Woodland Park's Two Newest Restaurants Are Making Two Very Different Bets This Fall
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Walk two blocks on Midland Avenue this month and you will pass both of them. One took over a beloved space that closed, reopened under new owners within two weeks of signing the lease, and still can't fully staff itself. The other is a two-story steakhouse and event hall with a chef who has fifteen competition medals and a banquet room built for weddings. Both are new. Both are Woodland Park. They are not making the same bet, and the difference tells you more about how this town actually works than any restaurant roundup will.
The Woodland Social opened over Independence Day weekend at 110 W. Midland Ave, the same address that housed 110 Reserve, a spot locals treated as a default meeting place thanks to its patio along the main drag. Husband-and-wife owners Levi and Miranda Kleeb weren't outside investors scouting a mountain town for their first venture. They already run The Salty Cow, a food truck that caters events across southern Colorado, and Red Beard Coffee. When the 110 Reserve space came open, they moved fast: signed the lease and had customers within two weeks, opening weekend built around live music, burgers, and a pimento bacon cheeseburger that's already a menu fixture.
What they ran into next is the part a restaurant list won't tell you. Staffing a second business in a mountain town is not the same problem as staffing a coffee shop.
"At the coffee shop we post an ad and we get hundreds of applicants within the first day."
That's Miranda, describing Red Beard Coffee's hiring pipeline. The restaurant has been a different story. As of this summer, the Kleebs were running the place with two staff members plus themselves, hoping to bring on six or seven more before they could push their current 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. soft-opening hours three hours earlier in the day. Salads, more starters, and possibly pizza are on the menu roadmap, but only once the kitchen has the bodies to execute them.
This is the quieter fact about a place like Woodland Park: growth doesn't scale the way it does in a bigger labor market. A new restaurant here isn't gated by capital or permits so much as by how many people who already live in Teller County are willing and available to bus tables. The Woodland Social is expanding at the speed its own hiring allows, not the speed its owners would prefer.
A few minutes' drive away, Tava House is running the opposite play. The project sits overlooking the north face of Pikes Peak, known to the Ute Tribe as Tava, or Sun Mountain, and it was built to be Woodland Park's answer to a specific complaint: the town has never had a proper banquet facility or event hub. Tava House is a two-story build with a pour-your-own taproom downstairs and Firebrand, a fine-dining steakhouse, upstairs, alongside a River Room event space designed for weddings and private gatherings.
At the helm is Master Chef Victor Matthews, who also built Black Bear Distillery in nearby Green Mountain Falls and has fifteen competition medals plus an American Culinary Federation Chef of the Year title to his name. The menu leans into interactive formats like guest-driven Beef Showdowns and blind tastings, the kind of programming built for repeat visits and group bookings rather than a quick weeknight dinner. Wedding bookings were open before the doors were.
By September, Tava House was already folding itself into the town's calendar in a smaller, more everyday way too. On September 14, the restaurant is hosting a Denver Broncos watch party, which puts a fine-dining steakhouse in the same conversation as a sports bar for one Monday night. That's a useful detail, because it shows the two ends of what Tava House is trying to be at once: an event venue with wedding-scale ambitions, and a place that also wants a seat at the town's ordinary weekly rhythm.
The contrast with The Woodland Social is direct. One restaurant is built to serve the town it's already in. The other is built to draw people who wouldn't otherwise have a reason to book a weekend in Woodland Park, and to give the people who already live here a reason to treat a Monday night as an occasion.
Woodland Park's civic and cultural calendar runs on the same logic. The free community concert series at the Ute Pass Cultural Center, held every second Wednesday through June, July, and August, wrapped for the season before September started. Nothing replaced it as a recurring weekly fixture. Instead, the fall slate is a run of named, one-off anchors, each tied to a specific venue the town already leans on:
Shining Mountain Golf Course is doing double duty as both a sports venue and a concert stage this month, which is a small but telling sign of how a town this size stretches its infrastructure. The Ute Pass Cultural Center, a converted 1936 schoolhouse in the shadow of Pikes Peak, is doing the same, hosting both the summer's free concerts and now a fall Oktoberfest.
Earlier in August, the 41st annual Mountain Arts Festival drew more than 70 painters, woodworkers, metalworkers, and jewelry artists to walk the streets around the Cultural Center for a weekend. Forty-one years running is not a marketing bet. It's a fixture the town keeps because it already works, the same instinct behind the city's own "Celebrate the Fall Season with Main Street" push this year, which leans on existing downtown businesses rather than importing a new attraction.
The same split shows up on the trails. Lovell Gulch Loop Trail sits within Woodland Park's own city limits, an easy-access route just over five miles long that crosses a creek, runs through aspen stands, and is popular enough with locals that moose sightings along it are a known occurrence, not a rare one. It's the trail residents use on an ordinary Sunday because it doesn't require a drive.
Rampart Reservoir via Rainbow Gulch is a different kind of popular. It's rated 4.7 stars across nearly 4,000 community reviews on AllTrails, the most reviewed trail in the area, and it sits on a granite plateau about four miles east of town, reachable by car rather than on foot from downtown. It draws hikers, anglers, and picnickers who are willing to drive for the payoff of the reservoir itself. One trail is what you do because you live here. The other is what you drive to because it's worth the trip.
None of this is really about restaurants, concerts, or trails on their own. It's about the fact that Woodland Park is running two versions of itself in the same season. One version is built by people who already live here, for the people who already live here: a burger joint growing one hire at a time, a golf course doubling as a concert venue, a five-mile loop trail that doesn't need a car. The other version is built to reach past the town's own population: a steakhouse with wedding bookings, a 41-year-old arts festival that pulls in artists from outside the county, a reservoir trail that's become a regional draw.
Both are true in September 2026, and neither cancels the other out. That layering, a town small enough to know exactly who's hiring and exactly which trail belongs to the locals, while also building the kind of venue that can host somebody else's wedding, is what actually living here looks like day to day.
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