The Illegal Pete's location on Colfax in Denver, in an old IHOP building.
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Editor’s Note: Illegal Pete’s is a fast-growing burrito-focused multi-unit in Colorado and Arizona. Ed Avis, publisher of el Restaurante, spoke with Ilegal Pete’s founder Pete Turner in early August. This is the final of three Q&A articles based on that interview. Click here to read the first installment of this interview, when Turner described the beginnings of his restaurant. And click here to read the second installment, when Turner talked about how his restaurant feeds traveling musicians through its Starving Artists program.
Do you always open new locations of Illegal Pete’s in buildings that already exist?
We love adaptive reuse and to get into historical buildings. I believe that when you move into a historic building that you sort of gain that history. So you almost have a built-in history. I absolutely love that.
Can you give me an example or two of this?
Our Colfax [Avenue, Denver] location that we opened in 2016 in the Capitol Hill neighborhood was an old IHOP restaurant. Remember the old A-frames? So we had to use this really unique 2000-square-foot building, it’s kind of skinny, long and tall. And we made a beautiful centered bar. I mean, it's gorgeous. We added a thousand square feet on the back for our kitchen. And we added a mezzanine. We won a mayor's design award for that.
We opened our location on South Broadway [in Denver] in 2013. That was an old car lot from the ‘50s. The building that became our restaurant was kind of a showroom/mechanic area. We built this big patio and put in a bocce ball court. It turned out really cool. And we have still big, 35-foot-tall old lights with huge white bulbs. They look like alien eyes from the ‘50s. Those still exist, and it still says cars. So we like the remnants of the history in it.
Our location in Tucson at the University of Arizona [is another example]. [We saw] a business, an old house, a 1906 house. It's a block off of campus and there was a clothing store there since 1959. I was like, man, if we want to be anywhere, we want to be right there. So Matt, [a partner of mine who is from Arizona], would go once a year and ask this old guy who had been running the clothing store since 1959, “Hey, do you want to sell?” “Nah, come back a year later.” So 12 years of doing this, finally he said, “Hey, I'm ready.”
So we had a great opportunity with a beautiful building that’s now almost 120 years old. Originally it was the house of the president of Arizona State Bank in 1906 or something. It became a women's boarding house, and then it was a clothing store. But when we went in there, there was a bunch of little rooms. So we opened the whole thing up. It was old plaster and lath walls. We deconstructed all the wood framing for the walls. We kept all the lath and the framing. We built all our furniture out of the wood framing. And then we colored the lath and used that as our wall treatment. I mean, beautiful. But we opened this whole space up and it's just so pretty.
We put the kitchen in the basement just to make it work. We have a dumb waiter that goes all the way up to the second floor. We built a whole second building on the back, to hold all of our systems and to house the bathrooms. We have a couple patios that jut off. So it is sort of old in the front and kind of modern in the back. It's really neat.
Your locations also feature a lot of art. Tell me about that.
The art kind of represents the communities in which we do business. We use various artists. Recently I've been working with two different artists, one old employee of mine who's a good buddy of mine, he's in New Orleans, but he's doing some paintings for us again. And a current employee; she did the paintings for Wheat Ridge.
We did a big art project for our 25th anniversary, which was 2020, called The Refresh Project. You can see that on our website. We used different artists from the community to help. The plan was [to commission the paintings] for the year of our 25th anniversary, which was Covid, which changed everything. So we had to stretch it out to do an art project at each of our restaurants that kind of added to the building and the community and celebrated the community and used a community artist. So that was pretty cool.
Click here to read the first installment of this interview, when Turner described the beginnings of his restaurant. And click here to read the second installment, when Turner talked about how his restaurant feeds traveling musicians through its Starving Artists program.
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