Denver stopped being just a gateway to the Rockies a while ago. Its airport is now among the ten busiest in the world, the A-Line train has shuttled visitors downtown since 2016, and the clearest sign of its arrival as a food city might be the sheer number and quality of its food halls.

The roots go back to vacant industrial warehouses around downtown — areas like RiNo and LoDo sat empty for decades until Coors Field arrived in the 1990s and started pulling crowds to the north side. Developers such as Zeppelin Development saw a chance to turn dead space into gathering places, and market halls let small independent chefs afford a storefront they could never take on solo. The city's demographics help too: roughly a quarter of the metro's 3 million residents are Latino, and large Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, Ethiopian and Venezuelan communities have reshaped what Denver eats.

The Source, opened in 2013 as the city's first full-scale food hall, still anchors the scene in RiNo. It packs a butcher, brewery, Bar Isabel and the Source Hotel under one roof, but the stars are Safta, a modern Israeli kitchen doing saffron-stewed Persian rice and foraged mushrooms, and rooftop Cimera, where chefs Diego Muñoz and Geoff Cox recreate the small-plates energy of Mexico City with a Latin American-spanning menu.

Over in LoHi, Avanti F+B stacked shipping containers into a two-floor hall with a patio looking out to downtown. Its rotating cast of chefs tests new concepts here before going brick-and-mortar, so it's the spot to taste what Denver will be eating next year. Longtime resident Quiero Arepas serves the Venezuelan classic, while newer arrival Ciao Babe brings Italian-leaning European street food alongside a doner kebab counter.

Denver Central Market in LoDo is the closest thing to a European-style urban market — bakery, butcher, delis and produce — with Vero turning out wood-fired pizza al taglio and handmade pasta. There's even a second branch inside the airport, in case you only realise what you missed on the way home.

Cross into Aurora for Stanley Marketplace, a converted airplane factory that's what suburban malls should be. Annette, chef Caroline Glover's hearth-driven restaurant, picked up a 2022 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mountain plus a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Misaki flies fish in from Japan for its sushi counter, and Molino Chido grinds about 1,000 tortillas a day behind a glass-walled mill for tacos that swing from al pastor to bison tongue and shrimp with XO sauce.

Back downtown, Denver Milk Market sits on the historic Dairy Block (there's a cocktail lounge called Moo Bar) with 16 kitchens. Konjo Ethiopian Food serves lamb tibs and lentil dishes with house injera, while YumCha does dumplings with a local twist — one soup dumpling comes filled French-onion style with Gruyère.

For travellers, food halls are the most efficient way to eat well in Denver: pick a hall, order across three or four counters, and you'll cover more ground in one evening than a week of restaurant reservations. If you care about award-winning cooking, immigrant-led kitchens or just a good patio drink, there's a hall with your name on it.

Story via Matador Network.