The LoHi Butcher Shop Pouring Natural Wine and Searing 50-Day Ribeye

Cattle horns on the wall. Skulls too. Leather, wood, earth tones, the lights turned way down. It feels like a bourbon tasting room built for people who do not mess around. And then you look through the archway and there is a customer next door buying a slab of dry-aged beef while you sip a glass of natural wine.

That is Western Daughters Wine Bar, which opened this month at 3326 Tejon St. in LoHi. And no, that is not a typo. A butcher shop opened a wine bar.

How a meat counter ended up with a wine list

Here is the part people miss. The wine bar and the butcher shop are the same operation, sharing the same building, connected by that archway I mentioned. Kate Kavanaugh and Josh Curtiss, who are married, founded Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe back in 2013. Now they own the wine bar too, along with Noah Heaney.

The space next door used to be Mr. Lucky's sandwich shop. When it went dark, the landlord gave Curtiss first crack at it. Smart landlord, if you ask me. Heaney is the one who said, do not overthink this, make it a wine bar.

And Heaney knows the Denver bar scene cold. He sold his stake in Golden's Miners Saloon, he still owns Nosu Ramen, and he first landed at Western Daughters as a manager of the butcher shop itself. So the guy running the wine list literally learned the business behind the meat counter. He curated the whole program. Natural wines, small producers, and here is the detail I love: every single wine is available by the glass AND by the bottle. No games where the good stuff is bottle-only. You want to try something weird, you can try one pour and bail. Which is dangerous for me.

The food is the whole point

Look, a lot of new spots in this city are all mood and no plate. Not this one.

The menu runs a 50-day dry-aged ribeye, beef tallow fries, and miso-braised cabbage. And the bar does brunch too, so this is not just a nighttime move. A 50-day dry-aged ribeye in a room lit like a speakeasy, with a glass of natural wine, while somebody buys their weekend groceries fifteen feet away through an archway. That is one of the stranger and better dinners you can get in Denver right now.

The kitchen also runs no seed oils and no refined sugars, and the whole facility is gluten-free. Those tallow fries? Cooked in beef fat, not canola. That is on purpose.

Where the meat actually comes from

This is what separates Western Daughters from a place just chasing a trend. The butcher shop sources 100% grass-fed and pasture-raised beef, lamb, pork, and chicken. All of it from animals humanely and sustainably ranched within 250 miles of Denver. So the "Western" in the name is not decoration.

And here is the number that stopped me. Western Daughters says 50 cents of every dollar you spend goes straight back to the farmers and ranchers it partners with. Half. Since 2013 that adds up to more than $5 million put back into their hands.

I mean, most restaurants will tell you a nice story about "local sourcing" and it means one farm they bought lettuce from once. This is a business built around the ranchers first, with a wine bar attached to it. That is backwards from how almost everyone else does it, and that is exactly why it works.

The real estate angle

Quick side note on Tejon Street, because this matters. LoHi has spent the last decade turning every empty storefront into either a cocktail bar or a boutique fitness studio. Rents climbed, the sandwich shop closed, and the usual next move is some out-of-state group parachuting in with a concept.

Instead the existing tenant next door expanded into the vacancy. That is a small thing that tells you something big about a neighborhood. When the businesses that already live on a block are the ones growing into the empty spaces, that block stays a neighborhood instead of turning into a strip of logos. Western Daughters has been on Tejon since 2013. They earned the right to take that room.

If you go

The butcher shop at 3326 Tejon St. is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. And every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. they fire up 100% grass-fed burgers and those beef tallow fries out of the shop. Hayley and I have a rule that a Saturday burger cooked by your actual butcher beats a drive-thru every single time. Not close.

So do this. Grab the Saturday burger, then come back some evening and sit in the dark room with the horns on the wall, order the 50-day ribeye, and let Heaney's wine list do its thing. Watch somebody buy a roast through the archway while you eat. It sounds strange written down. In person it just makes sense.

A butcher shop that pours natural wine and puts half of every dollar back into the ranchers who raised the animal. That is about as Colorado as it gets.