Walk W. 32nd Avenue between Perry and Lowell on any given weekend and you'll pass a restaurant that just replaced another restaurant, which replaced another restaurant before that. It looks like churn. It isn't. Look at what's actually moving in and out of these storefronts and a pattern shows up: the street runs in two directions at once, pulling outside concepts in while pushing its own back out. That's not instability. That's the corridor doing exactly what it was built to do.
The Address That Keeps Changing Hands
Start at 3940 W. 32nd Ave, because this one address tells almost the whole story by itself. Before it was anything else, it was FNG, a Denver chef Troy Guard concept. Then it became Rooted Craft American Kitchen. In March 2026, it became Paperboy, an Austin brunch spot opening its third location and its first anywhere outside Texas.
That last detail matters more than it looks. Paperboy started as a food trailer on Austin's east side in 2015, didn't open a permanent location until 2020, and didn't add a second Austin spot until 2025. When the founders finally decided to leave their home state, they picked this three-block stretch of West Highland over every other neighborhood in every other city they could have chosen. Founder Ryan Harms put it plainly when the opening was announced: he saw Denver as a kind of sibling city to Austin, and finding a space in this particular neighborhood pocket was what sealed it.
Business partner Robert Brown, who's lived in Denver for close to a decade, said something similar to Westword around the opening: he called it a place where people know their neighbors and show up to community events, and said that sense of connection is what Paperboy has always tried to build around. Whether or not you buy the sentiment, the business decision behind it is real. A national brunch concept looked at this street and decided it was the entry point worth taking.
The space now runs 3,000 square feet, with 75 seats inside and roughly 25 more on a sun-facing patio designed for the kind of people-watching that only works on a street people actually walk down.
The Local Answer, Two Blocks Over
If Paperboy is the outside world arriving on 32nd Avenue, Little Wolf is the neighborhood answering back. It opened in summer 2025 at 4408 Lowell Blvd, in the space that used to hold Café Brazil, from owners Clarke Boyer and Jonathan Odde, who also runs Burns Pub & Restaurant in Broomfield. The menu leans American with a few Brazilian dishes kept as a nod to what the space used to be, and the whole concept is built around showcasing American single malt whiskey, a category most Denver bars aren't built around at all.
Set these two openings side by side and the contrast is the point. One is a national concept making its first move outside its home state and choosing this street as the landing spot. The other is a locally rooted operator building something specific enough that it couldn't have existed as a template imported from somewhere else. Both bet on the same six-block stretch of pavement within about a year of each other.
The Building That Never Really Closes
A few blocks away, at 1575 Boulder St, Dearly Departed opened in 2025 in the basement of the historic Olinger Mortuary building, the same property complex that gave Lower Highland its name in the first place. The concept runs tapas and cocktails, burrata and croquettes, oysters and martinis, all inside a space that leans into the building's history rather than papering over it.
What's worth sitting with here isn't the menu. It's the fact that the neighborhood keeps finding new uses for the same handful of buildings instead of tearing them down and starting over. The mortuary that named the area is still standing, still occupied, still part of daily life on the street, just doing something different with its basement than it did a century ago. That's a different kind of continuity than most neighborhoods can point to.
The One Concept Leaving Instead of Arriving
Every story so far has been about something moving into West Highland. Nana's Dim Sum & Dumplings runs the opposite direction, and it started right here.
The original location opened at 3316 Tejon St in October 2023, founded by married restaurateurs Jack Lu and Kelly Ou, with a menu built from recipes passed down through Ou's grandmother, Nana. It became Westword's Best New Dumpling Restaurant within months of opening. Since then it has expanded from that single Tejon Street storefront to nine locations spread across three states, with outposts now in Boulder, Aurora, Parker, Colorado Springs, and as far away as Scarsdale, New York, with a Golden Triangle location in Denver now in the works.
That's the reverse of what Paperboy did. Paperboy looked at the country and picked this street to enter Colorado. Nana's looked at this street and used it as the launch point to leave. Both moves say the same thing about the block, just from opposite ends: it's a place concepts choose deliberately, whether they're arriving or departing.
The Same Three Blocks, Every October
None of this happens in a vacuum. The Highland Merchants Association runs the neighborhood's biggest recurring event on this exact stretch of pavement, and it's back this fall. The Harvest Festival and Trick-or-Treat Street returns Saturday, Oct. 25, 2026, from 2 to 5 p.m., running along W. 32nd Avenue between Perry and Lowell streets, the same three blocks that now hold Paperboy, Little Wolf, and the rest of this current wave of openings.
The event is free and built for families: a costume contest, a pumpkin patch, a jump castle, a beer garden, kids' games, and trick-or-treating at the businesses lining the street. It's the kind of afternoon where the restaurant turnover and the community calendar are the same story told two ways. The businesses that keep opening and closing on this street aren't background noise to the neighborhood's civic life. They're the storefronts the trick-or-treaters walk past.
If you've watched a new sign go up on 32nd Avenue and wondered whether that's a sign of instability, the pattern says otherwise. This stretch of West Highland is busy in both directions at once, pulling outside concepts in and sending its own back out, while the same Association keeps drawing the neighborhood back out onto the sidewalk every fall to walk the length of it in costume.
If you're curious about what any of this means for property values or timing on this stretch of the Highlands, Graham Group Real Estate is always happy to talk it through. Start a Conversation.
