"We've been packed every day since the soft opening," Tava House general manager Brad Beck said in late May, standing in a lower-level taproom that took the better part of a decade to become real. Down the street on Midland Avenue, Levi and Miranda Kleeb needed exactly two weeks to go from signing a lease to serving their first burger.
Both restaurants are new to Woodland Park this year. Neither timeline is typical, and that's the point. If you live here and you're trying to figure out where to eat downtown this month, it helps to know which kind of new you're walking into, because the two openings behave nothing alike once you're standing at the door.
Six Years in the Making
Tava House sits on just over six and a half acres south of the old Woodland Station depot, and getting it built took nearly as long as some Woodland Park kids have been in elementary school. CEO Derek Waggoner started pitching the concept years before anyone broke ground in September 2024, and by the time the project neared completion in December 2025, he told the Colorado Springs Gazette the idea had been "refined over the past six years."
Some of that time went to genuinely unglamorous work. The Colorado Department of Transportation required the investors to extend Saddle Club Drive and rework turn lanes off Highway 24 before the project could move forward. An old Cog Railway car parked at Woodland Station had to be relocated, which drew its own round of local pushback. And the Downtown Development Authority spent more than a year negotiating a tax-increment-financing reimbursement for the $550,000 the investor group had already sunk into infrastructure, on top of the roughly $2 million spent by mid-2025. Public radio reporting on the project later put the total build near $9 million across five investors.
What finally opened this spring is a two-story complex with a pour-your-own taproom downstairs, a banquet hall called the River Room, and an upstairs steakhouse called Firebrand that started taking reservations by early summer. The chef behind it, Victor Matthews, isn't new to Woodland Park. He's the founder of Paragon Culinary School and the distiller behind Black Bear Distillery in Green Mountain Falls, which occupies the building that once housed Black Bear Restaurant, one of the earlier fine-dining rooms along Ute Pass. Roughly half of Tava's current kitchen staff are his former students, and the operation has an informal pipeline running to Woodland Park High School and Merit Academy's culinary program. Before the project even opened, Matthews told Springsmag exactly what he thought the town was missing: "Woodland needs a banquet facility badly, a culinary community hub badly, a great taproom with fun food."
Two Weeks, Not Six
The Woodland Social opened over the Fourth of July weekend at 110 W. Midland Ave, in the space previously home to 110 Reserve. That restaurant closed, and within two weeks of signing the lease, Levi and Miranda Kleeb were pouring drinks under the same wide patio that made the location a gathering spot in the first place. There was no infrastructure fight, no turn-lane negotiation, no multi-year financing back-and-forth. They inherited a space the town already loved and reopened it under a new name.
That doesn't mean it's been simple. Miranda Kleeb also runs a coffee shop in town, and she told the Gazette the contrast in hiring has surprised her: "At the coffee shop we post an ad and we get hundreds of applicants within the first day." The restaurant has been a different story. At soft opening, the Kleebs were running the kitchen with two staff members beyond themselves, hoping to add six or seven more before extending hours much past an 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. window. The soft opening menu includes items like a pimento bacon cheeseburger and a four-layer chocolate cake, with salads, more starters, and possibly pizza planned once staffing catches up.
The Rest of Downtown Didn't Go Anywhere
Neither opening replaced anything else. Red Diamond Gastro Pub on South Elm Street went through its own remodel recently, keeping what regulars describe as the old tavern feel with a sharper edge. Bottom Taphouse has been the town's default craft beer and burger spot for years, which is part of why Matthews positioned Firebrand as something different rather than competing on the same ground. Judge's is still where people send visitors for a burger. Boards & Barrels is still on the list when someone wants a night out that isn't fine dining.
The math on Woodland Park's food scene right now isn't subtraction and addition, it's two very different construction speeds landing in the same summer. A town that already had a working set of restaurants just gained a $9 million anchor and a reopened neighborhood favorite within a few months of each other.
Before You Go: Reservations, Wait Lists, and Walk-Ins
The two new spots also want two different things from you at the door.
| Tava House | The Woodland Social | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 120 S. Center St. | 110 W. Midland Ave. |
| Opened | Taproom this spring; Firebrand steakhouse by early summer | Fourth of July weekend, 2026 |
| Time from decision to open | About six years of concept and financing work, then 20 months of construction after the September 2024 groundbreaking | Two weeks from signed lease to first customers |
| Getting a table | Taproom is open seating; Firebrand takes reservations online, with separate Community Table and Main Dining options; River Room is booked separately for private events | Walk-in, no reservation system as of this summer |
If you book Firebrand and just pick the first available slot, you may end up at the shared Community Table rather than your own. Request Main Dining if you want a private table. The demand is real either way. Beck's own account of the taproom, packed every night since the soft opening with a wait list on busy evenings, is a good reason to plan ahead rather than walk up hoping for space.
This Weekend Downtown Gets Busier
Time this right and you can turn either restaurant into part of a bigger outing. Memorial Park hosts the 41st annual Mountain Arts Festival this Saturday and Sunday, August 8 and 9, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days. It's free, dog-friendly, and expected to draw up to 100 artists along with food trucks and live music, set up in the same downtown grid as Midland Avenue's restaurant row.
This isn't the first time downtown Woodland Park has doubled as an event space this year. Tava House hosted the second annual America's Mountain Festival on its own grounds on July 11, a Western and Red Dirt music lineup organized by Waggoner himself. Between that and the mayor's retirement party the Gazette reported happening in the River Room on the night of its restaurant review, the space is already doing double duty as both a kitchen and a gathering hall, exactly what Matthews said he set out to build.
If you're planning to eat downtown this weekend, expect both the festival crowd and the restaurant crowd to overlap. A weeknight visit, or an early reservation before the Saturday festival rush hits Midland Avenue, is a reasonable way to skip the wait either place has been drawing.
Woodland Park's downtown didn't change overnight, and it didn't change all at once either. One project took six years of patient, occasionally contentious groundwork. The other took two weeks because the groundwork was already there. Both are worth your time this month, and now you know exactly what to expect when you walk in the door.
If you're curious what a summer like this means for property values along Midland Avenue and Center Street, or you're weighing your own next move in this stretch of the Pikes Peak corridor, Gold District Realty has been watching this town grow from the inside for a long time. Reach out anytime, or get an instant property valuation to see where your home stands today.
