"While it's a bummer to say bye to our great food and amazing drinks there is something brewing so stay tuned!!" That was Bellota's goodbye on Instagram in late January, as quoted by Westword. The upscale Mexican restaurant at 4580 Broadway served its last night on Saturday, January 31, 2026, after four years.
By summer the something had a name. Cinq à Sept, a French bistro, opened in the same room in July. It comes from the same company, Bryan Dayton's Half Eaten Cookie Hospitality, the group behind Oak at Fourteenth and Corrida. So for anyone who lives around Wonderland Lake, this year's change at the corner was an operator rewriting a room it already knew, at a size the room could support.
A short list of tenants, and one that stayed
The room at 4580 Broadway has had a short list of tenants.
- Restaurant 4580, later The North End at 4580. Closed after about eight and a half years.
- Bellota. Opened Wednesday, June 29, 2022, according to The Denver Post, with James Beard semifinalist Manuel "Manny" Barella as executive chef and partner.
- Bellota closes. Saturday, January 31, 2026.
- Cinq à Sept announced. A BizWest item in the Daily Camera on July 2, 2026 said the bistro planned to open July 7. That was a little over five months after Bellota's last service.
The group that closed Bellota is the same group that opened Cinq à Sept, so this year's handoff happened inside one company.
The North Broadway room had also become Bellota's last outpost. Westword reported that the concept started in 2020 at the Source in Denver, where it replaced another Half Eaten Cookie restaurant, Acorn. The Boulder location came in 2022, and the Denver original closed a year later. By January the group had already been running this address on its own for a few years. It decided what came next itself, without waiting for a landlord to find a new tenant.
A menu cut to the size of the kitchen
What the group put in is smaller on purpose. Boulder Reporting Lab reports that Cinq à Sept's focused menu reflects the restaurant's smaller space and kitchen, and that it is close in size to the menu at Oak at Fourteenth, organized a little differently. Dayton described it to the outlet in the plainest terms:
"The menu's delicious, but it is definitely nice and tight and executed well."
Chef Sam McCandless leads the kitchen. He learned to cook from French classics such as "Larousse Gastronomique" and "The French Laundry Cookbook." He then worked as a prep cook in Billings, Montana, and later in Chicago and in several Boulder kitchens. He described the cooking to Boulder Reporting Lab as "a story of simplicity."
Much of the produce and meat comes from nearby. Esoterra Farms supplies greens, carrots, squash and zucchini, and Buckner Family Ranch supplies beef and lamb. Dayton said some staples will never change and the seasonal dishes will rotate fairly often. A late-October menu should start leaning toward squash.
For a first visit, Dayton told Boulder Reporting Lab where he would start:
- The bread
- Prince Edward Island oysters
- The zucchini, which he called "next-level"
- The simple Esoterra salad
- The chicken
- The sole, served with brown butter and caper
He leaves beef off that list, and he admits that's a big statement coming from him. Dayton's Corrida Cattle Company is the source of the beef at C Burger.
The name says five to seven. The happy hour says four.
Cinq à sept is French for "five to seven," the early-evening hours for drinks and conversation. The actual schedule starts earlier than the name. Cinq à Sept opens at 4 p.m. every day. It closes at 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and at 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Happy hour runs from 4 to 5 p.m. daily. The happy hour menu has bread and cheese, fresh oysters, jambon de Bayonne and cold drinks.
Dayton said guests come all evening, not only for the early hour. He also said he sees plenty of familiar faces, along with many he doesn't recognize. That stands out to him after 16 years of owning businesses in Boulder. The restaurant was designed to work for North Boulder residents and to draw diners from the rest of the city.
A 4 p.m. start matters most to people who live within walking distance. The Wonderland Lake trailhead is at 4201 North Broadway, on the west side of the street between Sumac and Utica. The restaurant is a few blocks north in the 4500 block. A late-October afternoon could look like this:
- Start at the trailhead. It has 19 standard parking spaces and 2 ADA spaces, and those can fill up. The SKIP stops on Broadway right next to it, so the bus is an easy alternative.
- Walk the lake loop. The city lists waterfowl among the wildlife commonly seen there. Visit Boulder's birding page lists species you may see at the lake, including lesser scaup, northern shoveler, yellow-rumped warbler and pine siskin.
- Head north on Broadway to arrive before 5 p.m. for bread, cheese and oysters at happy hour prices.
- Stay for the sole, or head home before the dinner crowd fills in.
What's still being built on the walk up
Two city projects affect how people get around this stretch, and both are still underway.
The first is crossing Broadway. The city's Sumac Avenue Improvements project covers Sumac between Broadway and 19th Street. It proposes a new marked crossing with a flashing beacon at Broadway, linking the Wonderland Lake trailhead and the RTD bus stop. The project page still lists it in the design phase, with no construction date. Until it's built, crossing Broadway on foot works the way it always has.
The second is north of the lake. Open Space and Mountain Parks is rerouting the Foothills North Trail, with construction scheduled for about mid-June through December 2026, weather permitting. The contractor, Timberline Trailcraft, had built a large part of the new route by July. It runs from the corner of Dakota Boulevard and 2nd Street up to the plateau west of the Dakota Ridge neighborhood. The new trail is gravel-surfaced to reduce mud, includes some rock features for mountain bikes, and is built to work for adaptive three-wheeled bikes. Some segments may close temporarily during construction. Old sections are being closed permanently and replanted. The project page's last update is from July, so check the OSMP closures page before planning a longer loop north of the lake.
The room stays small while the group grows
The group around this room has kept changing. Westword noted in January that Half Eaten Cookie had had "some big wins and hard losses" over the previous year. Those included adding a standalone C Burger and the C Bar cocktail lounge on Pearl Street, and closing Brider on Platte Street in Denver after a decade. Then on October 9, the Daily Camera reported that the group had announced it is acquiring The Kitchen restaurants in Boulder and Denver. The Kitchen opened on Pearl Street in 2004 and on Wazee Street in Denver in 2012. Dayton didn't share financial terms. He said he plans "business as usual," with no major changes to the spaces, staff or menus beyond "some tweaks." No date has been announced for when the deal is final.
In the same year it took on The Kitchen, the group kept 4580 Broadway, changed the cuisine, and cut the menu down to what the room's kitchen can do well. Wonderland Hills now has a French bistro that opens at 4 p.m. a few blocks from the lake.
Kim Hullett pays the same kind of attention to the rooms and blocks around her clients' homes: who runs them, why they changed, and how they shape an ordinary weeknight. If you'd like to talk about life near Wonderland Lake and North Broadway, Kim Hullett Real Estate would be glad to hear from you. Work With Kim.
