Just because you've been living in a town for a good while doesn't mean you know its history all that well. There are always stories to discover, so when a friend told me there was an exhibit at the Museum of Boulder about local restaurants I might remember, I decided to go. The museum, at 2205 Broadway, is right next door to the Carnegie Library for Local History where we'd researched the Boulder Theater story*, at the intersection of Pine and Broadway.
The Boulder Eats exhibit begins with a riot of signs and menus from Boulder restaurants that will call up fond memories for some visitors (well, this one for sure), including Tom's Tavern, Juanita's, the New York Deli, Daddy Bruce's BBQ, and the Zolo Grill. Along with more than 300 objects from their collection, the museum provides some history you might not have known...
It was news to this writer that Daddy Bruce Randoph, who died at 94 in 1994, was not the first African-American to open a restaurant in Boulder. That honor belongs to O.T. Jackson, who managed the Chautauqua Dining Hall in 1898, and later owned a seafood restaurant and an ice cream parlor. The exhibit notes his involvement in the 1910 founding of Dearfield, a farming community for African-Americans south of Greeley. Daddy Bruce made a more recent imprint on local history, also because of his community spirit. In the 60s he began serving free Thanksgiving dinners in Denver's City Park, at first offering a couple hundred meals from a portable grill. By the middle of the 80s Bruce was serving thousands of free dinners at his restaurant in Denver's Five Points neighborhood.
Exhibit displays a history of kitchen appliances including a Victorian-style cast iron stove, a later 1920s model, a circular metal ice box with 100-pound capacity, a Fifties-style stove and fridge, and a microwave. Exhibit historian and food writer John Lehndorff helped provide a timeline of Boulder's natural food businesses, including the 1969 founding of Celestial Seasonings followed in 1970 by the Green Mountain Grainary, the first health food store downtown, and first to offer Celestial Seasonings tea, the 1976 founding of Rudi's Organic Bakery, and the 1987 founding of Wild Oats Market, which became the 2nd largest natural foods chain nationally.
Owing to recent raids on food businesses in other states by ICE, the exhibit curators decided not to display photos of immigrants working in local food businesses. Instead, they posted the silhouette of a worker, and noted the large part immigrants have played in harvesting and preparing food.
The curators decided, however, to post a photo of a guy who worked as a janitor at The Sink on University Hill during his student days at CU. That was Robert Redford, who left us back in September. The Sink is still in business, though, at 1165 Thirteenth Street...
There's also an ongoing, award-winning exhibit in the Boulder Experience Gallery that provides a panorama of local history including racing bicycles recalling the Red Zinger classic (1975-'79), runners and wheelchair racers from the Bolder Boulder 10k that began in 1979 and has continued on every Memorial Day since, and a satellite recalling Ball Aerospace, also in Boulder.
The Boulder Experience also displays artifacts from deeper history as well, beginning with the stories of Chief Niwot and the Arapaho tribe, the true "legacy Americans" who first lived here, along with photos, musical instruments and clothing from the era of cattle ranches that began to take over after the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise restricted tribal land access.
Downstairs from the main level where you enter, there's an interactive children's area with geometric toys on the wall, and a mural of a VW Microbus with colors and symbols from the Summer of Love era. That seems appropriate (this is, after all, Boulder), and though I'd thought the artist had made a bit of an error in choosing the "bay window" bus with its curved windshield, I was off base. The "bay window" bus first appeared in August 1967, when it was still the Summer of Love, for the 1968 model year. In May of that year, students joined union workers on a national strike in France. But that story is for someone else's history museum...
*Footnote: The Boulder Eats exhibit on the history of food in Boulder will be open through July 26, 2026. The Museum of Boulder is open Mondays and Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM and is closed on Tuesdays. June through August, Monday hours change to noon to 8:00 PM. You can visit museumofboulder.org to confirm ticket prices, but we saw that children under 5 are free, kids 5-17 and college students are $8 (along with seniors), and that standard tickets are $10.
And "Roadside Attraction: The Boulder Theater", our history of the recently-restored Boulder Theater, appeared as our blog post for December 15, 2025.
Photo Credits:
All photos are by the author.
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