Downtown Aspen Keeps Getting Its Old Names Back
Why would anyone name a bar after a concept that had already failed twice in the same room?
That is the practical question sitting in the basement at 320 South Mill Street this year. Since the original restaurant there closed in the mid-1990s, the space has operated as Acme Bar & Grill, then The Grottos, then Cabos, with two separate owners trying to revive the name Golden Horn in between, once in 2003 and again in 2017. Neither version lasted. This June, new owners went back to the name a third time. Two blocks away, on the second floor above one of Aspen's oldest bars, a nonprofit that had been searching for a permanent home since 1991 finally got one, in a building where Billie Holiday once sang. Both openings happened within the last year, and both are the same kind of story: downtown Aspen isn't chasing new addresses so much as reclaiming the ones it already had.
If you live near the core, this matters more than another restaurant list. It tells you something about how this particular few blocks actually works.
The original Golden Horn opened in December 1949, started by Steve Knowlton, a 10th Mountain Division veteran who moved to Aspen in 1945 and bought the corner lot near Wagner Park for $1,000. He put a ski shop on the ground floor and a bar and restaurant in the basement below it. For nearly 47 years, that basement served milk-fed veal as its signature dish, drew John Wayne and Gary Cooper through the door, and hosted live sets from Miles Davis. When it finally closed, the room didn't sit empty. It became a rotation of concepts, none of which held on to the name or the identity for long:
Both revivals eventually reverted back to Cabos. That's the version John Bukac and Sam Hayes found when they started planning their own concept in late 2021, the same year Eric's Bar, another downtown institution, announced it would close the following year. Bukac and Hayes had both spent years behind the bar at places like Meat and Cheese and Matsuhisa, and losing Eric's left a gap they wanted to fill. It took them nearly five years to get the new Golden Horn open.
The pool tables inside the new Golden Horn came directly out of Eric's Bar, re-felted and left free to play. The bar rail was salvaged from the Compromise Mine. Shutters lining the base of the bar came from the Mountain Chalet, which is currently mid-renovation. Ceiling beams were pulled from the building that used to house Cantina and Mi Chola, and stained glass from the closed Paragon now greets guests at the entrance. Portions of the walls still show the original exposed rubble from when the building went up. Near the entrance, roughly twenty portraits make up what Bukac and Hayes call the Aspen Wall of Fame, including Hunter S. Thompson and Bonnie Rayburn, who ran her own restaurant on Aspen Mountain for seventeen years. A copy of the original Golden Horn menu hangs nearby.
None of this is trying to recreate the 1949 restaurant with white tablecloths. The new menu runs to salads, protein bowls, burgers and wings, with an eight-dollar shot-and-a-beer special and a golf simulator in the back.
"It's approachable food and drink for the workhorses in town," Bukac told the Aspen Daily News.
The Golden Horn is open 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week, on the pedestrian mall a block off Wagner Park.
The Red Onion has been Aspen's bar since 1892, and it has been closed for several years while it undergoes its own renovation. In 1952, during that year's Winterskol festival, Billie Holiday played two nights there as part of a six-night Aspen ski trip. Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington all performed in the same room around the same era, booked by a Chicago promoter named John Silber.
Jazz Aspen Snowmass founded in 1991 and spent the next three decades without a permanent stage of its own, running its JAS Café concert series out of borrowed rooms including the basement of the Little Nell and the Aspen Art Museum. In 2018, the space above the Red Onion became available, and JAS decided to build there. Construction started in June 2023. The Paul JAS Center, named for a $10 million gift from local venture capitalist and JAS board chairman Andy Paul, opened on December 19, 2025, with a private concert by Trombone Shorty and a public show the following night. The building's total campaign raised more than $34 million.
In its first three months, the center hosted roughly 30 concerts, many of them at or near capacity. This past June, JAS opened the terrace doors for the first time during its June Experience festival, letting the music spill down onto the Cooper Avenue mall for passersby. The center still offers discounted tickets for Roaring Fork Valley residents, a detail that matters if you're the one walking past it on a Tuesday rather than flying in for a weekend.
The pattern isn't limited to bars and music venues. The Isis Theatre opened in 1915 and remains the only full-time movie theater in Aspen. This month, it hosts the 47th edition of Aspen Filmfest, running September 22 through 27, with tickets that went on sale September 1. It's the same building doing the same job it's done for over a century, in a downtown where a lot of other addresses have changed hands, names, and purposes multiple times over.
None of this is a story about Aspen resisting change. Downtown's restaurant and retail scene turns over constantly, and plenty of new concepts have opened this year without any connection to what came before them. What's different about the Golden Horn and the Paul JAS Center is that both landed on the same conclusion after years of searching: the value was already sitting in the building. One took three tries to get the name to stick. The other took 34 years and $34 million to finally settle into a room it had circled since 2018.
If you're walking the mall this fall, that's worth knowing before you decide the Golden Horn is just another sports bar or the room above the Red Onion is just another concert venue. Both are downtown Aspen doing something it seems to do reasonably well: letting an old address earn a second chapter instead of starting over somewhere new.
If you're weighing what that kind of staying power is actually worth in the buildings around Cooper and Mill, Jennifer Banner works with buyers and sellers across Aspen's downtown core and offers a confidential consultation for anyone trying to read this neighborhood the way a longtime local would.
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