Walk into Hop Alley in Five Points and the room fills with clatter, conversation and the waft of hot woks. Dishes like la zi ji—crispy, battered chicken tossed with dried chiles, Sichuan pepper and Ichimi Togarashi—share the menu with oyster-sauced gai lan kissed by wood-fire smoke and schmalz, and shrimp toast brightened with garlic-ginger vinaigrette and mustard gastrique. Hop Alley, a Michelin Bib Gourmand honoree, reinterprets Chinese standards with global techniques and surprising ingredients. Its approach reflects a larger movement in Denver: a generation of restaurants that both revive family recipes and wrestle with the city’s nearly erased Chinese past.
Chinese laborers arrived in Denver in the late 19th century to work on railroads and in mines. Redlining and discrimination clustered many in Lower Downtown—then derided as Hop Alley—where vice and prejudice were used to stigmatize the community. Anti-Chinese violence peaked in an 1880 race riot that culminated in the lynching of 28-year-old Look Young; that climate of hostility fed national policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Later waves of demolition in the 1940s and 1960s, followed by 1990s gentrification intensified by projects like Coors Stadium, erased most physical traces of Denver’s Chinatown. The Chinese American population dispersed and only began rebuilding after changes to immigration law in 1965.
Organizations like Colorado Asian Pacific United (CAPU) have worked to recover and publicize these lost stories. “There’s no architecture or long-standing businesses [from Chinatown], so a lot of [CAPU’s] work has been to reclaim the story and elevate the amazing work that the descendant families have been doing to maintain their history,” says Joie Ha, CAPU co-founder and executive director. With Asian Americans making up roughly 4 percent of Denver’s population, food has become a powerful connector across generations and communities—an accessible way to teach history and share culture.
Small businesses led by descendants of immigrants and newer arrivals are central to that revival. Penelope Wong launched Yuan Wonton as a 2019 food truck and later opened a permanent lunch-only spot in 2023. The daughter of first-generation Chinese restaurant owners, Wong handcrafts wrappers, fillings, noodles and dough. Her menu ranges from paper-thin egg-wrapped wontons in chili oil to gua bao with crispy chicken and Thai basil, and pillowy char siu pork buns. During the surge in anti-Asian violence in 2020, Wong used her platform to share personal experiences and raise funds for local AAPI causes. She keeps a schedule designed to preserve staff work-life balance—closing evenings and weekends—and has earned recognition as a James Beard semi-finalist and a finalist in the “Best Chef: Mountain” category.
Nana’s Dim Sum, founded by Jack and Kelly Liu, draws directly on family recipes Kelly learned from her grandmother. Kelly would return to China to refine those recipes, and today Nana’s turns out handmade dumplings—steamed or pan-fried—as well as inventive items such as truffle soup dumplings, honey-glazed chicken feet and hot-and-sour dumpling soup. Family labor helped the concept grow into seven Colorado locations and one in New York. Each restaurant includes a window into the kitchen so diners can watch staff fold dumplings, and employees take part in fine-tuning the recipes.
Doris Yuen and Ken Wan moved to Denver after running Meta Asian Kitchen as a pop-up in New York; they opened MAKfam as a more family-oriented evolution of that project. Their menu leans into heritage flavors unapologetically—the couple openly uses MSG—and features plates like salt-and-pepper calamari dressed with jalapeño and onions, stir-fried egg noodles with beef and crisp bean sprouts, and a savory corned-beef fried rice finished with pickled mustard greens and a fried egg. MAKfam has earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and Wan was a James Beard semi-finalist for “Best Chef: Mountain.” Yuen and Wan have partnered with CAPU on Lunar New Year commemorations and other community events.
Denver’s Asian food scene is broader than its Chinese restaurants. Chef Toshi Kizaki’s sushi restaurants—his newest, Kizaki, recently received a Michelin star—underscore the city’s long-standing Japanese culinary influences and the importance of deep supplier relationships with Japan. The Vietnamese community, centered in Southwest Denver and shaped by refugees from the Vietnam War and their descendants, is the region’s largest Asian diaspora. Anthony “Ni” and Anna Nguyen relocated from Los Angeles and opened Sap Sua, a Vietnamese restaurant that landed on best-new lists from the New York Times, Esquire and Bon Appétit, and brought the couple a James Beard Emerging Chef semi-finalist nod.
Unlike cities with uninterrupted Chinatowns—New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles—Denver doesn’t have a continuous, brick-and-mortar Chinatown to point to. But through restaurants, community groups and public programming, locals and restaurateurs are reclaiming memory and building new layers of belonging. They are preserving recipes handed down through families, reworking derogatory place names, and using food as a way to educate and foster solidarity.
Wong remembers learning about the erased Chinatown only as an adult. “I remember being very angry, wondering why this hadn’t been publicized ages ago,” she says, adding that she felt a complicated mix of anger and guilt for the ways she tried to assimilate as a child. Today she sees change in the next generation: her daughter is fluent in Mandarin after attending a Mandarin-immersion school and brings homemade wontons to share with classmates. “During my childhood, I was begging my mom to just make me a ham and cheese sandwich,” Wong reflects. “It’s incredible to see that things are changing.”