The new operators of the Brown Palace Hotel & Spa weren’t familiar with the centuries-spanning history of the building when they took charge in February. But they knew who was: the staff and customers who’d worked and eaten inside its restaurants and grown attached to a totem of downtown Denver.
New York-based Highgate, an international hospitality management company, is now starting to adopt some of their recommendations. The dining room of the Palace Arms, for instance, introduced a new steak frites concept over the summer called Le Palais Frites, while the nautically themed seafood restaurant, Ship Tavern, is debuting a raw bar and seasonal plates this month to bolster its menu.
But there are more changes on the horizon, said Edward Tracy, the hotel’s new food and beverage director.
“There’s a plan laid out over the next weeks and months of refreshing each space and making them even more unique,” Tracy said. “Not rushing them, making sure we do it the correct way.”
Tracy, who hails from the hospitality mecca of Las Vegas, came to Denver this summer to implement the changes. David Varley, Highgate’s regional vice president of food and beverage, had arrived months earlier to inspect the hotel, meet the staff and prepare the menus.
Breathing life into the Palace Arms was a focal point. The fine-dining restaurant had lost its relevance following the coronavirus pandemic, Varley said, its high prices giving the impression it was “prohibitively expensive.”
“We asked the staff, ‘Hey, tell us about the good old days,'” Varley said. “‘What was awesome about this room? What do people talk about still and what would they remember?”
The room itself, full of Napoleonic artifacts and maximalist old-school elegance, needed no changes. The menu did.
“We wanted a good hook for people to just give us a chance again,” he said.
The $49 prix fixe menu, which Varley adopted from a restaurant he founded in San Francisco, consists of three courses. Customers can choose between flat iron steak, half a chicken or roasted Portobello mushrooms for an entree and order as many refills of duck-fat fries as they want.
There are upgrades for every course, including the return of tableside Caesar salad service for an additional $18, half a dozen oysters for $20 or lobster thermidor for $49. Dessert involves either a Napoleon pastry or bananas foster flambé, prepared tableside.
The Ship Tavern didn’t need major cosmetic changes, either, but Tracy did organize the clutter among the room’s thousand and one sea-worthy artifacts and spruced up the table settings.
New dishes at the tavern include seafood platters, Colorado rainbow trout, yellowfish tuna tartare and a 1-pound lobster roll for $46.
By reinvesting in service and updating menus, the new caretakers said they are hoping to move the hotel past a rough patch that brought it to the brink of chaos last year.
The Brown Palace is perhaps best known for its tall, delicate atrium, where families with young children dress up for a cup of tea and finger food as a pianist plays softly in the background. The hotel’s ground floor also claims a cigar bar, Churchill Bar, and Ellyngton’s, a breakfast and brunch restaurant.
The Palace Arms inside the Brown Palace Hotel on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025. (Photo by Daniel Brenner/Special to The Denver Post)
Former hotel employees decried the direction the Brown Palace was taking under its owner, Crescent Real Estate LLC, and its former management company, HEI Hotels & Resorts. Burst pipes and broken boilers, flooded guest and dining rooms and a new set of inexperienced valets and bellhops all contributed to a drop in quality reflected in the luxury hotel’s rating.
Crescent Real Estate brought on Highgate, which operates hotels around the world. Both companies have a large presence in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The shake-up has required Varley and Tracy to quickly acquaint themselves with the hotel. What struck them the most was the passion longtime employees and visitors had for it. Their opinions became paramount.
“What they used to eat, what they used to drink, how the atmosphere used to feel and doing our best to smartly replicate that,” Tracy said. “You can’t bring everything back, but we can get darn close to it.”
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