On any given weekend evening, the dining room and patio tables at Cafe Aion are packed with couples and groups of friends savoring paella, swooning over duck confit and pairing Spanish and Moroccan tapas with diverse wines.
It sounds like a typical Boulder bistro. But Cafe Aion wasn’t the kind of culinary destination diners expected to find on The Hill when chef Dakota Soifer opened it in 2010.
According to Soifer, he was looking to do anything but run a full-time restaurant at the time.
“I had recently quit working at The Kitchen, and I was looking for work,” he says. “I saw an ad for a part-time cooking gig at Burnt Toast,” a breakfast and lunch spot in a historic building at 1235 Pennsylvania St. “Because it wasn’t a super busy place, I spent a fair amount of time standing around and daydreaming.”
What Soifer saw was a vision of his own restaurant: “a casual little neighborhood tapas bar.”
When Soifer took over the space soon thereafter, he named his new tapas bar Cafe Aion in honor of Aion Used Books, a store that occupied the campus-adjacent location for many years.
Cafe Aion’s debut menu on April 2, 2010 included a dozen tapas — Spanish small plates — with a beer, wine, sangria and cocktail list served just four nights a week.
“We quickly realized that plan was not going to work financially,” Soifer says. “I had a lot to learn, and that menu was lesson number one.”
Just one item from that first lineup remains on the menu 15 years later: Fried cauliflower with saffron yogurt for dipping.
After some adjustments, Cafe Aion became a destination restaurant for locals and campus visitors.
“People were looking for a full meal, so we started adding some entrees,” Soifer says. Chief among them was paella, because chef Hugo Matheson from The Kitchen dropped off a dozen rusted, dirty paella pans he found in the basement from a defunct downtown Spanish restaurant.
“Our goal was to be the adult, nicer restaurant on The Hill serving real food — a place for grownups as well as undergrads,” Soifer says.
“We recently had a group of sorority girls who used to come in for Sunday brunch, returning on the 10-year anniversary of graduating.”
Before the show
From the start, the cafe has had a close relationship with the people working at CU Boulder and attending events on campus.
“The pre-Macky, pre-concert, pre-Shakespeare Festival diners have been our bread and butter,” he says. “We’ll have the Portuguese department in for lunch, and they chatter away in Portuguese. Or we’ll have a Nobel laureate at one table and the guy who discovered absolute zero at another table.”
During the pandemic, Soifer focused on takeout and delivery by adding Boulder Brasserie, a “ghost kitchen” operating out of Cafe Aion offering French bistro favorites like steak frites. Those popular dishes have been folded into Cafe Aion’s current menu, like their lamb Merguez sausage with flatbread, hummus, tzatziki and house-made pickles. Entrees range from duck ragu gnocchi to beef bourguignon. The eatery’s lunch selections include a BLT on brioche and the bestselling Aion Burger with bacon, brie and fresh chips. Brunch features warm doughnuts fried to order as well as shakshuka — an egg-topped Moroccan stew served with toast.
Unlike 15 years ago, Soifer no longer lives at the restaurant, leaving day-to-day operations to Executive Chef Austen Vasquez.
“It’s a little bit of letting go on my part,” Soifer says. “He tries out dishes I wouldn’t have come up with.
“I still love cooking, except now I can cook at home.”
The Hill, transformed
Soifer grew up a part of a foodie family in rural Maine before setting off for Boulder in 1999 to ski and earn an architecture degree at CU Boulder. Cooking at Rumba (now Centro), the West End Tavern and later at San Francisco’s celebrated Zuni Café convinced Soifer to change careers.
The Hill has been through many ups and downs during Soifer’s 26 years in town. Today — with CU’s growing student population, the opening of The Moxy boutique hotel as well as a huge new hotel-conference center set to open across Broadway — The Hill is undergoing another dramatic transformation.
“In terms of restaurants, The Hill dining choices today are great,” Soifer says. Rather than bemoan the increased competition, Soifer is grateful for the renewed energy and multitude of options to attract diners to an area they might otherwise avoid.
“We just re-upped our lease for five more years,” he said.
Through it all, the university crowd have remained loyal customers of Cafe Aion.
“I coordinate events and menus here with groups at CU,” Soifer says. “The [teaching assistants] who came in here when we opened are now tenured faculty.”
Toasting Boulder’s Dining Survivors
Few Boulder restaurants get to celebrate their fifth birthday in business, never mind 15 years of feeding customers like Cafe Aion. Among the other Boulder eateries surviving 15 years or more are: Flagstaff House, Falafel King, Greenbriar Inn, The Sink, Rio Grande, Chez Thuy, Jax Fish House, Sherpas Adventure Restaurant, Frasca Food and Wine, Mustard’s Last Stand and SALT.