At the old K-Mart at East Colfax and Chambers, the parking lot held food trucks while the stalls were unfinished. That description was accurate for years. The food hall opened this spring.
La Plaza Colorado spent nearly four years getting built, which is a strange thing to say about a project that opened its doors back in March 2024. The market portion opened then, but the 24 kitchens meant to anchor the food hall were still shipping containers and construction tape. What filled the gap was a rotating lineup of food trucks parked outside while the kitchens remained unfinished. As Westword reported, the food hall portion finally opened on the first weekend of April this spring. The date doubled as the property's second anniversary. The completed food hall adds 24 kitchens to the property.
Food Trucks Filled the Gap During Construction
Developer Doug McMurrain took occupancy of the building in December 2017 and bought it in April 2019. When COVID hit, every plan attached to a 152,000-square-foot former big box store got harder. Investors pulled back. Supply chains delayed construction. Costs on the original buildout doubled. The conversion took longer than planned, and food trucks operated in the parking lot while the food hall was still being built.
McMurrain started charging vendors $300 a month to set up in the lot and at one point had as many as fifty businesses running out of it, until Aurora's health department stepped in and the city worked with him to bring the vendors up to code. Tacos Guerrero, now one of the sit-down kitchens inside the finished hall, started exactly this way: a food truck in that same parking lot in 2021, run by Alberto Moreno and Elizabeth Martinez, named for the family's home state of Guerrero, Mexico. Their daughter Fernanda now helps run the stall version of the business, which serves green and white pozole, birria ramen, and pizza birria to people who used to have to catch them in the lot on the right day.
The food trucks filled a gap during construction, and the finished hall now stands as part of the larger property.
What Finished Actually Looks Like
The property sits on close to 13 acres and includes the 25,000-square-foot Ahorra Mucho grocery store, a joint venture between Lever Supermarkets and Save-A-Lot billed as the first of its kind in the country, plus a VASA Fitness location that opened earlier in the property's life and never had to wait on the food hall to function. The 24 kitchens are what took the longest, and McMurrain has said the average visitor now stays more than four hours once they're inside, which tracks with what the property actually offers: food, a full grocery run, an arcade with a VR setup called the Hyperdeck programmed with 225,000 experiences, a women's salon, a med spa, and El Mercado, the property's full-service bar. Westword has reported the completed space as the largest Hispanic food hall in the United States, a claim tied specifically to the finished kitchen count rather than the marketplace as a whole.
The live music that used to happen in whatever open space was available on a given Sunday has also grown into something more deliberate. The stage got relocated and expanded specifically to make room for a bigger dance floor, and McMurrain has talked about adding an outdoor summer concert series on top of what already runs inside.
The Week Now Has A Shape
La Plaza runs on a weekly schedule now. As of this August, the programming looks like this:
- Wednesdays, Family Movie Night starts at 6 p.m., with a rotating film projected in the main hall. Encanto played the first week of August. It's free.
- Thursdays, the Colorado Collectible Show runs a trade night at 5 p.m., built around Pokémon cards, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and the kind of collectible traffic that doesn't have many other regular venues in Aurora.
- Fridays, DJ nights start at 6 p.m. with a rotating lineup spinning reggaeton, bachata, and salsa, free to get in.
- Sundays, live music runs through the evening, and this is when the property tends to layer in bigger one-off events. Earlier this month a Quinceañera Fest ran in the early afternoon with vendors specific to that kind of celebration, followed by two live bands that evening.
None of this requires planning a special trip. It requires knowing that Wednesday looks different from Friday, which looks different from Sunday, and picking the night that actually matches what you're in the mood for instead of showing up at random and hoping something's on.
What's New at La Plaza
La Plaza's construction took several years, and the food hall opened this spring. The property now has a weekly schedule of events.
Together, the finished kitchens and recurring events give the property a fuller role in the neighborhood.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what a finished project like this eventually does to interest in the surrounding blocks, that's the sort of shift REBL Home Team keeps an eye on across Aurora and the rest of South Denver. See your home's value now if you're curious where your own corner of the map stands.
