Walk east on Sixth Avenue past Elizabeth Street and you'll pass a storefront barely big enough to turn around in. Twelve seats inside, an occupant load capped at 22, a footprint of 658 square feet according to the permit filings. For most of the last two decades, that space smelled like cheese. Now it smells like smoked chicken. The sign changed in the spring, but the harder thing to notice is that this corner has been quietly changing hands for twenty-five years, and almost nobody registered it as turnover until the identity itself flipped.
Twenty-Four Years, Four Owners, One Identity
The Truffle Cheese Shop opened at 2906 East Sixth Avenue in 2001. Six years later, former Potager employees Rob and Karin Lawler bought the business from its original owners and narrowed its focus from general specialty foods to cheese specifically, a decision that shaped the shop for the next eighteen years. They ran it for twelve years, added a related restaurant in the Highland neighborhood in 2013, and eventually sold to Mark Schwab and his son Joe in 2019. Lisa Morris took over in 2021 and kept the identity intact enough that Westword named it the city's Best Cheese Shop in 2023.
That's four ownership changes across two and a half decades on the same 658 square feet, and almost none of it read as instability to the neighborhood, because the block still functioned as the cheese place. Ownership turned over. Character didn't. That distinction matters for understanding what happened next, because when the identity finally did change, it felt sudden even though the space had already proven it could survive multiple handoffs.
Then the Turnover Became Visible
In the fall of 2025, the Colorado Department of Revenue seized the shop's assets over $21,471 in unpaid back taxes. Morris later explained that a bookkeeping error had compounded over time. "It snowballed into a large debt, so I had to make a decision about how to resolve that," she said, adding that declining retail sales and rising costs across labor, utilities, and imported cheese had already made the storefront model difficult to sustain. The doors closed, and for the first time since 2001, 2906 East Sixth Avenue had no obvious next chapter.
It didn't stay empty long. By January 2026, permit filings showed a new concept called Chicken Riot moving through the city's review pipeline for that exact address, backed by Caleb Benton of Tredwell Hospitality, the team behind Riot BBQ. The plans called for interior renovation only, new kitchen equipment, and a counter-service layout built around carryout, with roughly 70 meals a day projected and about 80 percent of that as pickup rather than dine-in. Chicken Riot opened on March 26, 2026, serving pibil-marinated, slow-smoked half chickens alongside a citrus-marinated version called the Señor Loco, plus salads and sandwiches built on Reunion Bakery croissants. The team has said they built the concept around "a place where people come together and leave feeling nourished and cared for," a line that reads less like marketing copy and more like an attempt to inherit the neighborhood-anchor role the cheese shop had occupied for so long.
The Cheese Shop That's Coming Back, Just Not Here
Here's where the story gets more interesting than a simple closure-and-replacement. In June 2026, Denver-based DHP Holdings announced it had acquired the Truffle Cheese Shop brand and planned to reopen a storefront as early as this fall. Managing partner David Walsh framed it as an act of preservation rather than a fresh start: "The Truffle has been part of Denver's food culture for decades." The new ownership has said it is broadening the concept beyond cheese alone, toward a wider range of Colorado-made specialty products, while keeping cheese at the center.
What the announcement did not include was an address. As of the June statement, DHP Holdings was still evaluating retail locations, which makes sense given that the original spot on Sixth Avenue has been fully built out as a fried chicken counter with new kitchen equipment installed a few months earlier. A handful of secondary write-ups reused the old 2906 East Sixth Avenue address when covering the comeback, but that appears to be a database holdover rather than a confirmed plan, since Chicken Riot occupies that space and shows no indication of relocating. Residents who remember the shop fondly should expect a new address on a new block, not a returning tenant on the old one.
What Hasn't Moved
It would be easy to read all of this as evidence that Congress Park's food scene is in flux, but the churn is remarkably concentrated. Two blocks away, the corner of 12th Avenue and Madison Street has held its shape. Blue Pan Pizza is still serving its Detroit-style pies there. Bamboo Sushi and Under the Umbrella still anchor the same stretch, and Sweet Cooie's is still the ice cream stop that gives the corner its name recognition beyond the neighborhood. None of these businesses have changed hands in the period this storefront saga covers. Head a few blocks further and the pattern holds again at Twist and Shout and Tattered Cover Book Store, the record shop and the bookstore that share a building and have functioned as fixed points for long enough that most residents can't recall the block without them.
The lesson isn't that Congress Park's retail is unstable. It's that one particular 658-square-foot space, small enough to be hard to lease profitably and located on a stretch with real estate pressure, has absorbed almost all of the neighborhood's visible commercial turnover on its own, while the blocks around it stayed put. A single storefront changing concepts twice in a year can make an entire corridor feel like it's in motion, even when the businesses defining that corridor's character haven't budged.
Residents walking that stretch of Sixth this fall should expect an announcement about Truffle's new address well before they see any change at 2906. That storefront is already six months into its life as a fried chicken counter, with a build-out, a menu, and an owner who has given no indication of giving it up.
Following a single storefront's history is one small way of understanding a neighborhood's actual rhythm, and it's the kind of detail we track because we live and work in these blocks every day. If you're curious about what else is shifting or holding steady around Congress Park, the Wolfe Bouc Team is always glad to talk through what we're seeing on the ground.
