Skip the Denver Guidebook and Follow the Women Who Shaped the City

Union Station has seen similar ups and downs. By the early 2000s, the 1881 train depot had been hollowed out by decades of decline as air travel and the interstates slowed train travel. For a stretch of time, the grand Beaux-Arts hall sat mostly empty. It was Crawford, again, who saw what it could be. She pulled together the partnership behind the renovation that reopened the station in 2014. Today, it’s a meeting point for commuters heading to the airport, diners and drinkers frequenting the bars and restaurants inside the Grand Hall and across the tracks, and guests checking into the 112-room hotel built into the upper floors. They named that hotel the Crawford.

One woman’s vision and impact changed what the city became. Across Denver today, women are shaping the narrative of the city in other ways.

At the table

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For dinner at Work & Class, a restaurant from Dana Rodriguez, one of Denver’s star chefs, the portions arrived large enough to share. Still, coriander-roasted Colorado lamb, stout-braised short ribs, and mascarpone biscuits lasted maybe 3 minutes on the table. Every dish I tried reminded me of my grandmother’s Sunday meals of smothered chicken with a pot of greens left on the stove all day. The white corn grits at Work & Class had that same quality: simple on paper, impossible to stop eating, and the kind of thing that makes you realize you’ve been underestimating an ingredient your whole life.

Heather Morrison runs the room at Dear Emilia, as she does at its older sibling, Restaurant Olivia. In 2025 the Michelin Guide gave Morrison its Outstanding Service Award for Olivia. At Dear Emilia, a meal starts with a server guiding you through the menu. I started with the light and savory soufflé al parmigiano and spent the rest of the meal wondering whether I should have ordered a second. The butternut squash cappellacci with brown butter leaned rich without tipping into excess; a rolled spinach lasagna crisped at the edges in a way that made me understand, for the first time, how much of making good pasta relies on texture. The whole meal was paced like someone knew exactly when we’d be ready for the next thing.

At MAKfam, Doris Yuen sat with me at a table in the Chinese-American restaurant she opened with her husband, Kenneth Wan. She explained how the racialized mythology around MSG — the idea that it causes headaches and is less legitimate than other flavor-enhancing ingredients — had been used for decades to stigmatize Chinese food and the people who cook it. MSG is, of course, used in many of the dishes and sauces at MAKfam. The dishes are correcting the record in a delicious way: spicy noodles with a pleasant building heat, garlic stir-fry greens, hand-folded dumplings.

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Linda Hampsten Fox opened The Bindery after years of training in kitchens across Italy, France, and Southeast Asia. I went for breakfast and was served both a sweet and a savory version of the house Dutch Baby — billed on the menu as “You’ll Never Want Another Pancake,” which, for once, isn’t a stretch. The sweet version came with vanilla bean and rum chantilly; the savory — the “bad baby” — came with jack cheese, River Bear ham, and mustard gelato, which is a combination that has no right to work as well as it does. Then the La Emmabella arrived, named for Fox’s daughter: two eggs set into brioche with truffled honey butter, avocado, prosciutto, arugula.

Fox and the Hen is Carrie Baird’s place — a Top Chef finalist and James Beard semifinalist who spent years running the kitchen at Bar Dough before opening an all-day breakfast spot in the Highlands with her partner, Michael Fox. The food is playful and often indulgent. I ordered the French toast without reading the description carefully enough; what came out was passionfruit cheesecake French toast — graham cracker crumble, dulce de leche, passionfruit cheesecake custard folded into brioche.

The walls talk in RiNo

Photo: Adele Heidenreich/Shutterstock

Walking the alleys and building exteriors, I kept circling back to who, exactly, was being given a wall. For years the neighborhood’s murals turned over through CRUSH Walls, the street-art festival that built RiNo’s reputation. Out of that same scene, RiNo Art District artist Alexandrea Pangburn founded Babe Walls — a festival and collective created specifically to put women and nonbinary muralists up on walls in a medium that has long skewed male.

Even the beer asks you to slow down

Photo: Jasmine Browley

Ashleigh Carter co-founded the lager-only brewery Bierstadt Lagerhaus in 2016 with Billy Eye. Carter is one of a small number of women head brewers in Colorado, and her German-style beers have won awards and recognition across the country. One of the keys to the beer is time. Carter walked me through the brewing process and explained how Bierstadt lagers (a type of cold conditioning) its beer for about eight weeks. That’s far longer than most commercial lagers. Time plays a part once it’s done, too. The slow pour pils is among Bierstadt’s most famous beers and the name doesn’t lie: it takes 5 to 7 minutes to properly pour this traditional style.

The space has that same unhurried quality with a quieter upstairs bar. Below is more seating, music, and games that run from simple table activities to comically large versions of games you already know (think corn hole with bean bags you can sit on and wooden boards sized to match). A small wine nook takes over one corner of the space for whoever doesn’t want lager.

Beyond the Titanic

Photo: Kit Leong/Shutterstock

Margaret “Molly” Brown is most known for surviving the Titanic (and was played by Kathy Bates in the movie Titanic). But the Denver resident was so much more. The Molly Brown House fills in her story. Brown ran for US Senate in 1914 — six years before the 19th Amendment gave women the vote nationally, but Colorado signed women’s suffrage into law in 1893. Brown also played a role in the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre, when National Guardsmen killed 21 people in southern Colorado, including children, while trying to break a coal mining strike. Brown used her fame from surviving the Titanic and her social access to John D. Rockefeller to help fight for improved conditions and rights. By the end of the visit I felt a little embarrassed by how small my prior version of her had been.

A few blocks away, the Center for Colorado Women’s History at History Colorado expands the frame even further to artists, domestic workers, labor organizers, and women whose impact is diffuse and structural and therefore easier to overlook if you’re only paying attention to the famous names. I walked out thinking about how much of what makes a city is invisible if you only read the plaques on buildings.

The next chapter

When Denver Summit FC played its first home match at Empower Field at Mile High in March, 63,004 people turned out — the largest crowd ever for a National Women’s Soccer League game, and for any standalone women’s soccer match in the United States, shattering the previous NWSL record by more than 20,000. The archives remember women whose impact took decades to recognize. The women leading the city now are more front and center.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes the work that Dana Crawford was doing in 1965, and what all the hospitality professionals and artists are doing with their own work every day. You don’t need a packed itinerary to find this version of Denver. You just need to pay attention to the people behind what makes Denver so lovely to visit, and if you get a chance, ask them about it. The city opens up fast when you do.

Where to eat and drink in Denver

• Work & Class: 2500 Larimer St. Ste 101, Denver, CO 80205
• Dear Emilia: 3615 Delgany St., Denver, CO 80216
• MAKfam: 39 W. 1st Ave., Denver, CO 80223
• The Bindery: 1817 Central St., Denver, CO 80211
• Fox and the Hen: 2257 W. 32nd Ave., Denver, CO 80211
• Bierstadt Lagerhaus: 2875 Blake St., Denver, CO 80205

What to do in Denver

• Denver Union Station: 1701 Wynkoop St., Denver, CO 80202
• Larimer Square: 1400 block of Larimer St., Denver, CO 80202
• RiNo Art District: street art and murals throughout the River North neighborhood
• Molly Brown House Museum: 1340 Pennsylvania St., Denver, CO 80203
• Center for Colorado Women’s History at the Byers-Evans House: 1310 Bannock St., Denver, CO 80204
• Denver Summit FC at Empower Field at Mile High: 1701 Bryant St., Denver, CO 80204