In The Neighborhood

February / March, 2012

Legendary Restaurateur Lands at SouthGlenn

After more than three decades in the food service business, resilient Jimmy Lambatos opens his first restaurant in SoDe.

By Claire Walter

Jimmy Lambatos is the consummate restaurateur. A legend in metro Denver, he has restructured his career again and again, and it appears that he relishes each new challenge. His newest venture, Ivy At The Glenn, is elegant, affordable and very different from anything he has done previously.

Lambatos grew in Manhattan, a Greek kid in an overwhelmingly Italian neighborhood. He came to Denver in 1970 with a young lifetime in a big city where multiculturalism is not a buzzword but a way of life and where all mothers and grandmothers, no matter what their ethnicity, cooked. From scratch. Every day. Lambatos had no restaurant experience but scored a job at the long-gone Colorado Mine Company as a busboy and expediter, which, along with dishwasher, are classic entry-level positions in food service.

"The chef walked out one night," Lambatos recalls, "so I went into the kitchen and started cooking steaks." The Mine Company gig lasted for nearly a decade. He learned a lot on that job and began itching to run his own place. With a partner, he started Footers, a small Italian restaurant on Capitol Hill in 1978. Before long, he and his wife Ronda launched Footers Catering from a truck. It outgrew the truck and then the Capitol Hill location, so Footers Catering moved to a bigger space in Englewood, the first Lambatos foray into the southern suburbs. Son Anthony now runs the catering company.

Jimmy Lambatos was also a co-founder of a sub shop that, after a merger with a competitor across the street, became Quizno's. In 1988, he split with his partner who took over Quizno's, while Lambatos devoted himself to owning and growing Footers Catering. Quizno's grew via franchising, but the catering company grew because it became an event planning as well as a catering company and built a loyal following in the Denver area. His next move, in 2007, was to take over the Victory American Grill space in downtown Denver and reinvented it as Baur's Ristorante. Restored to a grand turn-of-the-20th-century style, Baur's served traditional classics to match the décor, plus the addition Mediterranean favorites.

"I put my heart and soul into Baur's," he says. "I restored it to the charm and glamour of the early 1900s and honored the recipes from the original." He also honored the original name. Otto Baur, a German immigrant, came to Denver in the 1860s and established a confectionery, bakery and catering establishment. Back in the day, Baur's is said to have been the most popular catering service among Denver's high society. For decades thereafter, its two-story-high sign was a landmark visible up and down Curtis Street.

Baur's Ristorante's life was cut short due to a landlord issue, and Lambatos says that although "the city, the theater district and the Visit Denver people were upset," the restaurant closed. He was disappointed but sufficiently resilient, after so many years in the business, to cast about for something else. He reconnected with Denver-born Ron DiSaverio, whose family was a pioneering Quizno's franchisee. He had owned six Quiznos and also worked for the corporation, but was ready for a change too. The two partnered up and looked southward to the Streets at SouthGlenn. They named their new restaurant Ivy At The Glenn, a tribute to The Ivy, a London West End restaurant popular with theatergoers. In fact, Lambatos had considered naming his downtown restaurant Ivy because it is down the street from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, but decided to honor the original Baur's instead.

Along the way, Lambatos founded Chef Jimmy's Bistro at Denver International Airport. It is a well-received place to grab a bite and a beer on the A-concourse, which travelers know to be underserved, foodwise. It was the first enterprise he named after himself. Still, Baur's seemed to be his favorite child.

Claire Walter is a freelance travel and food writer. Her award-winning blogs include travel-babel.com and culinary-colorado.com, which are Colorado-focused but not Colorado-exclusive. She can be reached at cmwalter@claire-walter.com.