If you have lived in Woodland Park long enough, you have heard someone say "wait until Tava House opens" the way people once said "wait until the bypass gets built." It was the town's standing joke and its standing hope, both at once. That joke is over now. Tava House is open, Firebrand Steakhouse is seating diners upstairs, and a second, much smaller restaurant just took over the old 110 Reserve space on Midland Avenue in about the time it takes most people to plan a vacation.
The two openings landed in the same summer, but they arrived on completely different clocks. Understanding that difference tells you more about how this town actually works right now than any single "what's new" list could.
The Six-Year Wait
Tava House started as what its founder called a pet project back when Woodland Park was still debating what to do with roughly 6.6 acres of vacant land just south of the old train station. The pandemic slowed things down through 2019 and 2020. City approvals took until 2021. The land deal didn't close until later, and construction didn't break ground until September 2024. By the time the Taphouse and River Room officially opened this May, the project had been "refined over the past six years," in the words of its founder, Derek Waggoner.
That backstory matters because it explains why the opening felt like an event rather than a ribbon-cutting. A Gazette reporter who visited during the soft opening described general manager Brad Beck fielding a packed house on a random weeknight, with a wait list at the Taphouse and the mayor's retirement party filling the River Room the same evening. Master chef Victor Matthews, who runs the kitchen, has a following in town that predates the restaurant by two decades. He first made his name at the Black Bear Restaurant in Green Mountain Falls, where a Denver Post critic once put him on the map with a review so glowing it changed the trajectory of his career. He still owns Black Bear's distillery today.
Firebrand, the upstairs steakhouse, took a little longer to finish than the Taphouse below it. It's now seating guests for dinner Thursday through Sunday, 5 to 9 p.m., a schedule worth knowing before you plan a Tuesday date night around it. The room has floor-to-ceiling west-facing windows looking at the back side of Pikes Peak, and reservations are recommended given the seating count. A newer addition, Bar Above the Clouds, has quietly built its own following alongside it.
The Two-Week Turnaround
Contrast that with what happened on Midland Avenue. When 110 Reserve closed, it left behind one of the more recognizable patio spots on the town's main drag, the kind of large outdoor space that draws foot traffic just by existing. Levi and Miranda Kleeb, a husband-and-wife team who already run the Salty Cow food truck and Red Beard Coffee, signed the lease and had their first customers within two weeks. The Woodland Social opened over Independence Day weekend with live music and a menu built around burgers, including a pimento bacon cheeseburger, and a four-layer chocolate cake for dessert.
The speed came with a real cost. Miranda Kleeb told the Gazette that staffing has been harder here than at her coffee shop, where a single job posting draws hundreds of applicants in a day. At the restaurant, she said, "it's been a little different." With only two staff beyond the owners themselves at soft opening, the Woodland Social has been running 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., with plans to extend earlier as hiring catches up.
So this fall, the town has two genuinely new places to eat, and they ask two different things of you. Firebrand wants a reservation and an evening set aside for it. The Woodland Social wants patience with hours that are still filling in, and a willingness to be an early regular while a young staff finds its footing.
| Firebrand (Tava House) | The Woodland Social | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 120 S. Center St. | 110 W. Midland Ave. |
| Backstory | Roughly six years from pitch to opening | Signed lease to open in about two weeks |
| Current hours | Dinner Thu-Sun, 5-9 p.m. | 11 a.m.-8 p.m., expanding as staffing allows |
| Owners | Victor Matthews and investor group | Levi and Miranda Kleeb |
The Rest of the Calendar Doesn't Move That Fast
Here's the part of Woodland Park that neither restaurant news nor a six-year construction saga touches at all: the civic calendar. It runs on a schedule that has nothing to do with who just opened a kitchen downtown, and this is the month it flips.
The Woodland Park Farmers Market has been meeting Fridays at Memorial Park and along Henrietta and Center Streets since June, and that summer run winds down at the end of September. What replaces it isn't a hiatus. It's the Winter Market, held the second Saturday of the month from October through May at the Ute Pass Cultural Center, the same building that hosts the market's Holiday Market the Saturday before Thanksgiving. If you've only ever known the outdoor Friday version, the indoor monthly version is a different rhythm entirely, and it's worth adjusting your calendar for now rather than in October when you're wondering why Friday feels empty.
The city's Main Street Program is also running its Fall Window Decorating Contest this year, with a September 9 entry deadline for local businesses, public voting from September 10 through October 9, and winners announced October 10. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that changes what downtown looks like walking past it in the evening for a full month.
Two other fixtures round out early fall. Creek Week, the community cleanup partnered with the Fountain Creek Watershed District, returns to Cavalier Park on Saturday, October 3, from 8 a.m. to roughly 1 p.m., part of what organizers describe as the largest watershed-wide cleanup effort in the state. And the Woodland Aquatic Center's Pumpkin Dive, now in its fifth year, brings kids back into the pool to fish out pumpkins before decorating them, a small tradition that has quietly become one of the more dependable fall dates on the family calendar.
None of this cares whether Tava House took six years or the Woodland Social took two weeks. The window contest happens every fall. The market flips indoors every October. Creek Week shows up on the same weekend the watershed district schedules it statewide. That's the actual shape of Woodland Park: a food scene that moves in bursts, sometimes glacial and sometimes fast, layered on top of a civic rhythm that has been running the same loop for years and isn't interested in speeding up or slowing down for anybody.
If you're deciding where to eat this month, that difference is useful. If you're just trying to figure out what changed in your own town while you weren't watching, that's the whole answer. Two kitchens opened on wildly different timelines. Everything else kept its pace.
Curious what a market like this means for your own property, whether you're thinking about buying near downtown or selling a home that's about to sit closer to two new dining destinations than it used to? High Country Realty knows this town at street level. Get Your Home Valuation today and find out what your Woodland Park address is actually worth in this market.
