What does a national restaurant company do when its own store at 104th and I-25 is already working, and instead of just expanding it, the company also opens a second, different brand in the same parking lot?
That's the question sitting quietly inside the paperwork at Northglenn Marketplace right now. Texas Roadhouse is adding roughly 650 square feet to its existing location there, with construction starting midyear. At the same time, Bubba's 33, the chain's own sports bar spinoff, is moving into a long vacant restaurant space in the center of the same shopping center, with renovations that began in May and a target opening before the end of 2026. Same parent company. Same eight acres of pavement. Two separate bets.
The Center That Lost Its Anchor in 2021
Northglenn Marketplace sits at 104th Avenue and I-25, anchored for years by Lowe's, Texas Roadhouse, IHOP, Ross and Office Depot alongside more than thirty smaller tenants. Hutensky Capital Partners bought the majority of the property, over 400,000 square feet of it, in late 2017, and the city's own redevelopment authority put $8 million toward the $28 million in exterior improvements that came with the deal.
Then came 2021, and Harkins Theatre walked away from its lease. Movie theaters everywhere were reassessing what a pandemic had done to ticket sales, and Northglenn's anchor became one of the casualties. For a shopping center that had just gone through a redevelopment agreement, losing the tenant that was supposed to draw people in on a Friday night was the kind of setback that takes years to shake off.
Why One Company's Own Math Tells You More Than a Leasing Announcement
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're only skimming a list of new tenants. When an outside company signs a lease, it's making a bet based on demographic data and a broker's pitch. When Texas Roadhouse expands its own existing store, it's acting on its own point of sale numbers, the actual receipts from the actual location. And when that same company then chooses to open a second, differently positioned concept next door rather than just growing the first one bigger, it's telling you the location can support more than one kind of dining occasion at once. That's a different order of confidence than a vacancy getting filled.
Bubba's 33 isn't a copy of Texas Roadhouse. It's a sports bar concept, built around televisions, burgers, pizza and beer rather than steak dinners and hand-cut rolls. Putting both under one roof at the same address is a company betting that Northglenn residents will use this corner for two different kinds of nights out, not just one.
What Actually Filled the Gap Before That
The Bubba's 33 and Texas Roadhouse moves didn't happen in a vacuum. They're the latest step in a slower rebuild that's been running since the theater left:
- 2022: Prost Brewing Company was announced as the new anchor, alongside Five Below, dd's Discounts and Painted Tree Boutiques.
- 2023: Prost opened its headquarters and biergarten on site.
- 2024: Kids Empire (11,583 square feet) and The Body Refinery Pilates signed on, a Tesla Supercharging station was added, and Black Eyed Pea, Maurices and Bath and Body Works all renewed their leases rather than leaving.
- 2025: Action Behavior Centers and Big Blue Swim School announced new space.
- 2026: Bubba's 33 and the Texas Roadhouse expansion, with the property now sitting above 90 percent leased across roughly 183,000 square feet.
Read in order, that's not a shopping center scrambling to fill holes. It's a shopping center that landed one large anchor early, then watched smaller, steadier tenants follow in each year after.
The Brewery That Explains the Math
Prost is worth slowing down on, because it's the reason the rest of this makes sense. The company put $23 million into a flagship brewery and biergarten here, using brewing equipment imported from the German manufacturer Kaspar Schulz, complete with carbon recapture and reuse systems that most breweries this size don't bother installing. That's not a modest tap room. It's built to be Colorado's fourth largest craft brewery by production, and the project was projected to draw over 300,000 visitors a year when it was announced.
A biergarten pulling that kind of annual foot traffic changes what else makes sense to build nearby. Restaurants don't need a shopping center to draw people in on their own if there's already a crowd showing up next door for something else. Prost gave the rest of Northglenn Marketplace a reason to bet on itself again, and the Bubba's 33 and Texas Roadhouse moves read like the second wave of companies acting on that same logic.
The Park That Isn't Tied to Any Storefront
Not everything filling in around Northglenn this year is commercial. Odell Barry Park sits just west of the Justice Center on Community Center Drive, on land the city bought from the Barry family back in 2016. Design work started in 2020, got refreshed through more community input in 2023, and the park is now opening on a site the city specifically chose because nearly 6,000 residents already live within reach of it, with more arriving as new housing goes in nearby.
The name matters. Odell Barry served on Northglenn's City Council and as mayor from 1980 to 1982, making history as Colorado's first Black mayor elected by a major city. He also served as recreation superintendent for the Northglenn Metropolitan Recreation District and helped bring Major League Baseball to Denver. With this park's opening, the city says it achieves a longstanding goal that every resident can walk to an active park in ten minutes or less.
That's a different kind of investment than a restaurant chain deciding where to put its next location, but it's happening in the same calendar year, in the same city, and it says something similar. Both the private money and the public money are landing here at the same time.
Where Northglenn Already Goes on a Given Night
None of this is replacing what already works. If you already live here, you already know the regulars:
- Boondocks Food & Fun, for an arcade, go-karts and bowling night that doesn't require picking a single activity
- D.L. Parsons Theatre, for a show or a comedy set when you want the evening to feel like an occasion
- @ Cheers, for live bands most weekends
- The Glenn Bar & Grill, for trivia night and a dog-friendly patio
- E.B. Rains Jr. Memorial Park, wrapped around Webster Lake, still the default spot for a walk, a picnic, or a community gathering
The new tenants at the Marketplace aren't trying to replace any of that. They're filling in the gaps around it, on a corner that spent a few years after 2021 not quite living up to what it used to be.
What This Actually Adds Up To
Take the year as a whole and the pattern is hard to miss. A brewery with enough pull to draw 300,000 people a year opened in 2023. A national restaurant chain looked at its own numbers from the store it already runs there and decided to both expand that store and open a second, different concept next to it in the same twelve months. And the city, working off a decade old land purchase, opened a park named for one of its own former mayors in the same stretch of calendar. None of those three things needed the others to happen. All three happened anyway.
That's usually the more reliable signal that a place is genuinely on the way back, not a press release from one company, but three separate decision makers, public and private, landing on the same corner of town at roughly the same time.
If you've been watching Northglenn change and you're curious what it means for the block you actually live on, the team at JJ Alexander tracks this kind of shift across south and southeast Denver metro neighborhoods every day. Schedule a Free Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what it means for you.
