Restaurant Olivia

The Restaurant

Restaurant Olivia opened in 2020 on a quiet stretch of South Downing Street in Wash Park, a residential neighbourhood ten minutes south of downtown Denver, and earned a Michelin Guide listing in the inaugural Colorado guide of 2023. The dining room is small — forty covers across a single long room — with white-cloth tables, a low-lit open kitchen at the back where the pasta-making bench is visible from every seat, and a small bar at the front facing Downing Street. The cooking is run by chef-owner Ty Leon, formerly of Coperta and Frasca Food and Wine, and named after Ty's grandmother Olivia.

The menu is pasta-first and pasta-serious. The bulk of the offering is house-made every morning on the bronze-die extruder visible from the dining room: gemelli with Umbrian sausage and pecorino cream, hand-shaped tortellini filled with braised duck, tagliatelle Bolognese, ricotta gnocchi with coconut lobster bisque and black garlic, agnolotti dal plin filled with veal and cabbage. The non-pasta menu is short — a handful of antipasti, two secondi, a single roasted vegetable — and exists mostly to frame the pasta. Ingredients are organic, local, and ethically sourced wherever possible. The dessert programme is short and Italian: a budino, a panna cotta, a seasonal fruit crostata.

The wine list is one of the most thoughtful in Denver — about two hundred references, heavily Italian with a deep bench of natural and lesser-known regional producers, and a by-the-glass programme that lets a diner taste five different Sangiovese expressions in one evening. Service is warm and intelligent, with a sommelier who walks the room and pairs without pressure. Olivia is the Denver Italian room that the city's serious food writers reliably name first, and reservations on Tock release thirty days ahead and book within the hour for any Saturday at seven.