Chicago breakfast and lunch restaurant Egg Harbor opening first Colorado locations

Will Makoski wanted to move to Colorado from Chicago but didn’t want to leave the cafe he’d worked at for the past 17 years.

“The company felt that it was ready. I spoke up and said, ‘Hey, this has always been a dream of mine, and I think we could do really well there.’ I probably go to Colorado once a year,” Makoski said.

In February, the 40-year-old will open Egg Harbor’s first two Colorado locations, one in the DTC at 7222 E. Layton Ave., and the other in Highlands Ranch, at 9579 S. University Blvd. The breakfast and lunch spot has been around since 1985 in Chicago, with recent expansions into Georgia and Wisconsin, also driven by employees.

“As we started to get bigger and bigger, we started to encounter more employees that were either coming to us and saying, ‘An Egg Harbor would be great out here,’ or, ‘It’s always been a dream of my family to live in this part of the country, but I also don’t want to leave Egg Harbor.’ And so that’s how Georgia happened. That’s how the Wisconsin one happened,” Makoski said.

For Makoski, it will be a family affair. He met his wife at Egg Harbor, and his stepson works at the eatery, too.

But cracking into a new market won’t be easy. The cafe scoured 30 locations across the state, from Fort Collins to the Springs. It costs between $1 million and $1.5 million to open a new restaurant, though how much of that Egg Harbor will pay depends on the landlord and whether a restaurant was previously inside the space.

Lorenzo Harris of JLL helped the eatery find its first local locations.

In the DTC, the restaurant will start from scratch in one of Denver’s newest office buildings. Built by Vectra Bank in 2022 and part of the ritzy new Belleview Station area, its entire 5,100-square-foot retail space on the ground floor has never been occupied.

“It is just a concrete floor and windows. So, we’re really having to go in and start from scratch,” Makoski said.

In Highlands Ranch, things will be more straightforward. The former tenant inside the upcoming Egg Harbor space was a brewery, HopsnDrops, that closed last spring. The brewing tanks and equipment have largely been removed.

The company typically likes to stay in the suburbs, where it captures more of the commuter crowd on the way to work. Its thinking behind more urban spots is to be near residences, as is the case with Belleview Station, home to three new apartment complexes.