The Aspen Airport Business Center, known locally as the ABC, is three miles west of downtown on Highway 82, across from the airport. It offers a range of dining options for people in West Aspen.
It holds roughly 300 businesses and about the same number of residential units, tucked in among the warehouses, the FedEx counter, and the only CrossFit box in Aspen. It is also, quietly, where a James Beard-nominated chef is opening her second restaurant, and where a 21-year-old health food institution is being replaced by a family pub built specifically for the people who live within walking distance. Together, these new restaurants add to the ABC's role as a gathering place for the neighborhood.
How the ABC Grew Alongside Aspen
The ABC exists for a specific reason, and it isn't scenery. As the Aspen Times reported, in the mid-1960s, as Aspen's reputation as an international resort outgrew the commercial core downtown, developer John McBride, working with the late Fritz Benedict, planned a site west of town where the city's more industrial businesses could operate without competing for space against ski shops and hotels. The original vision was modest: a small number of live-work units. But as Aspen housing costs climbed past what working locals could afford, apartments and condos went up alongside the warehouses, and the ABC became something closer to a small town of its own.
The early tenants tell you what kind of place it was built to be. Jack Reese opened a small grocery market there in the mid-1970s, later bought out by Tom Clark, who still runs it. Pete Stone started Airport Liquor. Dudley's Diner became a neighborhood staple until it closed in the mid-1990s, eventually succeeded by other restaurants including Cecily's, still open today. Klaus Obermeyer built his warehouse and office complex there in the late 1970s, and Obermeyer Ski Wear has stayed put ever since. Ski.com, now the largest wholesaler and retailer of ski vacations in the country, keeps its offices there too, alongside Aspen Skiing Company. The ABC offered space at a fraction of Main Street rent while remaining close to town.
Housing pockets like North 40, Alpine Grove Condominiums, Annie Mitchell Homestead, and Burlingame sit within walking distance, which is exactly the population the ABC's food scene has always fed first and tourists second.
Mawa McQueen's Next ABC Restaurant
Mawa McQueen has been cooking in the ABC since 2004, when she opened a catering kitchen there. By late 2014, that catering operation had become a sit-down breakfast and lunch spot, Mawa's Kitchen, in a 12-table space you enter through the working kitchen. When she added regular dinner service, she called it what it was: the first upscale dinner restaurant the ABC had ever seen.
This fall, McQueen is opening a second concept two doors down, in Suite J at 305 ABC. Mawita will serve Spanish and Mediterranean small plates with Afro-fusion touches, plantain bravas and truffled grit croquettes alongside a Za'atar-spiced grilled red snapper. It replaces a Mawa Tapas & Wine Bar location in Snowmass Base Village that closed in spring 2025.
"Mawita is a space to gather, share and revel in our warm mountain town energy."
Mawita will also run something called Industry Hours every Monday through the winter, from 3 to 7 p.m., a standing invitation for Roaring Fork Valley workers to gather with a complimentary drink and chips and salsa during one of the busiest stretches of the tourism season. That's not a marketing gimmick aimed at visitors. It's a restaurant explicitly building its slow afternoon around the people who work the shifts nobody else is thinking about.
The Pub Replacing a 21-Year Institution
Down the row at 316 ABC, the space that housed Mountain Naturals, a health food store that had served the business center for 21 years under owner Anthony Smith, gave way this year to Winston and Frazier's Neighborhood Pub. The owners, Aspen native Aidan Wynn and longtime restaurateur Mark Reece, named it after Wynn's two dogs. Wynn has worked in Aspen's restaurant scene for years, including as a part owner at El Rincon and a manager at Mezzaluna, so this isn't an outsider's read on what the ABC needs.
The Aspen Times reported that the pub's owners hoped to continue the old tenant's legacy:
"Continuing Anthony Smith's legacy of providing affordable food for the people of the ABC."
The menu leans toward basics built for families rather than a curated tasting experience: steak, salmon, hand-cut fries, salads, deep-dish pizza, with televisions and NFL viewing packages for game days. Wynn has said directly that the pub is meant to serve the families living in North 40, Alpine Grove Condominiums, Annie Mitchell Homestead, and Burlingame, the residential clusters that ring the business center. A health food store closing after two decades and being replaced by a sports pub sounds like a loss of character until you notice both businesses were solving the same problem: getting affordable, sit-down food to the people who actually live nearby, on their schedule rather than a visitor's.
What Was Already Working, and Why It Stuck Around
The ABC's food scene didn't appear overnight, and some of its oldest tenants are still doing exactly what made them useful in the first place. The French Pastry Cafe, originally opened in 2007 by France natives Franck and Marilyn Thirion as Franck Thirion Cafe, earned a following for croissants and baguettes made the way you'd expect from a Dijon bakery. When the Thirions stepped back after eleven years, longtime employee Margarita Alvarez bought the business in 2018 and kept the pastry program intact while adding her own touches, taco and enchilada specials, the occasional tres leches cake, drawing on her roots in Querétaro, Mexico.
A few doors over, Francesca's Pasta Market grew out of a similar story. Its owner, who moved to Aspen from Argentina, started by selling fresh pasta from a shop next to City Market and empanadas at the Aspen Saturday Market before opening a catering kitchen in the ABC and eventually a storefront named after his daughter. Fresh pappardelle, fettuccine, and spaghetti in egg, beet, squid ink, carrot, and spinach varieties now sit alongside ravioli and lasagna, plus breakfast empanadas that didn't exist a few winters ago.
If you're mapping out where to eat in the ABC, here's the current lineup, plus what's opening this fall:
- Mawa's Kitchen at 305 ABC, with Mawita opening two doors down this fall
- French Pastry Cafe, the original bakery under new ownership
- Francesca's Pasta Market
- Winston and Frazier's Neighborhood Pub, new this year in the former Mountain Naturals space
- Home Team BBQ, Carreno's Cafe and Grill, Red Mountain Grill, and Cecily's
- Pussyfoot Steeps for coffee
That's not a food court built for convenience. It's a cluster of owner-operated businesses, several of them run by the same people for a decade or more.
What's Coming Next
The ABC's own literature already flags a project called the Lumberyard as something that will bring more local customers through the business center, a sign that the people who manage the property expect the same pattern to continue. Given that a chef with James Beard recognition is opening a second restaurant there, and that a neighborhood pub is replacing a health food store on the same premise of serving the families who actually live nearby, that expectation looks reasonable rather than optimistic.
None of this makes the ABC a destination in the way Main Street is a destination. It was never built to be one. It began as a place for industrial businesses outside Aspen's commercial core; over time, apartments and condos joined the warehouses.
If you live in West Aspen and haven't made it out to the ABC lately, it's worth the five-minute drive. And if you're thinking through what life in this part of the valley actually looks like day to day, from the businesses that keep it running to the neighborhoods that surround it, Brittanie Rockhill has spent years watching this corner of Aspen change and is always glad to talk through it. Schedule a confidential consultation whenever the conversation turns from where to grab lunch to what comes next.
