The Old Dairy Farm And The Old Strip Mall Are Both Getting New Restaurants This Fall

For more than a decade, the corner of Race Street and East 120th Avenue sat empty. If you drove past it on your way to King Soopers or the library, you might not have noticed it at all: a flat, weedy lot where a dairy used to be, the kind of place that becomes invisible once you stop expecting anything to happen there.

Something did happen there this year, and if you haven't been back to that corner since January, the change is worth a look. It also turns out that corner isn't the only part of Northglenn getting new restaurants right now. The other one is on the opposite side of the city, inside a shopping center most residents have driven past a thousand times without a second thought.

The Corner That Sat Quiet For A Decade

Karl's Farm Dairy was Northglenn's oldest company, tracing back to 1947, before the city itself was even incorporated. It was a third-generation family operation, and when it closed in 2012, the city's own economic development office called it a valued Northglenn business and corporate citizen, the kind of loss that leaves an actual gap in a place's identity, not just its tax base.

The land didn't get developed right away. Karl's Farm sat as a 64-acre parcel between Irma Street and Race Street for years while a master plan slowly took shape: roughly 280 to 350 single-family homes, close to 385 multifamily units, a 164-unit senior living community, and about 8 acres set aside for retail, restaurants, and services. Homebuilders moved in first. Meritage Homes built out its share of the residential lots, and that phase has since sold out. The retail acreage took longer to fill, which is normal. Restaurants follow rooftops, not the other way around.

What Finally Opened There

The first tenant to open on that retail pad was Smalls Sliders, and it did so on January 8, 2026, with a 10 a.m. grand opening at the corner of Race Street and East 120th Avenue, right in the Karl's Farm retail node. It's the brand's first Colorado location, part of a "Can" concept built from modular shipping containers, serving fresh cheeseburger sliders, waffle fries, and shakes through a walk-up window or drive-through.

The opening event included a ribbon-cutting with the Northglenn Community Foundation, and the local franchise group, Mountain Sliders, is run by Nick and Alix Ralls, who have already said they plan to open more locations in Johnstown and Green Valley Ranch. For a corner that had been vacant for over a decade, having a national brand pick it for a Colorado debut is a real marker. It means the rest of that 8-acre retail parcel is likely to fill in behind it, not stay quiet the way it did after the dairy closed.

Across Town, The Marketplace Is Filling Its Own Gaps

While Karl's Farm has been building from nothing, Northglenn Marketplace, the shopping center at 104th Avenue and I-25, has been doing something different: filling spaces that already existed but had gone empty. The center is anchored by Lowe's, Texas Roadhouse, IHOP, Ross, and Office Depot, along with more than 30 other tenants, and it's been owned by Hutensky Capital Partners since a 2017 purchase of more than 400,000 square feet.

The two big 2026 announcements there are Bubba's 33, which will take over a vacant restaurant space in the center of the Marketplace once renovations that began in May 2026 are finished, with an opening targeted for late 2026, and an expansion of the existing Texas Roadhouse by about 650 square feet, with construction starting in mid-2026. Neither of those is a brand-new business coming to Northglenn for the first time. Both are existing Marketplace tenants growing into space that's been sitting unused, which is its own kind of signal about demand.

The Marketplace's other recent win has already had time to prove itself. Prost Brewing Company opened its headquarters and biergarten there in January 2024, after delays pushed the original 2023 target back. It's since become the fourth largest craft brewery in Colorado, and the equipment inside, imported from the German manufacturer Kaspar Schulz, is built around carbon recapture and reduced water use. It's not a new opening this fall, but it's the anchor that makes the rest of the Marketplace's food and drink lineup worth paying attention to.

One Saturday, Two Very Different Reasons To Be Out

Here's where the two sides of town land on the same date without planning to. On Saturday, September 26, 2026, the Northglenn Artisan Market runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 341 W 104th Avenue, a craft fair with handmade goods, local makers, and food trucks. That same morning, a few blocks away on the same stretch of 104th, Prost Brewing hosts its Oktoberfest 5K, part of the Colorado Brewery Running Series, with start waves at 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. and a free beer or non-alcoholic beverage waiting at the finish line.

If you wanted to build a Saturday around it, the logic writes itself:

1. Run or walk the Oktoberfest 5K at Prost starting at 10 or 10:30 a.m., costume optional but apparently encouraged.
2. Walk or drive the short distance to the Artisan Market at 341 W 104th Ave while it's still running, through 3 p.m.
3. End the day back at Prost's biergarten, since the race medal gets you there anyway.

Neither event is dependent on the other. They just happen to land on the same date, on the same road, which means a resident who only knew about one of them has been missing half the day without realizing it.

What This Actually Tells You About Northglenn Right Now

It would be easy to read all of this as one trend: Northglenn is getting more restaurants. That's true, but it undersells what's actually happening. This isn't one strip filling in while the rest of the city stays the same. It's two separate parts of Northglenn, a brand-new mixed-use node built on land that sat vacant for a decade, and an established shopping center finally leasing up space that had been empty for years, both adding food and drink options in the same twelve-month window, without either one being the obvious center of gravity.

That matters if you live closer to one side of the city than the other. If Karl's Farm is basically your backyard, Smalls Sliders is the first sign of more to come on that retail parcel. If you're closer to 104th and I-25, Bubba's 33 and a bigger Texas Roadhouse are arriving on top of a brewery that's already built a following. You don't have to pick a side of town to benefit. You just have to know both things are happening, which is easy to miss if you're only half paying attention to the shopping center you don't usually stop at.

That's really the thing worth remembering heading into fall: Northglenn's growth isn't concentrated in one visible corridor the way it sometimes feels like it is in neighboring cities. It's showing up in two places that don't talk to each other on a map, at the same time, for different reasons. Whichever half of the city you're in, there's a real chance something new opened closer to you than you think.

If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's changing in your own neighborhood before it shows up on everyone else's radar, that's a big part of what I do for clients too, just applied to home values instead of hamburger stands. HomesBuyJess keeps a close eye on what's opening, what's expanding, and what that means for Northglenn as a place to actually live. If you're curious what any of this means for your own corner of the city, or you just want to talk through what your home might be worth in a market that's clearly still adding to itself, schedule a consultation any time.