Boulder's Newest Restaurants Come From Owners Who Already Knew the Room

More than 40 years ago, Edwin Zoe arrived in Boulder a day early to move into his University of Colorado dorm. No one was there, so he slept in his car. When he woke up, he saw mist drifting over the first three Flatirons. He told the Daily Camera that this was his "first imprinting of Boulder." It's also the reason his new restaurant on 10th Street is called San San, which translates to "three mountains."

Zoe ran the same room for years under another name. That's true of the most interesting Boulder openings of 2026. San San, Cinq a Sept in North Boulder and Temaki Joint on Baseline Road all come from operators who already had the space, saw what it wasn't doing, and rebuilt it around a shorter menu. When you know what each room used to be, you know how to use it now.

A full-service room that spent years at the counter

Before San San, 2014 10th St. was Dragonfly Noodle, another Zoe restaurant. It closed in summer 2026, just weeks before San San's soft launch in early August. Zoe told the Daily Camera that Dragonfly Noodle started in the early days of the pandemic. It needed counter service and a limited menu, even though the room had been designed for full-service dining.

"As we have emerged out of the pandemic, I want to realize the full potential of the space with a concept I have wanted to create for quite some time," he said in that same interview.

So San San is the room finally doing what it was built for: 80 seats, booths, outdoor tables, and a bar program led by beverage director Matthew Jansen. Zoe already runs Zoe Ma Ma at 919 Pearl St. and Pearl Poké next door at 2010 10th St., and he knows Boulder's appetite for casual Chinese food. San San is aimed at what he sees as missing downtown. "If you want to go out for your anniversary, I don't really see a venue for Chinese that way," he told the Camera.

The menu is where the rebuild shows. Old-school American Chinese menus often run to 20 pages. At opening, Zoe announced about eight seasonal entrées, a half-dozen appetizers, a couple of soups, and a multi-course tasting menu for $40 to $50. The chop suey he serves is the dish he traces to 19th-century Chinese miners and railroad workers cooking with whatever they had, and it rotates with the seasons.

4580 Broadway, rebuilt again by the people who were already there

The North Boulder space now home to Cinq a Sept has the longest history of the three. Here's the order of tenants:

1. Restaurant 4580 opened in early 2006, according to the Daily Camera, and Martin Hammer was its owner before the next operator came in.
2. The North End at 4580 was running by 2015 under owner James Cimino, with Jeffrey Barbour as executive chef, as Yellow Scene reported that year.
3. Bellota, a Mexican restaurant with chef Manuel "Manny" Barella, launched in 2022 from the team behind Oak at Fourteenth and Corrida, per the Daily Camera.
4. Cinq a Sept opened in July 2026.

The last two belong to the same operator, and that's the point. Westword reported that Bellota's last day was Saturday, January 31, 2026, after four years, and identified it as part of Bryan Dayton's Half Eaten Cookie Hospitality Group. Six months later, the same group reopened the room as a French bistro.

Dayton told Boulder Reporting Lab that the goal was a restaurant North Boulder residents would want, one that would also draw diners from elsewhere in the city. Like Zoe, he describes the result in terms of what the menu leaves out. "The menu's delicious, but it is definitely nice and tight and executed well," he said. BRL notes that the focused menu reflects the restaurant's smaller space and kitchen, and that it's about the size of Oak at Fourteenth's.

Chef Sam McCandless learned to cook from Larousse Gastronomique and The French Laundry Cookbook, then worked in Billings, Chicago and several Boulder kitchens. He calls the cuisine "a story of simplicity." The kitchen works closely with local suppliers, including Esoterra Farms for greens, carrots, squash and zucchini, and Buckner Family Ranch for beef and lamb. A few staples will stay on the menu, and the rest will change with the seasons.

An upstairs that wasn't pulling its weight

Temaki Joint is the smallest of the three, and its story is the most literal version of the pattern. Chef Duy Pham spent decades in Denver-area kitchens, including Opal, Parker Garage and Foraged. According to Boulder Reporting Lab, his business partner owns the restaurant space on Baseline Road near U.S. 36 and felt the upstairs "wasn't being used to its potential."

Temaki Joint started as a trial run, sharing the space with the tea shop Tea Mate. Then Pham closed for about three weeks, and Tea Mate moved downstairs. The upstairs became a full restaurant with 20 seats across the dining room and patio, plus eight at a new sushi bar. It reopened June 30. "We took about three weeks off to renovate, build out the sushi bar, buy more equipment, knock down some walls," Pham told BRL.

His partner wanted to build around omakase. Pham, looking at the campus a few blocks away, also wanted somewhere people could "come in real quick, have a few hand rolls where they're not spending an arm and a leg." He rolls them into cylinders instead of cones, which is where the name comes from. The room now does both.

How each room works now

Each rebuild split the experience in some way, and that split decides how you get in.

Some details on each:

San San. The service fee comes from a position Zoe has held for years. He was a business advocate for Amendment 70, the 2016 ballot measure that raised Colorado's minimum wage, and he told the Daily Camera that all of his restaurants use the service-fee model so front-of-house pay isn't tied to tips. The opening menu also had a few surprises with a history behind them. One was a homestyle burger, a nod to early Chinese restaurants in Western mountain towns that served American staples to survive. The other was a single USDA prime rib roasted on Friday nights and served until it sells out.

Cinq a Sept. The name means "five to seven," the early-evening hours for a drink. Dayton told Boulder Reporting Lab that diners are coming all evening, not just for happy hour, and that he's seeing plenty of faces he doesn't recognize after owning a business in Boulder for 16 years. For a first visit, he suggests the bread, the Prince Edward Island oysters, the zucchini ("that's next-level"), the Esoterra salad, the chicken, and the sole with brown butter and capers.

Temaki Joint. If you'd like to try omakase without committing to the full meal, there's a smaller version with two pieces of sashimi, three pieces of nigiri and one temaki. Hand rolls come one at a time or in chef-selected sets of three, five or seven, from bluefin and yellowtail to eel with foie gras. Pham made some of the plates and serving pieces himself, a woodworking habit that started with replacing the handles on knives he's collected since 1989. Omakase is booked every night, he told BRL, and if that keeps up he would consider keeping this room as a temaki place and finding a separate space for omakase.

As someone with a background in interiors, I love it when a room finally gets used the way it was designed. If you have a favorite table in one of these three, or a room of your own that seems to want a different job, I'm always glad to talk it through. Kristi Clary is happy to connect over dinner recommendations or anything else on your mind.