Denver chef and restaurateur Jennifer Jasinski and her business partner Beth Gruitch are stepping away from managing two of their restaurants and they’re closing a third one.
Stoic & Genuine, their seafood concept at the city’s Union Station food hall, will close as of Sept. 1 as the lease expires. The restaurateurs cited “changing market conditions” as a reason for shuttering the restaurant.
Jasinski and Gruitch have signed a lease extension for Rioja, their fine-dining restaurant in Larimer Square in Downtown Denver that’s celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.
They are handing over management of their two other restaurants, Ultreia and Bistro Vendôme, to veteran team members.
“Conductors pass the baton. It’s time to pass along stewardship of these beautiful places,” said Jasinski, who was inducted to Nation’s Restaurant News’ MenuMasters Hall of Fame in 2021. “Surviving the pandemic and the changes to downtown Denver has left us in a great place to make this move.”
Rioja also was inducted into NRN’s Fine Dining Hall of Fame in 2011, and Jasinski won the James Beard Foundation’s Restaurant and Chef Award for Best Chef in the Southwest for Rioja in 2013.
Adam Branz is returning to Ultreia, the group’s Spanish and Portuguese tapas restaurant in Union Station, as sole operating partner. He had left Jasinski and Gruitch’s company, Crafted Concepts, several years ago to develop Split Lip, an Eat Place, which he will continue operating.
In a release announcing the changes, the company said Branz was instrumental in creating Ultreia, where he was opening chef and partner.
The group’s other restaurant, Bistro Vendôme, is being handed over to Tim Kuklinski, who has been with Crafted Concepts for 18 years and has been the group’s culinary director since 2019.
Jasinski and Gruitch will retain their ownership of the restaurants and will continue to operate Crafted Concepts as a consulting firm, but the three restaurants will be operated independently.
Branz and Kuklinski plan no major changes in the restaurants, although they will make “minor tweaks” to the concepts, menus, beverage programs, and staffing, according to the release.
Gruitch said in a statement that she and Jasinski had always planned to step back from the restaurants.
“Our plan from the start was to turn these restaurants over to the next generation of restaurateurs and that’s our plan today,” she said.
Branz has worked at Crafted Concepts’ now-closed Euclid Hall and Rioja before becoming Bistro Vendôme’s chef de cuisine in 2014. He went on to run the kitchen at Ultreia before venturing out on his own.
Kuklinski has headed up the kitchens of all of the Crafted Concepts restaurants and was named Outstanding Professional by the Colorado Restaurant Association in 2018.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
