On a Sunday afternoon in August 2025, people were already forming a line outside the old Old Chicago on East 1st Avenue, a full day before anything inside was serving food. The marquee sign was up. The fish tank was stocked. Monday morning at 11 a.m., the doors opened as the fourth Cherry Cricket location in the Denver area, and the wait was over before most of Broomfield had finished breakfast.
A few miles north, a different restaurant has been trying to open in Broomfield for more than a year, and it still doesn't have an address.
That gap says something true about how this city grows. Broomfield isn't short on interest from restaurants. What it's short on is agreement about where a drive-thru fits into a corridor that was built for cars decades before the traffic counts got this heavy. One burger joint slid into an empty dining room and was serving customers a little more than a year after the deal was first announced. Another has submitted two separate proposals, watched the first one collapse under resident objections, and is still waiting on a hearing date for the second.
The Burger That Already Showed Up
The Broomfield Cherry Cricket sits at 1280 East 1st Avenue, in the space that used to be Old Chicago, and it did not arrive quietly. The build-out added roughly 8,500 square feet, a covered patio, and what the ownership group calls a Burger Garden, seating for more than 325 people between indoor and outdoor space. It created about 100 jobs in the process.
Broomfield Mayor Guyleen Castriotta was on hand for the opening and kept her comment short.
"We are absolutely thrilled to welcome the Cherry Cricket to Broomfield."
The location's general manager, Taylor Hauenstein, put it in more local terms:
"It's kind of perfectly situated. It's a great suburb."
A year later, the Cherry Cricket isn't a novelty anymore. It's just where you go for a Cricket Burger and pork green chili on a Tuesday, the same way Cherry Creek and Ballpark locals have for decades. That's the whole point. Nothing about this opening required a variance, a traffic study, or a public comment period stretching past a year. The building already existed. The parking lot already existed. The only thing that changed was who was cooking inside.
The Burger That's Still Circling the Block
In-N-Out has now tried twice to plant a flag in Broomfield, and both attempts have run into the same wall: parking math that doesn't pencil out under the city's own rules.
The first attempt, filed in 2025, proposed a location inside the Broomfield Plaza shopping center at 5005 West 120th Avenue. Broomfield planners received roughly a dozen emails from residents worried about the site's ability to absorb the traffic a burger chain that popular tends to generate, and the company withdrew the plan before it ever reached a neighborhood meeting.
The second attempt landed in February 2026, this time two blocks east at 4181 West 120th Avenue, a stretch of road that already hosts a Chick-fil-A, a Noodles & Company, a Raising Cane's, an IHOP, and a Ted's Montana Grill. The new proposal calls for a 3,890 square foot building with a 1,400 square foot patio and 76 parking spaces.
Here's the part that actually explains the holdup. That stretch of West 120th Avenue sits inside a designated Parking Reduction Area, and Broomfield's municipal code caps a building that size at 33 parking spaces. In-N-Out is asking for more than double that. Getting an exception requires a formal traffic study, which the city has said will be part of any application that moves forward.
Broomfield closed its public comment window on the concept on March 12, 2026. As of this summer, the city's own project tracking page still lists the proposal as under review, with hearings not yet scheduled. Nobody has said no. Nobody has said yes either. It's sitting exactly where these things sit in a growing suburb that's still figuring out how much traffic one more drive-thru can absorb on a road that's already carrying five of them.
Baseline Is Filling In Its Empty Storefronts First
If West 120th Avenue is a corridor with too many restaurants competing for too little parking, Baseline is the opposite problem: thousands of new rooftops with almost nowhere to eat yet.
Baseline, the roughly 1,000-acre planned community going in northeast of Broomfield near I-25 and Colorado 7, is expected to eventually include around 9,000 residential units and several million square feet of commercial space, built out over the next two to four decades. Right now, most of that commercial promise is still on paper. The development's own materials describe a future Center Street district with a choice of dining and shopping, but for the families already living in West Village and the newer Parkside West, that choice mostly means driving somewhere else for dinner.
That's starting to change. Chipotle cleared a Land Use Review Commission hearing on July 27, 2026, for a location at 16802 Galapago Place, just north of Baseline Road. It still needs to clear a standard two-week council call-up window before it's fully locked in, but it's about as close to shovel-ready as a restaurant proposal gets in Broomfield right now.
A little further south, Jersey Mike's has been building out a spot in the Broomfield Marketplace at 1170 U.S. Highway 287, targeting a summer 2026 opening under local franchise owner Steven Ashoori. His reasoning for picking Broomfield, in his own words, was straightforward.
"Broomfield stood out to us for its growing community, family-friendly atmosphere, and convenient location for local residents."
Neither of these is a headline-grabbing opening the way Cherry Cricket was. They're smaller, quieter, and exactly what a fast-growing area actually needs first: everyday options close enough that a sandwich run doesn't require getting on the highway.
Arista Never Had This Problem
There's a third pattern worth noticing, and it's the Arista neighborhood near Broomfield's western edge. Hickory & Ash, the modern American meatery inside Arista Broomfield, has been open since 2017 and never went through anything like the West 120th Avenue fight. Executive Chef Ryan Taylor, whose father is longtime Denver chef Kevin Taylor, runs a kitchen built around Colorado-sourced beef and in-house charcuterie, and the restaurant sits at 8001 Arista Place as one of several dining options anchoring the community's walkable core.
The difference isn't luck. Arista was planned as a mixed-use district from the start, with restaurants, parks, and a central plaza built into the same master plan rather than dropped into an existing strip mall corridor later. Arista Park still runs its water feature and hosts the neighborhood's smaller gatherings the way it always has. When a restaurant is part of the original design instead of a request bolted onto a 1990s parking lot, there's no traffic study to fight over because the traffic was accounted for on day one.
The One Weekend Nobody's Waiting on a Permit
None of this restaurant back-and-forth touches Broomfield Days, and that's exactly the point. The city's biggest annual event returns to Midway Park on September 19, 2026, the same way it has for decades, with a pancake breakfast, a 5K and fun run, more than 300 vendor booths, a car show, a duck race, food trucks, and live performances across three stages. Past years have drawn crowds estimated around 30,000 people to six blocks of park that don't need a land use review to host them, because the city has been running this exact event long enough to know precisely what it takes.
That's the contrast worth sitting with as summer turns into fall here. Some of what's new in Broomfield right now is a corporate proposal working through parking exceptions and traffic studies on a timeline nobody controls. Some of it is a neighborhood tradition that shows up on the same weekend every year without asking anyone's permission. And some of it, like Cherry Cricket, is just already open, serving burgers to people who stopped thinking of it as new sometime around last October.
If you live here, you already know which of these you'll actually use this month. The Broomfield Days schedule is worth circling regardless of where you land on the burger question.
Sold With Kathryn keeps track of what's actually changing on the ground across Broomfield and the rest of the Denver metro, block by block, not just what's listed for sale. If you're curious what a specific corner of this city is worth right now, or just want someone local to talk through the market with, get in touch anytime.
