Two upscale restaurants are headed for the Denver Tech Center, and they turn out to be built on the same idea. Troy Guard's G&G Surf Club will put a raw bar and a sushi bar beside a steakhouse menu at 8100 E. Union Ave. The Brinkerhoff is a Mexican steakhouse that serves sushi. Greenwood Village City Council approved its site plan for 5390 Greenwood Plaza Blvd. in September.
Both projects took years to come together. One fills a dining room that someone else built, spent heavily on and never opened. The other sits on a site its owners first found in 2018. Together they show where the south metro's special-occasion dining is settling, and which operators the landlords around here are now willing to bet on.
The Penterra Plaza Room Nobody Got to Eat In
If you have driven past Penterra Plaza on East Union Avenue over the past few years, you have passed one of the most finished empty restaurants in the metro. Westword reports the space sat vacant for years after McCormick & Schmick's left.
Oak View Group, the venue hospitality company that moved its headquarters to Denver in 2023, then took the space for an upscale restaurant called Golden Oak. The Denver Post and BusinessDen reported that Golden Oak was slated to open in early 2025 and was meant to serve as a training ground for OVG's chefs. Sources told BusinessDen the company spent upward of $10 million on the buildout. Golden Oak never opened. OVG did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and Guard declined to comment on OVG's situation.
That is the room Troy Guard now has. He signed a 15-year lease for the prebuilt space with landlord Edgewood REIT. He told BusinessDen he had talked with the same landlord about a Guard and Grace there five years ago, "but they couldn't make the numbers work."
"And five years later they called us up and said they might have another opportunity for us. So we went and looked at it and saw some things that need tweaking, but it's got great bones."
Guard called it a great deal but declined to share the terms. He also said he would not have taken it "if this were a regular opportunity." In a September interview with Westword, he described the wider pattern: landlords now bring offers to proven operators to fill long-vacant spaces. "It's harder out there," he said, and "some great chefs don't even want to open restaurants anymore."
What G&G Surf Club Is Actually Building
G&G Surf Club is a seafood-focused version of Guard and Grace, the downtown steakhouse that opened in 2014. Guard told BusinessDen the menu will keep high-end steaks, salads and pastas and add more fish dishes. He grew up in Hawaii, Seattle and San Diego before moving to Denver at 30, and he said the menu draws on that.
His team plans to put "significant dollars" into adjusting the existing buildout, including a new island bar and raw bar. When Westword toured the site in September, the room was still under construction plastic, with a large wraparound bar and lounge, a raw bar, a sushi bar, an open kitchen and a private dining room. Westword counted roughly 225 indoor seats plus two large patios.
The square footage depends on the source. BusinessDen gives 9,000 square feet and Westword gives 8,500. Either way, it is a big room for a single restaurant, and Guard said that size was part of the bet. "I think this neighborhood can withstand a large restaurant like this with the clientele that's around here," he told Westword.
Eight Years to Greenwood Plaza Boulevard
The second project took even longer. "It was 2018 when we first found this site," reads the quote at the top of BusinessDen's July report on The Brinkerhoff. "It's taken us a long time for one reason or another."
The first Brinkerhoff opened in Castle Rock in 2025 at 6373 Promenade Pkwy. It is a Brinkerhoff Hospitality concept, and the restaurant describes it as a Mexican steakhouse inspired by colonial Mexican architecture and Mexico City flavors, with sushi on the menu. The menu centers on prime steaks, line-caught Hawaiian tuna, fish flown in daily, and cocktails made with the house's own barrel-aged tequila.
The Greenwood Village location went through the city's review quickly once it was filed. On July 21, the planning and zoning commission unanimously recommended the site development plan to City Council. Council approved it unanimously on September 14, together with the development improvement agreement. Citizen Portal's recap of the vote gives the details residents will notice:
- a 9,800-square-foot restaurant, filed as Brinkerhoff Landmark
- a valet drop-off
- 39 on-site parking spaces
- a solar canopy expected to supply about 15% of the restaurant's power
- an approved exception for discontinued light fixtures
Approval does not mean construction has started. No construction start date or opening timeline appears in the city materials or the reporting so far.
Two Menus, One Instinct
Side by side, the two projects look a lot alike.
| G&G Surf Club | The Brinkerhoff | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 8100 E. Union Ave., Penterra Plaza | 5390 Greenwood Plaza Blvd. |
| Operator | Troy Guard, TAG Restaurant Group | Brinkerhoff Hospitality |
| Parent restaurant | Guard and Grace, downtown Denver, 2014 | The Brinkerhoff, Castle Rock, 2025 |
| Menu core | Prime steaks plus raw bar and sushi bar | Mexican steakhouse plus sushi |
| Size | 8,500 to 9,000 sq ft, about 225 seats inside | 9,800 sq ft |
| Status as of early October 2026 | Under construction, aiming for fall | Site plan approved September 14 |
Both concepts pair a prime steak program with raw fish, and both are big enough to handle business dinners and private events as easily as a Friday reservation. Both also come from operators with an established Colorado restaurant behind them.
They also join an existing cluster. Guard named the neighbors himself in his Westword interview: "Now Ocean Prime's here. Eddie V's is here. La Loma just went in. This area is continuing to grow." He already runs Los Chingones at Belleview Station, which he described as "just on the other side of the freeway."
Why the Tech Center Got These Rooms
Guard backs his view with his own numbers. Los Chingones has been at Belleview Station for nine years, and he told BusinessDen in June that it now outperforms his RiNo location. He said that pattern reversed after the pandemic.
"To me, DTC is way stronger than downtown," he said. "During COVID, a lot of people went to Cherry Creek and DTC down south. You just have more business and more buildings." In the same interview he said his Denver restaurants were down 15% across the board, with Guard and Grace flat for the year after steady growth since 2014.
He also explained who he expects to fill the seats. He likes the area for "the business, the hotels, the locals," and for "people from the south that don't want to drive all the way downtown." He called the DTC "a great meeting point," with room to draw diners from the northeast and southwest.
Guard has not left downtown. Westword reports he plans four new metro restaurants over the next two years. They include a downtown concept called Barbara in a 10,000-square-foot space and another HashTAG in Wheat Ridge, while the 1900 Lawrence project is aiming for fall 2027. G&G Surf Club is scheduled first of the four.
What Is Confirmed, and What Is Still a Target
Restaurant openings slip often, so here is what is on the record as of October 5, 2026:
- G&G Surf Club. In June, Guard told BusinessDen he expected to open by November 1. Westword's September 16 story described an October or November window. The restaurant's website lists no firm date, has no reservations open yet, and invites visitors to sign up for updates.
- The Brinkerhoff. The site plan and development agreement were approved September 14. No construction start or opening date has been announced.
- Golden Oak. It is not coming back under that name. Its buildout will open as G&G Surf Club after Guard's changes.
For residents, the nearest milestone is G&G Surf Club's reservation launch, which would be the first public sign that the long-empty room on East Union Avenue is close to opening.
Dining rooms like these get planned the way good homes do, with years of waiting for the right site and the right terms before construction starts. If you're curious how the DTC's growing restaurant scene fits with life in Greenwood Village, Coleen Sanders is happy to talk it through over a table at one of them once the doors open. Let's Connect.
