HUDSON
It’s Dave Martin’s last day cutting the meat. Martin has owned the Pepper Pod restaurant in Hudson since he was 21. He is now 70. He has a hard time holding a knife, and his fingers curl and tense as he washes off the juices from a batch of chicken-fried steaks. He shuffles around the kitchen, where he still arrives around 5 a.m. each day, with a slight limp. Around him everything spins.
It’s Jan. 10, the last Saturday of service in the Pepper Pod’s 113-year history — it’s also the last day of service ever, but Martin and the staff don’t know this yet. A line has been forming at the door since 6:30 a.m.
The crowds haven’t stopped coming since the restaurant announced its imminent closure about a week prior. Staff shifted opening hours and ditched the reservation system to serve everyone. There are a few more servers running around than usual, and certainly more tears and hugs.
Waitresses slip through a side door, give Martin a smile and a wave, and head straight for the kitchen. Dozens of plastic butter cups are arranged in neat rows, ready to be shuttled on plates with flapjacks and French toast. The grills are hot, the coffee dispensers are full. The doors unlock at 7 a.m. and the place whirs nonstop until close at 9 p.m., when the staff finally gets a chance to sit down for dinner.
“When we close the doors, we all sit together as a family and eat,” one waitress, Renee McClure, said. “It has always been that way.”
It’s the final day at Pepper Pod restaurant, Jan. 10. Owner Dave Martin, left, cuts beef for chicken-fried steaks, and Renee McClure, right, serves breakfast to Tammy Nisley and Nacheal Pierce.(Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Pull up a seat
To call the Pepper Pod a family business is an understatement. The place stayed in the extended Peppers family from its founding in 1913 until 1977, when it sold to Dave and Beth Martin, whose daughter, Amy Jackson, joined as head chef and general manager after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 2004.
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But that’s just the leadership team. The kitchen is full of aunts, sisters and sons, multiple generations from multiple families, squeezing by one another carrying platters of salads and pitchers of iced tea.
“On Mother’s Day they’d make sure to schedule all the McClures during the day shift,” said Renee McClure, whose youngest son and two daughters work, or have worked, at the restaurant. The same went for Father’s Day and Easter.
The McClure family had been eating at the Pepper Pod since they moved to Hudson in 2004 from Arvada. At that time, the restaurant served a “feast for four” that offered an affordable selection of entrees and unlimited access to a salad bar. They visited weekly to take advantage of the town’s best deal for feeding four young kids. Their youngest, Michael, was 3 years old when they started eating there.
On the final Wednesday night of service, Michael sat surrounded by family at a 12-person table for his 25th birthday dinner. He bounced his 13-month-old daughter on his knee. He feigned triumph for landing the last celebration that they’d all gather for at the Pepper Pod.
He handed his daughter across the table to Renee, who discreetly handed her over to Michael’s sister, Jessica, who was waitressing that night. Jessica roamed back and forth between the kitchen and her batch of tables, order pad in one hand, baby girl on her hip.
Going out to eat as a family has become increasingly rare across the U.S. In 2025, 22% of consumers said they dined out less than the year before, while 18% said they dined out less often with groups of friends or family, according to an annual survey by the food and beverage research firm Datassential. Nearly 30% of those surveyed said they cooked at home more often.
While the restaurant platform Toast found a slight uptick in reservations nationally between 2024 and 2025, it found that Denver — the only Colorado city it analyzed — bucked that trend, with a 4% decline overall.
The reasons are multifaceted. Operators are feeling the squeeze across almost all menu items while consumers are becoming more selective about spending money. Many restaurants didn’t bounce back from pandemic closures, while people simultaneously got used to eating at home. Then there is the swift rise of delivery apps and fast-casual chains like Chipotle, which cater to to-go customers.
The effect is an atomization that goes beyond restaurant economics. Much of what defines identity and social interaction occurs not at home, but at the places we shop, eat and voluntarily spend time, according to a 2025 research paper that analyzed class segregation in daily activities. The authors looked at a massive cache of mobile geolocation data to figure out what businesses, organizations and institutions attracted the widest range of people from different class backgrounds.
What they found was that the most socioeconomically diverse places in America are not public institutions, like schools, parks or libraries, but affordable chain restaurants, like Applebee’s and Olive Garden.
Whether people dining in those restaurants actually interacted with one another, though, was not measured. The results only showed that these were the places they’d be the most likely to mingle, not that they did.
At the Pepper Pod, it wouldn’t take a scientific study to observe the cross-table pollination. People stopped by a table to greet friends as they were being seated, they waved at one another from across the dining room, occasionally they pulled up a chair.
“You come in and you know someone, every time. You see someone, you talk to them for five minutes or so, it makes being here that much better,” Michael said. “And it’s always like that. It’s always been like that.”
Customers Diane and Grant Walker eat breakfast, Enola and Jackson Muhler look over the menu, and longtime server Renee McClure goes over a customer’s bill. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Not a rookie’s restaurant
The Pepper Pod was opened by Roy Peppers, who moved to Colorado from Iowa in 1902 by way of a homestead east of Yuma. After working at a mercantile in Brighton for a couple of years, he set up the Pepper Pod near the center of Hudson.
The restaurant closed for a few years during World War II, then opened back up in 1946 and quickly became a community hub, hosting wedding dinners and ag-industry banquets, and making a name for itself outside of town with an unusual menu offering: buffalo, a way to both skirt the beef shortage after the war and offer novelty.
In 1956, the Pepper Pod moved to a large lot near the newly constructed Interstate 80 (now known as I-76), a savvy move that would pay off decades later.
When the Martins took over the lease in 1977, there was still a major market for small-town restaurants offering regionally specific dishes. In Hudson, that meant beef and buffalo.
While the Martins’ first decade of ownership coincided with a boom in chain restaurants around America, which lined the highways and outcompeted in-town cafés for middle-class money, the Pepper Pod had already secured its spot right there at the edge of Hudson, visible from the I-76 exit ramp.
Despite the location, those first few years were tough. The Martins, still in their 20s, had to come up with a $2,200 monthly payment made up of $1.40 breakfast plates, Martin said. They also had trouble keeping staff. It took about 10 years for Martin to notice a shift in the business.
Staff started to hang on longer and a loyal customer base formed. Martin hired kids from town as a way for the kids’ parents — who also worked at the Pepper Pod — to keep them busy.
“They’d say ‘if you think they’re worth something then pay ’em, if not, at least we’ll know where they’re at,” Martin said.
You come in and you know someone, every time. You see someone, you talk to them for five minutes or so, it makes being here that much better. And it’s always like that. It’s always been like that.
— Michael McClure, who worked at the restaurant with his mother and sister
Robert Floyd, left, peers into the Pepper Pod dining area while awaiting a table on Jan. 10, the last day the restaurant was open. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The Martin family hadn’t been secretive about their desire to sell. Martin’s health has been declining. He can’t work the hours he used to. His roughly eight-hour shifts these days feel to him like “part-time,” he said. And he’d rather spend that time with his wife, “drinking coffee and looking out the window,” and taking road trips to the national parks in Utah.
“It’s a tough business to stay married in,” Martin said. But it helped that for nearly three decades, his wife, Beth, co-owned the restaurant with him. “She gets it.”
The Pepper Pod building and lot have been listed for sale for $4.5 million since last April, but the right buyer hasn’t come along. None of the big hospitality groups want in once they look at the area’s demographics, Martin said. And he wasn’t willing to hand the place over to someone trying to break into the business. “It’s not a rookie’s restaurant.”
Making ends meet
Maybe because of or maybe despite its rural location in southern Weld County, between Brighton and Keenesburg, the Pepper Pod remained relatively insulated from the woes of metro-area dining, where well-loved restaurants haven’t been able to keep up with operating costs, and the Colorado Restaurant Association has become a regular presence at the statehouse, looking for pressure valves via policy.
In Denver, there were 506 fewer licensed retail food establishments in November 2025 than there were in July 2023. Statewide, 498 restaurants closed between 2024 and 2025, a 3.7% decline, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
“A lot of places do it backwards,” Martin said. “They cut quantity and quality and think, ‘There, we’ve got our food costs under control,’ but then customer counts start to go down, three, four months later,” he said. “Customers notice.”
Buying the restaurant’s beef in huge slabs and cutting it himself helped save on food and labor costs.
It also helped that he had the same Sysco rep for about 25 years, someone who lived in the area and understood “we can’t charge $65 for a ribeye or $44 for eggs Benedict,” he said. The Pepper Pod’s supply contract was unchanged for decades.
That doesn’t mean they’ve been untouchable. Last year’s property taxes cost them nearly $60,000, “that’s $60,000 people don’t see on their plates,” Martin said. Credit card fees gobbled up more than $70,000, Martin pointed to the table, “right off the plates.”
“Legacy businesses like these are more than just places to eat,” said Denise Mickelsen, spokesperson for the Colorado Restaurant Association. “They’re job creators, dedicated employers, community hubs, cultural centers and cornerstones for every district in the state. These businesses are also particularly hard hit by current economic conditions because they were established long before the skyrocketing costs and burdensome regulations operators have had to contend with in recent years.”
But while operating costs escalated, longtime workers maintained that they’d always been paid fairly. Downright “spoiled,” McClure said. Server Brianna Pierce nodded in agreement.
“They’ve bailed us out of some hard times, even personally,” Pierce said. “Amy (Jackson) has loaned me money when I’ve hit tough spots. My husband got hurt right before I had my first kid, and (the owners) took such good care of us, made sure we had everything we needed.”
Pierce, who is 34, had spent half her life as a server at the Pepper Pod. During her last shift she zoomed through the kitchen, not wanting to stop for an interview because of the tears streaming down her face.
“I did really good today!” she said, wiping her eyes. She had one hour left. “But then stupid Brian was out there and it made me cry.” Brian was a cook when Pierce started in 2007.
The things they’ll miss the most are the good pay and the bonds with their coworkers, Pierce and McClure agreed. “You can try to stay in touch, but it’ll just be different,” Pierce said.
The things they won’t miss: refilling the salt and pepper shakers, changing the beer kegs and vacuuming.
The last shift
The charged sense of endings intensified over the course of the week. The lines got longer. Staff picked up extra hours. Customers added waiters on Facebook and insisted on keeping in touch. Where would they work next? Most customers wanted to know. There’s a café in Keenesburg that might have a few open spots, one waitress relayed — but not nearly enough for the roughly 35 restaurant workers who, as of last week, are out of a job.
“If you work at Texas Roadhouse and you leave, I don’t know that any of the customers would care,” McClure said. “I don’t think they’d even notice.”
Though the restaurant had announced its final day would be Jan. 12, by the weekend it seemed increasingly possible they’d run out of food before then. The bar was drying up, the cakes were disappearing, Martin wasn’t cutting any more meat.
By the end of the shift Saturday, it was clear they wouldn’t have enough to open the next two days. So they shut the doors for good. They emptied the salt shakers and vacuumed the floor.
The following Monday, instead of opening for one more tearful and chaotic shift, the only people in the Pepper Pod were its staff from across the years, who gathered at the restaurant for a party, a final paycheck, and one more family meal.
Patrons wait in long lines for a table during Pepper Pod’s final day, while chef Amy Jackson and Bivi Alanis and Saul Gonzalez prepare meals in the kitchen. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)
