Mustard’s Last Stand, a 49-year-old Chicago-style hot dog restaurant and Boulder staple, will have to leave its current location because the city is planning to demolish its building. The timeline has been known for more than a decade.
What’s unclear is whether the community is saying goodbye to Mustard’s site, or the restaurant itself.
Mustard’s rents space in Park Central, a city-owned building slated for demolition in late 2027 or early 2028 due to its location in a high-risk area of the Boulder Creek floodplain. City code adopted after its construction prohibits new development in that area. The situation has been public since at least 2013, when The Daily Camera ran the story: “Boulder’s Mustard’s making its last stand.”
“For the last 10 years, people were coming in and saying, ‘Oh, you’re still here. I thought you were closed,’ because they saw that headline,” Mustard’s co-owner Dan Polovin told Boulder Reporting Lab.
For years, Polovin believed the city would find the restaurant a new home as part of its redesign of the Civic Area, the area along Boulder Creek between the Farmers Market and the main Boulder Public Library. The city’s 2015 master plan called for considering “opportunities for Mustard’s to continue to be part of the future development of the Civic Area” after its building was demolished.
“It was no contract, but it was a good faith statement that Mustard’s, Dushanbe Teahouse and the Farmers Market were stakeholders in the Civic Area, and they would do their best to find us a new home,” Polovin said.
“[After] all the talk of helping me, I’m finally saying: Give me something concrete, a proposal. It’s gotten to be just lip service.”
Mustard’s has not secured such a commitment from the city, though Parks and Recreation Director Ali Rhodes said city staff are researching alternative locations to propose to Polovin and forming a cross-departmental team to discuss options.
“We have a track record of helping displaced businesses find suitable location options, including some reasonable relocation cost assistance, as demonstrated by our efforts related to the Hill hotel development work,” she said.
Polovin said relocating elsewhere in the city is “definitely doable,” but financial and permitting hurdles would make it difficult. He said he’s not committed to staying open if Mustard’s needs to leave the area.
“How motivated are we? That’s what we’re trying to decide, especially being spoiled with the location,” he said. “There’s been food on that corner of Broadway and Arapahoe for 100 years.”
In 1930, Boulder’s first drive-in restaurant, True’s Thirst Shop, opened at the site. After True’s, various restaurants occupied the space before Mustard’s opened in 1978.
Will Mustard’s have a place in the Civic Area?
City spokesperson Sarah Huntley said that it is still possible the Civic Area could include a place for Mustard’s. Some concepts include restaurants along the East Bookend, near the Dushanbe Teahouse and Farmers Market.
The problem, Huntley said, is that the city won’t decide specific uses for the East Bookend, including whether it will include restaurants, until 2027 or later. Mustard’s will need to vacate its building by mid-2027, when city staff move out.
Rhodes said that the city will decide how to use the East Bookend based on site planning with a selected private partner.
The city plans to release a request for proposals for that partner this summer.
Polovin said he expects competition and that the city’s search for a private partner feels “backwards” to him.
“You’re asking developers to come tell you what you want,” he said. “To me, it’s like: We got an idea. Let’s find the money. This is: We got the money, now let’s find an idea.”
The city has not set a construction timeline. But Polovin said that if there were a spot in the Civic Area, the delay won’t matter.
“I’m old and decrepit. I’m 76,” he joked, “But my partner, he’s a younger guy, he’s full of energy,” referring to 23-year-old co-owner Dave Goodhart.
“The point is, by the time they finalize whatever their plans are, and they had an offer for us and it sounded good, of course we’d be interested,” he said.
Community push to keep Mustard’s
The news of Mustard’s departure resurfaced last month after Historic Boulder, a nonprofit with a mission to preserve historic buildings and longtime Boulder businesses, encouraged residents to visit the restaurant.
“We just want to bring attention to longtime businesses that express the spirit of Boulder,” Leonard Segel, Historic Boulder’s former executive director, said. “Every time we lose one, it’s like a little cut.”
The news struck a nerve, particularly after the recent closure of the Dark Horse, another longtime Boulder restaurant.
Lines formed out the door, and Polovin said the crowds keep coming.
“It’s been the busiest five days we’ve ever had following that. We couldn’t be more thrilled about that,” he said.
“I would love to see it stay downtown somewhere,” said Historic Boulder’s new executive director, Tim Plass. “There aren’t many places like this. We do fancy really well. We don’t have too many hot dog stands.”
Why Mustard’s has to move
Since news spread, Huntley said there has been confusion about why the building is being demolished.
Some believe it is for redevelopment. Others think it is flood mitigation. She said neither is correct.
The building is being demolished because it sits in a floodway, land reserved to carry floodwaters where permanent structures are not allowed.
No new flood mitigation is being proposed.
The building’s location is fairly unique. Nearby city buildings, like the library and Penfield Tate II Municipal Building, are at risk in the event of a “100-year flood” — a major flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year — but are not in a floodway.
Huntley said the Civic Area redesign envisions parkland and a “nature hub” at the Mustard’s site, because flood risks make it the “only appropriate use.”
A document from the city’s Request for Interest for the Civic Area partnership calls the future nature hub near Mustard’s current location an “opportunity for future development” that “could be considered for partnership,” despite it being in the floodway.
Rhodes said that any development there “would require funding and site regrading to raise the elevation of any area to include a permanent structure above the High Hazard [flood] zone.”
One iteration of the plan includes a beer garden. Why not make it Mustard’s?
Why not preserve the section of the builing that houses Mustard’s when they knock down the rest of the building. Seperate Mustards and remodel as a stand-alone structure – leaving it right where it is.
I’d love to know how this is “floodway”, despite the building sitting well above all the projected 50, 100, and 500-year flood demarkations on the Gilbert F. White memorial; which literally across the street from Mustard’s. More crackerjack journalisms from the BRL, I guess. Since rather than challenge a dubious claim, they repeat it like gospel..
Hi Garrett, you can check the FEMA map that places Mustard’s building in a regulatory floodway here: https://hazards-fema.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=8b0adb51996444d4879338b5529aa9cd