Fathima Dickerson laughs with a customer as she takes their order during a Welton Street Cafe pop-up at Genna Rae’s on Sunday, March 17, 2024, in Denver. Welton Street Cafe closed more than two years ago following a dispute with the restaurant’s landlord. The Dickerson family is close to reopening the cafe at a new location on Welton. It would be two hours before a cook dropped the first strip of catfish into a fryer boiling hot grease.
“Their food is beyond description, so every minute is worth it,” Lynch said of her wait that Sunday. “If you can catch them when they’re cooking, it’s a hot ticket.”, closed its doors at 2736 Welton St. on March 12, 2022, following a dispute with the business’ landlord. Since then, the Dickerson family — six of them own and work at the cafe — has labored to reopen in a new location one block down the street in the city’s Five Points neighborhood.
Since the arrival of the pandemic in 2020, though, commerce along the corridor has slumped, with multiple businesses closing or relocating. The historic Rossonian hotel is still shuttered even after announcements promising a revival. Old buildings remain boarded up with no assurance that renovations are coming anytime soon.
The Dickersons opened the Welton Street Cafe in 1999, but the family has operated restaurants in the Five Points neighborhood since 1986. From left, Flynn Dickerson and his daughters Cenya and Fathima pose for a portrait in front of the new location of Welton Street Cafe in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood on Tuesday, March 19, 2024. Welton Street Cafe closed its doors two years ago and the Dickerson family has been trying to get their restaurant reopened at the new location, 2883 Welton St.
“The Welton Street Cafe and the Dickerson family are part of the fabric of Five Points,” said Norman T. Harris, executive director of the. “You have to experience it to understand it, but it’s a place where you go and it means more than a plate in front of you.” Joshua Graham works late nights on the security crew at Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom, a live music venue on Welton Street.
“Why would I put 40 years into a business and then give you almost half of it for nothing?” Flynn Dickerson said. “We didn’t owe him anything.” Burkett, who describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” with business interests around the world, lives in Five Points and owns multiple buildings on Welton Street, although he would not say how many. He also has stepped into the hospitality sector, opening two restaurants on Welton; his brunch spot, Mimosa’s, has been open since 2021 while his dinner restaurant, Moods Beats Potions,“It is not easy,” he said of the restaurant business. “You need some luck. You need great staffing.
In February, a Denver County Court judge declared the restaurant a public nuisance after bartenders sold alcohol to minors during three undercover Denver police stings. The judge ordered Agave Shore to pay a $2,000 fine and closed the building for three years. Neither Goins nor Burkett would comment on the ongoing legal problems surrounding the public nuisance order.Burkett and Cobbins signed a deal that gave Burkett 40% ownership in the business, Coffee at the Point.
At the same time, the group also announced that Busboy’s and Poets, a well-known Washington, D.C.-based bookstore and restaurant celebrated for its activism and promotion of Black art and literature, would open its first location outside of D.C. on the same block as the Rossonian. The owners of Palisade Partners would not elaborate on their latest plans for the hotel, only telling The Post that they were in the planning and design phases of the project. Those plans still include a hotel, restaurant, multipurpose event space and a “music component, all while preserving the rich history of the neighborhood,” Krystal Shores, executive assistant to Palisade’s president, said in an emailed statement.
The Rossonian hosted a popular jazz club until the 1950s and operated as a hotel into the early 1970s, according to History Colorado. Members of Mile High Brass play as they walk down Welton Street during the St. Patrick’s Day pet parade and bar crawl in Five Points on Saturday, March 16, 2024, in Denver. Curtis Park Neighbors event organizer John Hayden, at left, says they wanted to have a jazz band perform to honor the rich history of jazz in the neighborhood. Multiple people interviewed for this story told The Post that there needs to be more retail on the strip so people can shop and then stay for lunch or happy hour.
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