Fire on the Mountain is flying into Central Park.
The chicken wing joint, which has spots in the Highlands and Wash Park, will soon add a third, owner Andrea West told BusinessDen. The newest outpost will be at 10155 E. 29th Drive in Denver and is slated to open in the fall.
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She wishes it was sooner, though.
“Chicken wings, that’s our jam. It’s all about the sauce,” West said. “If it was up to us, we’d be frying chicken wings there right now.”
FOTM replaces Troy Guard’s TAG Burger Bar, which operated there from April 2024 until its closure Friday. It’s a turnkey space, West said, and FOTM will take over the remaining four years on Guard’s lease.
John Livaditis of Axio Commercial Real Estate represented FOTM in the deal. Andy Clemens and Tony Pierangeli of SRS Real Estate Partners, along with Jamie Roupp of JLL, represented Guard and TAG Restaurant Group, which still operates breakfast spot HashTAG in the complex.
“A burger is honestly my favorite thing to eat, so TAG Burger Bar has always held a special place in my heart,” Guard said in a statement to BusinessDen. “Closing our original Congress Park location in 2021 was incredibly difficult, and bringing it back in Central Park really did feel like coming home. Making this decision is just as difficult.”
West said the Central Park location will be largely the same as her other spots. She’s operated in West Highland since 2012 and Wash Park since 2019. The newest spot has around 20 taps for beer and will have cocktails along with vegan offerings.
“It’s just such a little gem in the city, and the demographic feels perfect for us,” West said of Central Park, noting that it’s filled with young families and professionals. “It also has beautiful schools, rec centers and fills a good geographic niche where it’s far enough away from our current restaurants.”
The space is largely built out and the group isn’t making structural changes. West expects to spend $250,000 on equipment, aesthetics and to buy the lease and some other assets from Guard.
That relatively small price tag was part of the reason FOTM decided to open at the spot. The Wash Park restaurant, at the corner of Logan and Alameda, cost $1.2 million to build out in the late 2010s, when costs were cheaper.
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FOTM has no outside investors, West said. It’s just her, local co-owner Craig Oberlink and several other partners who run FOTM locations in Portland, Oregon, where the concept first opened in 2005.
“This is pretty cheap as far as restaurant build-outs go,” she said.
West said the newest spot is a good middle ground between the bigger Wash Park and smaller West Highland outpost. She called the latter FOTM’s “tiny little mighty mouse” spot because it leads the company with $5 million in revenue.
The Wash Park location, which opened six months before the pandemic, took a few years to find its footing, West said. But now that it’s rolling, it does $4 million in annual sales.
While revenue has stayed largely the same across both spots, she said profit has steadily increased by 2% to 3% in the past few years. That’s because FOTM has hammered down on its suppliers and has gotten more efficient with scheduling to grow at a time when Denver’s restaurant market is contracting.
“It doesn’t sound huge, but that’s the difference between making money and not,” West said.
Those changes enable FOTM to offer benefits most of the restaurant industry isn’t privy to. West’s staff gets health, dental and vision insurance, along with a 401(k) and paid time off, she said.
“I never wanted to run it as cheaply as we could. I want to provide the life for my employees that I want them to live,” she said. “I’d rather not do this at all than run it in a way I don’t want to run it. We’re just trying to dial in all the aspects of finding profitability so we can realize that.”
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