Pete Turner
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Editor’s Note: Illegal Pete’s is a fast-growing burrito-focused multi-unit in Colorado and Arizona. More important, the restaurant has character! From collaborations with artists to cool locations in repurposed buildings, the restaurant does things its way. Ed Avis, publisher of el Restaurante, spoke with Ilegal Pete’s founder Pete Turner in early August. This is the first of three Q&A articles based on that interview. Click here to read the second installment, when Turner talked about how his restaurant feeds traveling musicians through its Starving Artists program. And click here to read the third installment, when he describes reusing old buildings for new locations.
Avis: Illegal Pete’s is 29 years old now. I read that your dad was your original business partner. How did that come about?
Turner: While I was in college, I had gone to visit my friends in the Bay Area, San Francisco, which is where I first had the big burrito, the Chipotle Qdoba type thing. So when I was in college, I would go back and visit and be like, Hey, if this existed in Boulder, I would eat this twice a week. So when I graduated I talked to my dad about whether it was possible. He was terminally ill – he had been diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin's leukemia in 1989, my first year at CU [University of Colorado] -- but he said, “Hey, I'll give a loan for you to get this done.”
It wasn't a ton of money. I mean the first restaurant was 600 square feet, eight seats, but to me it was all the money in the world at the time. I was 23 years old, and kind of went for it. And so he was my partner and more than anything was just kind of moral support and just made me feel confident, I guess. But he never worked in the restaurant. He was battling his own his health issues.
I signed the lease [on the first location] in February of 1995. We opened the doors August 15th, 1995. My father passed away August 24th, 1997. So two years later. My dad never worked in the restaurant with me, but he helped talk me through all the issues and ups and downs, trials and tribulations of doing, running the restaurant for this first couple of years and getting it set up.
My idea was to build this type of food and make it a really fun environment with really good service. We made a lot of mistakes and the food wasn't great at first, but people loved it. The food has gotten better over the years, let's just say that.
Anyway, my main thing is I wanted to be open Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights on the Hill (a neighborhood near campus) after the bars closed. We wanted to be open until 2:30 am. The bars’ last call is at 1:30, and then all these kids get out. That kind of put us on the map, and it was about a year and a half in where we started to really get traction. So let's say spring of ‘97 people started to get to know us, and then that fall of ‘97, we just started to really kind of hit.
My dad was dying at that point, and before he died, he is like, “Man, I think you're going to be all right.” It makes me feel great that he died with sort of confidence that at least his son was going to do okay with that. So it was pretty cool. It was cool that he was able to see that.
Your dad’s name was also Pete, and I read in an article that you named the restaurant after him.
Well, it's influenced by my dad. He and I settled on that name. He at first asked, “What does it mean?” I'm like, well, it's kind of the spirit of rebellion, questioning authority and stupid rules. And he loved it. And he was actually cremated with his Illegal Pete’s hat and t-shirt.
The Loteria images from the Pearl Street, Boulder location
My dad died in ‘97, we opened the Pearl Street (Boulder) location in ‘98. We started this series of paintings based on the Loteria. It's basically a takeoff on the imagery of the three cards Mind, Body, Soul -- or la Mente, el Cuerpo and el Alma -- and a digital representation of what that might mean to me about my dad. And the numbers on the cards – the first is 3, the second is 31, and the third is 40 -- are my dad's birthday, which lives in all of our restaurants. So we do a different series of these for all the restaurants. That's kind of the tribute to my dad that lives in all the restaurants. A lot of people don't know that.
That’s a great way to honor your dad. Tell us a little about the growth of the restaurant.
We opened the Pearl Street location in October of ‘98. We took over a company that was called Jalapeno Mexican Grill, which was on the east end of Pearl Street Mall, and which was kind of No Man's land at the time is now kind of the center of the mall in Boulder. They actually had a bar, a small little bar. So that's the first one we did with a bar. So that allowed us expand our offering. And then in 2000, I signed a lease in downtown Denver, lower downtown Denver, which was exciting for me to get back to my hometown of Denver.
Pete Turner outside the LoDo location
We opened that July 5th, 2001. I think it's important to note that our first location was 600 square feet, and the second location at Pearl Street was 2,000 square feet. The third in downtown Denver is 2,400 square feet, and now our average is right around 3,000 square feet. So we grew in size and we grew in our offerings.
The location in downtown Denver had a legit, separate bar with probably 18 seats. And we also added a stage at that restaurant. That's when we started doing music pretty consistently in our stores; now we're well known for our involvement in music and the arts. But that's where that started, at the downtown Denver one. And that's kind of been our model moving forward.
And so now 29 years in, we have 15 restaurants, two in Arizona and 13 in Colorado.
I read that you recently opened several new locations.
Yeah. Because of Covid, we had projects that were in the works (that slowed down). We had signed a lease on a store in Park Hill (a Denver neighborhood) and started the construction of that in early 2020, and then Covid hit, and it was just obviously scary for all of us. We saw that through, although that was very, very lonely.
And right before Covid we had moved our Denver store a half block down into … a 4,000 square foot space, which was bigger than what I wanted. But we had a lot of catering that we had to turn away from that original space, and I thought, “This is a great move.” Then Covid hit, and that downtown restaurant went from being our number one store to being our worst store. It's recovered a bit, but these downtown areas completely changed. Friday used to be the busiest day, and now it's like Monday used to be, it's just weird.
The food!
In the last six months, we opened four more stores, one of which was a full remodel of our existing Denver University store. Another one is in South Boulder.
And then we opened Wheat Ridge on Leap Day of this year, and that was just a really cool center in a part of Denver that's really underserved. I didn't know exactly how successful that would be, but it's opened incredibly well. There's a lot of pent-up demand there.
And then we also opened in Colorado Springs, which to be honest, has been a little more challenging. Thought we'd get more name recognition down there. We opened that in April, and it's not doing the numbers we had hoped. So three of the four are really doing it.
Click here to read the second installment, when Turner talked about how his restaurant feeds traveling musicians through its Starving Artists program. And click here to read the third installment, when he describes reusing old buildings for new locations.
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