Levi and Miranda Kleeb signed the lease on 110 W. Midland Ave. in early summer. By the time most people in Woodland Park had circled the Fourth of July on their calendars, the Kleebs were already pouring drinks and plating burgers. Sign the lease, staff the kitchen, open the doors. About two weeks, start to finish.
A few blocks away, on 6.6 acres next to the old train station, another restaurant took the opposite road to opening day. Derek Waggoner first pitched the idea to Woodland Park's Downtown Development Authority back in 2019. The land didn't change hands until 2022, for $800,000 cash. Crews broke ground in September 2024. The doors didn't open until this spring, and even then it took a soft-opening announcement in April to pin down an actual date.
Both projects landed on the same street in the same year. Neither ran on the same clock, and that gap tells you something real about what's changed on Midland Avenue in 2026: this isn't one story about a growing restaurant scene. It's two different models for how something new gets built here, and knowing which one you're walking into changes what you should expect when you show up.
The Two-Week Restaurant: The Woodland Social Takes Over 110 Reserve
The Kleebs weren't strangers to Woodland Park's food scene before they took over 110 W. Midland Ave. They already ran The Salty Cow, a food truck that caters events around southern Colorado, and Red Beard Coffee. What they didn't have, until this summer, was a room with the town's best-known patio attached to it.
That patio came with the address. Under its previous name, 110 Reserve, the space had built a following as a gathering spot along the main drag, thanks largely to outdoor seating visible from the street. Miranda Kleeb pointed to that view and that foot traffic as the reason they moved fast. The Woodland Social opened over Independence Day weekend with food, drinks, and live music, echoing the send-off the space had under its old name.
The opening menu leaned casual: burgers, including a pimento bacon cheeseburger, and a four-layer chocolate cake for dessert, with salads, more starters, and possibly pizzas planned as the kitchen built out. What was actually holding that expansion back wasn't the menu. It was staffing. Miranda has said hiring for the restaurant was slower than hiring at the coffee shop, where a single job post can draw hundreds of applicants in a day. In mid-July, a couple weeks after opening, the Kleebs were running the floor with just two employees plus themselves, with a goal of adding six or seven more before extending hours beyond the 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. window they started with.
That staffing gap is worth knowing before you go, even a couple months out. A restaurant that opened lean on a proven patio, in a town where hiring takes longer than it does an hour away in Colorado Springs, may still be catching up on hours and menu additions well past its opening weekend, so it's worth calling ahead to confirm current hours before you plan a night around it.
The Six-Year Restaurant: Tava House Finally Opens
Tava House started from a groundbreaking on empty land at Woodland Station, with no existing following to inherit. Mayor Kellie Case has said she sees the project as a catalyst for more places to have a meal, shop and explore downtown. An $8 million, three-concept build takes years to assemble, not weeks.
The financing tells the same story in numbers. Native American Bank and Park State Bank & Trust put together a joint $6.9 million loan, $3.8 million and $3.1 million respectively, to get the building finished. That money built three separate businesses under one roof:
- Tava Taphouse, a ground-floor beer hall with 50 drafts on tap, indoor seating for more than 40, and patio seating for another 50.
- Firebrand Chophouse, the upstairs fine-dining room, seating 60 to 65 guests around a solid-walnut community table with a see-through fireplace set into the wall between kitchen and dining room. Floor-to-ceiling windows face north toward Pikes Peak, which the Ute Tribe named Tava, meaning Sun Mountain.
- The River Room, a banquet and event hall that can hold up to 80 guests for weddings and corporate gatherings.
Chef Victor Matthews, who also runs Black Bear Distillery in Green Mountain Falls and serves as dean at Paragon Culinary School, built the menu around partnerships with regional ranches, including PBJ in Divide and Ranch Foods Direct in Colorado Springs. He's also teased a secret fusion menu he calls Casian, blending Cajun and Asian flavors, for guests who ask.
Investor Mark Weaver told the town's Downtown Development Authority in April that the soft opening was targeted for May 1, just ahead of Mother's Day weekend, once the certificate of occupancy came through. That timeline held. Five months later, Tava House is open, but a project that took six years to leave the ground is still the newer of the two operations on this list, and staffing a three-concept building is a different challenge than staffing a single kitchen.
What Actually Compares
| The Woodland Social | Tava House | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 110 W. Midland Ave. | Woodland Station, off Midland Ave. |
| Opened | July 2026 (Independence Day weekend) | May 2026 (soft opening) |
| Path to opening | Signed lease to open in about two weeks | Pitched in 2019, groundbreaking in 2024 |
| What it inherited | 110 Reserve's patio and local following | Undeveloped land at Woodland Station |
| Scale | Single casual eatery, staff of four | Three concepts: taphouse, chophouse, banquet hall |
Why Some Storefronts Reopen Fast and Others Sit Empty
The Woodland Social's speed wasn't just decisiveness. It was inheritance. The Kleebs walked into a space with a patio people already knew and a name that already meant something on the street. Other Midland Avenue storefronts have gone a different way. Sorrisos, the Italian spot at 108 E. Midland, and Rhapsody, the craft cocktail bar at 121 W. Midland, are both listed as closed, as is a Starbucks location at 320 E. Midland. The research behind this post doesn't say what is planned for those addresses, so the comparison here is about timing only.
For anyone watching what happens on Midland Avenue next, the Woodland Social shows how much a familiar patio and an owner ready to sign can shorten the timeline. Two weeks from lease to opening is fast for any restaurant space.
What This Means for Your Next Night Out
If you want a quick, casual dinner on a patio that's earned its reputation over years, The Woodland Social is your spot, though it's worth a quick call ahead. The restaurant opened with a four-person team and an 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. schedule, with hours meant to expand as hiring caught up, so hours may look different now than they did at launch. The burger and the chocolate cake are the safest early bets.
If you're planning something bigger, a rehearsal dinner, a milestone birthday, or just a fine-dining night out with a view of Pikes Peak's north face, Firebrand Chophouse and the River Room give Woodland Park an option that didn't exist a year ago. Just know that a project six years in the making is still working out its rhythm five months after opening, from staffing three separate concepts to fine-tuning a secret menu that hasn't officially launched yet.
Midland Avenue only has so many storefronts, and this year two of them changed in completely different ways, at completely different speeds.
If you want to know what's opening, closing, or quietly changing hands on Midland Avenue before it shows up on a for-sale sign, that's the kind of thing we track every week at Gold District Realty. Send us a note if there's a corner of downtown you're curious about.
