Welcome to #TBT, or Throwback Thursdays, where we revisit some of the Denver metro area’s tried and true restaurants that have become institutions, like the farm-to-table staple, Potager. These places have weathered the shifts in our city’s restaurant landscape. As flashy newcomers enter and exit, these restaurants, bars, and cafes remain, though sometimes get overlooked by the fickle short-term attention span of a social media-driven obsession with the new and the now.
On a late-summer Denver evening, the farmhouse-like interior dining room at Potager is abuzz with activity. It’s somehow both chaotic and calm, like a summer thunderstorm just on the edge of turning violent that still lulls you off to sleep. Potager is clearly a place that has found a confident rhythm after nearly three decades as a Capitol Hill neighborhood mainstay.
As diners eat, laugh, and pour each other wine, servers wind between tables with plates of heirloom tomato salads and housemade bread. Some busy themselves with running the newly-seated guests through nightly specials like a beer cheese spaetzle with pickled rhubarb or scallops with celeriac puree and charred shishito. On one side you’ll see chefs in a kitchen so open, you’re practically sitting inside it. Watch as they clang away, shoulder-to-shoulder on the line, repeating orders back in unison like samurai warriors.
This rhythm isn’t based on a set menu or consistent ingredients. As a farm-to-table restaurant in the purest interpretation of the now-overused term, nearly 99% of Potager’s ingredients come from local Colorado farms. This ensures not only freshness and seasonality, but also constant adjustment. Chefs write new menus every four to five weeks to match what’s coming out of the ground, resulting in fleeting dishes by design.
This is how owners Paul and Eileen Warthen like it. While they ride the whirlwind on a weekly basis, they take whatever challenge is thrown at them. Years later the couple still approaches the hardships with humor, creativity, and appreciation.
“We say our gratitudes every morning,” said Eileen. “Sometimes they’re really big and sometimes they’re really small, but if you can find something to be appreciative of every day, you can be happy with the small business that you own.”
Farm-to-Table, the Hard Way
The Warthen’s acquired Potager in early 2019 from the original owner, Teri Rippeto. who, after 23 years at the restaurant’s helm, decided to retire. Today Paul, a veteran of kitchens in New York and Los Angeles, runs the back-of-house, while Eileen, a certified sommelier, leads the front-of-house and wine program.
On paper, buying the restaurant was a terrible business decision. They didn’t have the money. It was much larger than they wanted. And of course they had no idea that a global pandemic was just around the corner.
“We were not prepared,” said Eileen. “We were not ready. But it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.”
As new owners, the Warthens made very few changes, holding firm to the farm-to-table ethos Potager was founded on. Paul grew up on a dairy farm in Massachusetts and oversaw the culinary operations of an 800-acre organic farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley for 10 years. Yet committing to cooking exclusively with Colorado ingredients proved no small feat.
“The shortness of seasons and the unpredictability of the weather like extreme heat, hail or frost, that kills and shortens the spans of so many different vegetables and fruits,” he said. “That has a big impact.”
But at Potager every problem has a silver lining. The couple’s solution to limited produce availability is to work with a wide variety of farmers who today are growing a wider variety of crops. Because of the team’s dedication, Potager often gets the first shot at, and sometimes even gets goods from farmers’ private gardens.
“There are new farms. There are boutique farms. And they’re finding niches and growing things that nobody else is growing,” said Paul. “We’ve tried to broaden that spectrum, just acquiring from as many farms as possible and buying enough from them so that we’re on the top of every list.”
On any given day, some six or so farmers could be making deliveries. As if on cue, during the interview for this story, Paul paused to announce to the prep team, “Andrew is here” when one such farmer walked in with a large box.
The Warthens shared a story about another important delivery, or more, a visit from chef Alice Waters. Waters, the legendary founder of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Cali., launched America’s farm-to-table movement in 1971, moving the country from fancy French food and into a revolution of home-grown ingredients and approachable seasonal fare.
A Chef’s Playground
The menu at Potager offers a long list of the evening’s ingredients, which are printed along with the farms they came from. But while the restaurant wears its farm-to-table mission with pride, less obvious to the everyday diner is the reputation Potager has developed within the Denver chef community.
The chef-driven restaurant allows cooks to develop their own menu items from the constantly changing list of ingredients. In fact, this seasonal creativity with food is actually a requirement of the job.
“This is a cook’s sanctuary,” Paul says. “You can work in the garden. You can decide on what you’re planting in the garden. You can be creative.”
The tradeoff is that cooks have to wash all their own vegetables, sweep the floors and clean their stations, and work 16 days. The kitchen is intentionally small with a three-person line and no walk-in, which forces precision and collaboration.
“In other places where you’re in bigger kitchens you just have one task and duty,” said Paul. “I want somebody that wants to treat it like their own. So if you’re not passionate about wanting to better yourself and work with these ingredients, then this is not the place for you. There’s no egos in the kitchen.”
That philosophy has sent Potager alumni on to open restaurants, run kitchens, and teach culinary programs. It has also earned Potager a reputation among culinary students as one of Denver’s “must-stage” kitchens and a place to learn how to cook seasonally at the highest level.
Remaining a Neighborhood Beacon
The constantly changing menu with an ever-rotating list of ingredients can also prove a challenge for guests. Potager is not the place where you can rely on an old standard being available anytime you visit. Often, the dish you fell in love with one night will be gone from the menu forever within a matter of weeks.
However, there is one exception to this rule, the chocolate pudding dessert. It’s been a mainstay on the menu for over 20 years, and there are no plans to take it off.
“There’s not a lot of places where you’re convincing people they have to come back before the menu is already gone,” said Eileen. “These places that say they’re seasonal but only change the menu three times a year, you can go back and have the same dish. Here, you’re lucky if you get to eat the same thing twice.”
This practice makes Potager’s connection to the Cap Hill neighborhood particularly important and special. The restaurant has a strong local following, built during the pandemic when, out of necessity, it stayed open seven days a week. During that time the restaurant offered takeout and delivery to locals previously intimidated by the white tablecloths and crowded bar.
Today, Eileen estimates only about a third of diners on any given night are first-timers. The fact that she knows this despite not using any digital reservation platforms is a testament to the personal connection the owners have made with diners over the years.
Before the Warthen’s took over, Potager took no reservations whatsoever. That changed when pandemic dining policies forced them and other restaurants to collect diner contact information. So rather than pay for a reservation platform, Potager handles reservations now the old fashioned way by phone or text.
“We still keep at least 40% of the restaurant walk-in only, so that people who have been coming for 25 years can still come in on a Thursday night and grab a four top without worrying about it,” Eileen explained. “I think in today’s climate especially, people are kind of nervous and want something definite, so they can make a reservation. They just have to make an effort to do it instead of just typing on a computer.”
As a result, she knows many regulars not only by name, but also by the wine they like and occasionally the car they drive. The information passes to the service team in order to promote a relationship with guests as solid as the chefs have with the farmers.
Old School Becomes Modern Again
If Potager remains a place where a Tuesday night can feel like a special occasion, where bread is still baked in-house and served freely, and where the promise of the next seasonal menu keeps everyone excited for what’s to come, it’s because of the little choices made along the way.
From making the herculean effort to source nearly exclusively from Colorado farmers to eschewing digital reservation platforms to refusing to add additional hospitality or wellness fees to checks, Potager is forging its own path through the modern dining scene.
Ironically, the dedication to doing things “the old way” is what makes the restaurant feel fresh and new compared to other establishments that bend to more modern, business-friendly practices.
So for all the gratitudes that Potager’s owners make on a daily basis to keep their business running, Deverites have one to give as well: That Potager and the values it promotes continues to prevail.
“There’s this thought that Potager is a special occasion place, but to me every day is a special occasion,” said Eileen. “So if you really want to make a difference in your community, go out to eat at the places that you want to eat at. Don’t wait. Because we don’t know what’s happening in the world right now.”
