Ask a visitor where Aspen eats and they will point you toward Main Street, or the restaurant row on Hyman Avenue, or whichever chef just landed a write-up in a national food magazine. Ask someone who actually lives in West Aspen the same question on a Tuesday and they will point you three miles west on Highway 82, across from the airport, into a business park that most people driving to catch a flight never think to stop at.
That business park is the Aspen Airport Business Center, known locally as the ABC. 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 just chose to open her second restaurant instead of downtown, 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. Neither of those things happens in a place that's just a convenient lunch stop for warehouse workers. They happen in a place that has become the neighborhood's actual gathering point.
A Business Park Built Because Downtown Priced Out Its Own Workers
The ABC exists for a specific reason, and it isn't scenery. 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. None of these businesses need a downtown address. What they needed was space that cost a fraction of Main Street rent, and a place close enough to town to stay useful.
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.
The Chef Who Doubled Down Instead of Moving Downtown
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, instead of taking that momentum downtown, 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. That's worth sitting with for a second: given a choice between rebuilding in a resort village built for foot traffic and expanding in a business park three miles from downtown, McQueen chose the business park.
"Mawita is a space to gather, share and revel in our warm mountain town energy."
Mawita also runs 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.
Wynn framed the new pub as picking up where the old tenant left off:
"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 actually eat in the ABC right now, the current lineup includes:
- Mawa's Kitchen and Mawita, side by side at 305 ABC
- 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, each one having earned its lease renewal by staying useful to the neighborhood rather than chasing a tourist season.
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 just chose to expand there rather than move downtown, 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 was built as a release valve for a town that priced its own workers and tradespeople out of downtown, and sixty years later it's still doing that job, just with better croissants and a tapas bar.
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.
