After three years on Wazee Street, Rio Grande is rechanneling.
The downtown Mexican restaurant, which opened on Blake Street in 1999 and moved to 1745 Wazee St. in 2022, is getting a slightly different name and menu. The shift stems from subpar sales, according to owner Pat McGaughran.
“Quite honestly, it hasn’t been what our expectation was when we moved,” he said. “But after winter comes spring.”
McGaughran opened the first Rio Grande in Fort Collins in 1986, and there are now five locations along the Front Range. But the downtown location has been renamed Rio on Wazee and is going beyond its Tex-Mex heritage.
While classics like Rio’s fajitas remain on the menu, executive chef Jesus Martinez has added more elevated, traditional Mexican dishes like a roasted pork shank birria and striped bass veracruzana.
“We’re still Rio, and this rebranding effort is to get people to come downtown to have a sort of more urban experience, the type of dining experience that people who paid to park downtown came to enjoy,” McGaughran said, noting it is less family-oriented as well.
Mole, a Mexican sauce made of fruits, spices, seeds and nuts, is prominently featured. Rio’s well-known margaritas, which have a three-drink limit, are sticking around too.
“It’s a bit of a pilot,” McGaughran said of the revamp. “Who’s to say if that migrates to other locations?”
Those outposts, along with RARE Italian, an upscale steakhouse he owns in Fort Collins, have seen sales drop around 10% from two years ago, though that number isn’t uniform across all the restaurants.
In LoDo, sales are around two-thirds of the peak nearly 20 years ago at the original 1525 Blake St. location, McGaughran said. He bought the Wazee property, the home of Morton’s The Steakhouse until 2020, for $3.8 million in 2021.
Part of the reason for the move was to get out of “substantial renovation costs” at the old location. He also wanted to get “closer to the energy where LoDo is regathering post-COVID.”
“We’ll probably never be like LoDo in 2008, but we’re doing remarkably well with regard to everything we know and hear about the restaurant industry right now,” he said. “I don’t want to paint a rosy picture when the roses aren’t there, but we have a level of business that’s sustainable.”
Consumer preferences and macro-economic conditions constantly change, McGaughran said, noting that Rio has gone through several evolutions during its time.
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In the future, McGaughran hopes to add more locations. But for now, the focus is on his current crop.
“We would like to expand. We’re still considering ourselves a growing company, and we’ll wait until the economic conditions are good enough for that. The good news being a mature company is we can wait and not take on unnecessary risk.”
Rio’s former building on Blake, meanwhile, was purchased in 2022 for $6 million by Francois Safieddine, the restaurateur behind ViewHouse and My Neighbor Felix. But nothing has opened in the space and the property has been listed for sale.
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