Aspen on Brink of Last Mi Chola Cinco de Mayo Party
An Aspen staple is about to close its doors — but not before one more early-May rager.
Mi Chola’s Cinco de Mayo party is back for its last hurrah, beginning at 5 p.m. on May 5 at 411 E. Main Street with DJ Naka G providing tunes. Owner Darren Chapple expects the business will have at least 200 to 300 people coming into the establishment on the day, as it welcomes its last summer season. The happy hour menu will be available for the entire day.
“There’s amazing memories in this place on that date,” Chapple said, who has co-owned the business alongside Adam Malmgren until Malmgren stepped away a few months ago.
But a combination of post-COVID inflation and rising rent has forced the business to move on. Lowell Meyer, who owns the space, is raising the business’ rent from $42,000 to over $80,000 per month once the lease expires on Oct. 1, according to Chapple.
He said the business will be closing its doors a week prior to the end of the lease.
“It’s a very hard pill to swallow — there’s no doubt about it,” he said of the restaurant’s impending closure, adding, “This is a community that has given me so much, not just professionally but spiritually, athletically, culturally.”
He said he doesn’t know what the space will be used for in the future. After October, he will return to Santa Rosa, California, to run the other restaurant he owns, La Rosa.
Chapple began his time in the Main Street corner space long before Mi Chola opened in 2016. He initially worked at The Cantina, one of Mi Chola’s Mexican restaurant predecessors in the space, as part of the wait staff in 1996.
In 2002, after getting permission from a previous owner of the business, he completely revamped The Cantina with Troy Selby, who now owns and operates the Silverpeak Grill.
“And we just on a dime, just changed the menu, changed the vibe, changed the concept, and it just blew up,” Chapple said.
He carried on for the next six to seven years running the business with help from Malmgren, who was a key employee at the time.
Around 2009, Chapple stepped away from the restaurant business for a few years, at which point it fell under new management and was changed to El Rincon. After that business closed in 2015, he signed a lease for the space, opening Mi Chola on May 4, 2016, with Malmgren.
From then on, the business’ goal was to be locally-serving for the Aspen community, providing affordable food, drinks, and a good time, which it did very successfully for the following several years.
“The locals took care of us,” Chapple said. “They always showed up. We were always busy.”
But after the pandemic, the business was strained by inflation.
“We’ve had to raise our prices and scale back on the comps,” he said. “And that has been our hurdle for locals because I can’t imagine any local in the community that would disagree with me as far as how frustrated they are with the cost of everything going up.”
Danno Lahr, an Aspen local who moved to town in 1997, said Mi Chola and the other businesses that have operated out of the Main Street space are iconic and that the closure represents the decline in the town’s livability.
“Aspen’s a very, very special place,” Chapple said. “And I hate to leave it. I wish I could be a part of it forever.”
By: Skyler Stark-RagsdaleI The Aspen Times I April 26, 2025