Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Here is the part people are going to miss. You sit down at Soda Club, order the gigli with borlotti ragu, pour a glass of something natural and orange from one of 200-plus bottles, and you never once think the word vegan. That is the whole trick. There is no meat anywhere in this room. Not a scrap. And Michelin has praised the place for "smart cooking that celebrates vegetables with creativity and class," which is not the kind of sentence you usually attach to a plant-based spot.
Soda Club officially opened September 1, 2026, at 1260 25th Street, inside The Ramble Hotel in RiNo, over in Denver's Five Points neighborhood. They ran a soft opening the week before. And this is not some hopeful new concept testing the waters. This restaurant has earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand every single year since it opened in New York City's East Village back in 2021. Four years, four nods. That does not happen by accident.
The founder is Ravi Derossi, and here is the local hook. He grew up in Boulder. Colorado native. He is a two-time James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurateur and the CEO and founder of Overthrow Hospitality, and if that name Death & Co rings a bell, it should. Derossi brought Death & Co to The Ramble Hotel back in 2018. That was the cocktail bar's first location outside Manhattan. So Soda Club is now sitting in the same hotel as the bar he already put on the map here. He has been circling this block for years.
Most people do not realize how deliberate the whole thing is. The name Soda Club nods to the moderation movement. The East Village flagship opened with a serious nonalcoholic drink list inspired by an old-school Italian soda fountain. So you can drink all night or not at all and nobody blinks.
The food is where it gets fun. Executive chef Amira Gharib, who helped launch the New York location and is of Egyptian descent, shapes the menu with a Sicilian-style, Arab-influenced approach. So you get harissa, saffron, sumac, Urfa pepper. That is not the vegan playbook you are picturing.
The pastas are made in house. Gigli, casarecce, lumache, all the shapes you cannot pronounce confidently on a first date. And the sauces go off script. Borlotti ragu. Cashew pepper butter, which honestly sounds dangerous for me because I will order it twice. There is also Roman-style pinsa, made from a long-fermented dough that blends wheat and rice flours. If you have never had pinsa, it is lighter and crispier than the pizza you know, and it is worth the trip on its own.
They also brought in Jon Robbins as chef de cuisine. If you spent any time eating in Denver over the last decade, you know Robbins as the owner of Bistro Barbes, which has since closed. So there is real local pedigree stacked in this kitchen.
The wine director is Drew Brady, a Wine Enthusiast "Future 40 Tastemaker," and he built a natural wine list of more than 200 bottles, all from small independent producers. That is a lot of pours to work through, and I say that as a threat to my own weekends. On top of that, the bar runs a grappa-focused cocktail program the team says matches its other ventures, Death & Co and Amor y Amargo. Grappa is a hard sell for most people. It takes a confident bar to build a program around it and mean it.
The Denver space is almost twice the size of the New York original. Roughly 70 seats inside, 30 more out on the patio. Velvet-clad, low-lit, intimate. The kind of room that photographs terribly and feels perfect in person.
Here is the real estate angle, because there always is one. Soda Club took over the former Super Mega Bien space, which closed earlier in 2026. And that matters. RiNo has been chewing through restaurant concepts for years now. Rents in this stretch of Five Points climbed hard as the neighborhood turned from warehouses and rail into one of the most sought-after commercial corridors in the city. When a space like Super Mega Bien goes dark and a four-time Michelin-recognized operator moves in within the same year, that tells you something about where the demand still is. Nobody is putting a New York flagship's bigger sibling into a soft corridor.
The team also plans to bring its popular monthly pasta-making classes to Denver, which is either a great date night or a humbling one. Hayley already flagged it, so I know where a future Saturday is going.
Look, the vegan thing is the headline, but it is almost beside the point. This is a serious restaurant from a Boulder kid who has been building this hospitality world for years, dropped into a hotel he already helped define, in a neighborhood that keeps proving it can carry this kind of ambition. Order the pasta. Get the orange wine. Do not overthink what is or is not on the plate. That is exactly how they want you to do it.