Welcome to Nibbles, Boulder’s weekly food newsletter. Look for Nibbles every Tuesday in your inbox for a smorgasbord of Boulder County food and restaurant news, dining tips and cooking hacks.

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In this week’s Nibbles, I tour the second-year Lafayette Farmers Market, which features a distinctive roster of local farmers, bakeries and food businesses and serves as an introduction to the culinary attractions of South Public Road. Plus: I check out some perfect buns, share news about a new Boulder chocolate shop and share a recipe for chipotle meatballs from the Boulder County Farmers Markets. 

Stay tuned: Expect some new Boulder County restaurants to be added to the Colorado Michelin Guide when its 2026 selections are announced Sept. 14. 

— John Lehndorff

Join us to celebrate the 2026 City of Boulder Climate Resilient Landscape Showcase! We are celebrating creative and inspiring landscapes in our community! View a gallery walk and enjoy light food and refreshments, which will be followed by a keynote speech and a presentation of awards to community members. Saturday, Sept. 12 • 6-8:30 p.m.

Strolling through the Lafayette Farmers Market on a recent Sunday morning was like going to food church and seeing so many familiar local friends and faces. Walking along several blocks of South Public Road between Cleveland and Geneseo streets, I shouted greetings to Fadya Beckta, who was offering pistachio baklava from Lafayette’s Kismet Cafe, Susan Loriho from Susan’s Samosas, and hummus master Adam Bratter of Falafayette. 

While there are some favorite vendors from the Boulder and Longmont markets like Mountain Girl Pickles, the producer-focused Lafayette Farmers Market is refreshing because it showcases fresh faces, especially from eastern Boulder County. Featured local growers include Unsung Farm, Switch Gears Farm, Speedwell Farm and Lafayette’s Three Leaf Farm — the latter supplies restaurants including Chautauqua Dining Hall and the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse. Among the strictly local vendors are NOCO Chocolates and Weedhart Pies from Erie, Crunchology granola from Broomfield, and Longmont’s Rising Tiger and Five Freedoms Dairy. 

Chef Devin Keopraphay prepares stuffed scallion pancakes at his Rising Tiger booth at the Lafayette Farmers Market. Credit: Lafayette Farmers Market

Lafayette-based vendors range from De Los Andes Empanadas to the Freshly Laid Food Truck.  

As a baked goods fan, I was pleased to see long lines at Get Right’s Bakery, Cherry Eyes native frybread and Jenerous, a gluten-free bakery. A longtime favorite cottage bakery, Daily Grains, expects to open a brick-and-mortar bakery on South Public Road soon. I had a great time talking about pie with Jocelyn Su, a crust-loving speech-language pathologist who operates Penny’s Pie Shop out of a commissary kitchen. I paired her fine cherry frangipane pie — with its buttery, beautifully laminated crust — with an iced cold brew from Chocolaterie Stam.

Speech-language pathologist Jocelyn Su operates Penny’s Pie Shop out of a Lafayette commissary kitchen. Credit: Lafayette Farmers Market

The Lafayette Farmers Market was opened in 2025 by Peter and Margo Wanberg, who launched the City Park Farmers Market in Denver in 2021.  

“I owned a coffee roasting company for 10 years and ran a couple of cafes. Margo was an elementary school teacher, but she was also a beekeeper. We started selling at farmers markets in Denver. The market customers were amazing, but the market didn’t seem like it was being focused on the farmers,” Peter Wanberg says. 

“We oriented City Park Farmers Market to be a producer’s focused market. It was simple: ‘You can’t resell Cuties from the grocery store.’ Boulder was really the only one doing it in that way originally.”

The couple and their children settled in a Lafayette home several years ago. 

“We moved here and said, ‘Why isn’t there a farmers market?’ Everybody said that Lafayette was too sleepy of a place,” Peter Wanberg says. The crowds at the weekly market in Lafayette have proved those doubters wrong. 

“Lafayette is a totally different market and demographic from Denver or Boulder, with an older population as well as a lot of young families who are really strong grocery buyers. We want to grow more local food consumers in our area, and the best way to make that happen is to meet the people growing and making the food. We operate a marketplace for a bunch of small businesses every week and tell their stories to the community,” he says. 

Visiting the market also reminds foodies about the wealth of nearby Lafayette attractions, including Bee’s Thai Kitchen and Saigon District One. South Public Road is a mile of food and drink stops ranging from the new Remi’s Cajun Creole Restaurant to the venerable Efrain’s Mexican Restaurant. 

As the market season winds down, there are other local farmers markets well worth visiting, including the Louisville Farmers Market on Saturday, Lyons Farmers Market on Sunday, the Erie Farmers Market on Thursday and the monthly Superior Market. 

Strollers pack the busy Lafayette Farmers Market on a recent Sunday morning. Credit: Lafayette Farmers Market

Found: Football-shaped buns for serious fall sandwiches

The problem with most fancy buns, be they sourdough or brioche, is that they simply lack structural integrity. It’s sad when you are forced to eat your disintegrated sandwich with a fork. My go-to bun is the baguette-inspired bolillo baked at Panaderia Sabor a Mexico in Boulder. The football-shaped roll, typically used for messy Mexican tortas, is sturdy enough to hold up when piled high with fillings, veggies and condiments. Panaderia Sabor a Mexico also offers conchas, empanadas, cookies, tres leches cakes, Mexican groceries, and pinatas that resemble a certain political figure.

Bolillo buns baked by Boulder’s Panaderia Sabor a Mexico are ideal for oversized, messy sandwiches. Credit: John Lehndorff

DAR Chocolate to open NoBo tasting room

NoBo’s booming food and drink scene is gaining a new attraction. DAR Chocolate will open a shop and tasting room next door to Moxie Bread Co./Nude Foods Market at 4593 Broadway. Thornton-based DAR is a single-origin, bean-to-bar chocolatier. Other recent North Broadway additions include The Brothl and a French bistro, Cinq à Sept.   

As a lifelong fan of halvah, the sweet Middle Eastern sesame treat, I was delighted to discover a local producer. Lakewood-based Har Matok Foods produces Vah!, small-batch artisan halvah infused with pistachios, dark cocoa, coffee, matcha or almonds. Can’t wait to taste it. 

CU Campus Dining & Hospitality — the folks who feed the students — has launched USEFULL, a new, free reusable takeout container program on the Boulder campus to replace mountains of disposable containers. 

Bean-to-bar chocolatier DAR Chocolate will open a shop and tasting room at 4593 N. Broadway. Courtesy of DAR Chocolate

Opening

Longmont Supply, the rooftop bar and restaurant at the new Hotel Longmont, is open at 508 Third Ave.

Late-summer food fests celebrate sober sipping and Ethiopian tastes

The sober-curious are invited to the annual Dry Hop Fest Sept. 12 at Denver’s Champa Street Gym. The state’s largest tasting of non-alcoholic beverages includes NA craft beer, cocktails, spirits, hop waters and wines. According to event organizers: “All participants are asked to practice 48 hours of sobriety before attending, to allow us to show up as our whole selves.” Register here.  

The Taste of Ethiopia Food Festival, Sept. 12-13 in Denver’s City Park, features traditional buna coffee ceremonies, cultural performances and authentic fare from local eateries including Lafayette’s Ras Kassa’s Ethiopian Food, which originally opened south of Boulder in 1988. 

Friends Farm in Lafayette hosts a Sept. 12 farm tour and bilingual (English/Spanish) food preservation workshop. Register here. 

Chipotle-fired meatballs feature locally raised beef

This week, the Boulder County Farmers Markets profiles the local ranchers at Grama Grass who raise cattle sustainably on public and private property to restore soils, reduce drought impacts and mitigate fire damage. They share a recipe for meatballs fired up with chipotle chiles in adobo sauce. Get the recipe here.

You can also find a wealth of fresh produce and locally produced foods at the many roadside farm stands across Boulder County. Follow this guide. 

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. … Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.” ― Wendell Berry, 1934-2026

Wendell Berry was a beloved American poet, environmental activist and farmer. Credit: Guy Mendes

Want more Boulder bites?

Check out recent editions of Nibbles:

🍕 Longmont stakes a claim as Colorado’s pizza capital

🧀 Artisan cheesemaking returns to Boulder County at Dolly Mama’s

🍝 Meet the family behind 25 years of Il Pastaio in Boulder


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John Lehndorff is Boulder Reporting Lab’s food editor. A Massachusetts native, he has lived in Boulder since 1976 and has written about food and culture here for nearly five decades. His Nibbles column has run since 1985, and he also serves as Food Editor of Colorado Avid Golfer magazine and Exhibit Historian for the Museum of Boulder’s upcoming Boulder Eats exhibit. A former restaurant cook, caterer and cooking teacher, he has been Food and Features Editor of the Daily Camera, Senior Editor at the Aurora Sentinel, and Dining Critic for the Rocky Mountain News. His writing has appeared in Westword, Yellow Scene, the Washington Post and USA Today. Nationally recognized as a pie expert, he is the former Executive Director of the American Pie Council and longtime Chief Judge at the National Pie Championships. He has hosted Radio Nibbles on KGNU-FM for more than 30 years and co-hosts Kitchen Table Talk.