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Steuben's Uptown
Steuben's Uptown opened in 2006, the second restaurant from Josh Wolkon, who'd moved to Colorado in 1995 and opened the fine-dining-leaning Vesta Dipping Grill in 1997 before wanting a more relaxed, lower-stakes space where his kitchen could experiment. He named the new restaurant after his great-uncles' Steuben's, a Boston restaurant and nightclub that operated in the 1940s, and built the concept around American regional road food — diner classics reworked with real technique rather than nostalgia alone. The building itself is a former auto body shop in Denver's Uptown neighborhood, converted into a retro-leaning dining room and bar that fits the "road food" concept the menu is built around. Fried chicken has become the dish Steuben's is most specifically recognized for — 24/7 Tempo named it Colorado's best fried chicken restaurant — but the kitchen's broader comfort-food menu, including a well-built diner cheeseburger, runs on the same philosophy: familiar American formats executed with more care than the format usually gets. Wolkon has since built Steuben's into part of a larger local restaurant group, Secret Sauce Food & Beverage, which also runs Vesta and Ace Eat Serve, along with a Steuben's location that opened in Arvada in 2016 and a food truck that's been running since 2009. That growth has stayed rooted in the same Uptown building where the concept started nearly two decades ago. For a Denver cheeseburger list, Steuben's Uptown is the essential "chef-driven diner food" entry — a comfort-food menu built by a fine-dining-trained chef inside a converted auto body shop, where the cheeseburger sits alongside award-recognized fried chicken as proof the kitchen takes classic American cooking seriously.
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Smashburger
Smashburger is a Denver original in the most literal sense: the chain was founded here in 2007 by Rick Schaden, a former owner of Quiznos, and Tom Ryan, a food scientist who had previously helped develop Pizza Hut's stuffed crust pizza and served as chief concept officer at McDonald's. The pair bought an existing Denver restaurant to test cooking and management techniques before opening the first official Smashburger in June 2007, backed by $15 million in outside capital and a genuinely research-heavy process that reportedly included a blind taste test of roughly 300 kinds of beef before settling on Angus. The name describes the technique exactly: a ball of fresh beef pressed hard onto a hot flat-top grill, searing the surface into a crisp, caramelized crust in a matter of minutes, a method the founders helped popularize nationally well before "smashburger" became the generic term it is today for the entire style. Ryan and Schaden's research-driven approach — treating burger development more like food science than short-order cooking — was unusual for a fast-casual chain at the time and became a big part of the brand's early identity. The bet paid off fast: Forbes named Smashburger to its "America's Most Promising Company" list in 2011, and again in 2014, as the chain expanded well beyond its original home market into a national and eventually international footprint. That growth hasn't erased its roots — the company still operates several Denver locations, including a longtime spot on East 35th Avenue, keeping the smash technique available in the city where two Denver entrepreneurs first built it into a business. For a Denver cheeseburger list, Smashburger is the essential "the format itself started here" entry — a thin, hard-smashed patty from the fast-casual chain that helped take the smashburger technique from a diner trick to a national category, launched in Denver in 2007 and still serving out of the city that built it.
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