Design Series: Cochino Taco, Denver – Going to the Pigs!

July 12, 2019

3:08 PM

James Florio

By Ed Avis

For decades, customers entering the building at 3495 S. Downing St. in Englewood, Colo. needed car repairs, gas or snacks. Today the building still serves the neighborhood, but with a very different product line-up – tacos, margaritas, and other Mexican fare.

“We took a really bad gas station in an older suburb of Denver and made it into a beautiful restaurant,” explains Brandon Anderson, principal of LIVstudio the architecture firm behind Cochino Taco. “The building is close to some hospitals and a residential area that was in need of interesting food options. It’s been extremely successful.”

New Concept

Johnny Ballen, the restaurant’s owner, says he had been looking for a location for a new restaurant for several years. Cochino Taco is his third restaurant, but his first Mexican concept. His investment partner, David Mandarich, found the building and suggested they buy it.

The structure was originally a Phillips 66 station. It was probably built in the 1940s, and over the years the structure had been seriously altered to accommodate repair bays and a convenience store.

“It had been covered up with a lot of bad design over the years, but the basics were there,” Anderson says. “It was a cool, mid-century gas station. So we stripped off the ‘70s and ‘80s elements and brought back the mid-century elements.”

Among the original design elements that were still intact were the large, slanted windows and flagstone entry in front of the building. Anderson added a red banded soffit across the roofline to unify the exterior of the building. The Cochino Taco sign rises above the red soffit.

The gas station’s service stalls became the kitchen and bathrooms, and the bar is

“We added a large patio on the front,” Anderson says. “Luckily, all the space that had been used for the driveway and gas pumps gave us a decent amount of room for parking.”

Anderson says one of the challenges of converting the gas station to a restaurant was making sure everything was up to code. Since parts of the building had been added later, all the pieces had to be tied together properly. And a restaurant has some rooftop mechanical elements, such as exhaust stacks, that the gas station did not have, and the roof needed to be reinforced to handle them.

Piggy Interior

The restaurant, which opened in 2016, features irreverent tacos ranging from Say What? (crispy fried pig ears, Cochino slaw, white onion, serrano salsa, fresh cilantro) to Fungus Among Us (cremini and portabella mushrooms, corn, avocado tomatillo salsa, fresh cilantro). So it stands to reason that the interior design is as irreverent as the menu.

For example, the men’s room features a vintage car radiator framing a painting of Jesus walking on water, a 1970s-era disco ball hangs from the ceiling in the bar, and a mural of a pig riding a PeeWee Herman bike adorns one wall. Pigs in general are a key design theme, which suits a restaurant with “cochino” – Spanish for “pig” – in its name.

The interior design fell to David Schaich, principal of (shike) design, also in Denver. Schaich and Ballen had worked together on previous projects, and both have an affinity for architectural salvage.

“David and I have known each other for a while, and we know what each likes,” Ballen says. “We bounce ideas off each other – our relationship is great, it’s easy.”

Among the salvage items that Shaich incorporated into the restaurant’s design are an old Days Inn billboard that forms the wall behind some of the booths; a collection of multicolor hand-made tiles of all different shapes and sizes; and a light fixture that once hung over a dentist’s chair. A prominent structural feature – the wall that separates the bar from the dining room – is made from a bunch of curvy wooden boards that originally were used to keep pipes in place while in transit.

“What I’m most proud about is when I see people sit down and they’re just looking around. I think: first timers,” Ballen says. “How do you separate yourself? It’s the little details that set you apart. I have a bunch of pigs on the bar, and customers will bring in more and I’ll put them up. And I have Jesus in a Broncos jersey on top of the bar. It was in a yard in a few blocks away, and I talked to the owner about buying it. He said, ‘Just take him. I can’t make money off Jesus.’ I was raised Catholic, and it’s all in fun. If people get offended by something like that, there are other places to go. Customers love it.”

Ed Avis is the publisher of el Restaurante.

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