it happen: Ben Myers and Shane Tebo, both with landlord Tebo Properties, marketed the space and landed the deal with the Buff House operators.
CoStar Market Manager Kathryn Binns contributed to this report.