Whether they've been in business for two years or two decades, restaurants across downtown Denver are throwing in the towel and blaming a worsening situation: a lack of nearby office workers.

More operators are deciding to shut their locations, citing the diminished foot traffic and the city's failure to generate the level of business necessary to remain sustainable. Since the beginning of February, at least three restaurants have closed in a sign that, while the pandemic may be over, the fallout is still dealing heavy blows to the local economy.

What's more, some operators say, the worst is yet to come.

"Downtown didn’t recover," Robert Thompson, the owner of Denver's Three Saints Revival, said in a statement. "The staggeringly low office buildings’ occupancy is killing so many businesses that count on people visiting and working downtown. Three Saints Revival is just one of many recent closures of beloved restaurants in downtown Denver, and we’re certainly, and unfortunately, not going to be the last.”

The Mediterranean restaurant at 1801 Wewatta St., opened by Thompson in late 2021 as "a place filled with colors and flavors that brought joy to people as they emerged from their COVID hibernation," hosted its last service Feb. 18. Other restaurants in the city that have closed within the past several weeks include Avelina in Denver's LoDo neighborhood as well as Ana's Norwegian Bakeri, which shut less than three months after its debut late last year.

Echoing Thompson, operators have blamed downtown's diminished office occupancy rate as the primary reason driving their decisions to permanently close.

Avelina owner Kevin Jennings took to the online review platform Yelp to air his frustrations over the challenges restaurant operators have faced in recent years, with many still struggling to recover from the destruction wrought by the global pandemic.

“We lost thousands and thousands of dollars trying to stay open after COVID,” Jennings wrote on Yelp in response to a customer complaining about their canceled reservation. “LoDo offices are empty. We can’t even do one-half of the sales we were achieving before COVID. We paid to keep the place open for the last two years. We are now closed for good. Cry me a river about your dinner reservations."

The effects of hybrid work policies, coupled with lower attendance rates, closed or relocated offices and increasingly dispersed workforces, have simmered into a complicated stew for restaurants and other downtown businesses that previously relied on the steady, five-day-per-week schedules most employees maintained before the pandemic's outbreak.

To make matters worse, office tenants continue to slash their real estate footprints to make what remaining space they have more efficient. Companies collectively handed back roughly 65 million square feet last year across the United States, according to CoStar data, bringing the total to more than 180 million square feet of move-outs since the start of 2020.

Low attendance rates and a pullback in hiring have pushed the national office vacancy rate to a record high of nearly 14%, according to the data. In Denver, the downtown vacancy rate is more than twice that amount at about 30%. That is one of the highest rates in the country and is largely attributable to tenant downsizings and large-scale offloads.

More than 220 Denver restaurants permanently closed between July 2022 and 2023, according to data from the Colorado Restaurant Association, accounting for a roughly 11% slice of the city's entire restaurant scene. That also stands in stark contrast to the 3% to 5% annual growth reported in the years leading up to the pandemic as hopeful operators chased after the crowds that previously populated areas such as downtown Denver.

“The challenges facing Denver’s local restaurants are daunting — remote work reducing foot traffic, safety concerns related to the unhoused population downtown, and a minimum wage surpassing major cities like Los Angeles and New York,” Colorado Restaurant Association President and CEO Sonia Riggs said in a statement to CoStar News.

All of that has meant operators such as Three Saints Revival's Thompson, many of whom already run on extremely thin margins, are left with one of two options: rework a business model reliant upon steady foot traffic or close for good.

"The office buildings in downtown Denver and the surrounding blocks remain mostly empty," the restaurant recently posted on Instagram to announce its closing. "That, combined with economic and other forces, has made it impossible to stay in business. It’s time to pull up our stakes and move on.”