AURORA | Every table was full inside Lupita’s Mexican Restaurant on East Colfax Avenue last Friday night as a three-piece band transitioned from Johnny Rivers’ “Mountain of Love” into Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.”
The players, each sporting a white T-shirt commemorating Lupita’s 25th, smiled and nodded at the dozens of patrons inside the bustling Aurora staple. They knew most of them by name.
Several tables took a break from their burritos and enchiladas to stand up and dance. Others, bound to their cushioned booth seats without the aid of a walker, did their part to maintain the beat by clinking utensils against cups and plates, and faithfully sang along.
Photo by Philip B. Poston/Sentinel Colorado
There wasn’t a mum party in the place each time the ensemble — known as The Buffalo Riders — belted out Diamond’s famous refrain: “…good times never seemed so good …”
It was the last time the Lupita’s faithful would ever enjoy the weekly country-western showcase hosted by the East Colfax institution for nearly a quarter century. Lupita’s closed for good on Saturday, March 23 after more than two decades of dishing Mexican-American fare near the corner of East Colfax and Oswego Street.
The restaurant hosted a combined silver anniversary and closing party on Saturday, starting with an in-house Catholic mass in the morning, followed by an all-day concert.
“We did paper plates because I refused to wash plates on my last day,” Betty Oxley, the longtime owner of Lupita’s who has a cadre of dedicated followers unto herself, said with a laugh. “It’s been a good run for us. We created a new family here on Colfax.”
But the closing has been more bitter than sweet for Oxley, who said she’s not leaving on her own terms. A disagreement with her landlord and spats with neighboring business owners are what spurred her to decline to renew her lease at the end of March.
“I got kicked out,” said Oxley, a native of Huasahuasi in central Peru.
The building’s owners don’t frame it that way.
Photo by Philip B. Poston/Sentinel Colorado
Elaine Georges, one of the building’s several owners, said Oxley voluntarily declined to renew her lease.
“She wanted to move out,” Georges said. “It’s not that we told her to move out.”
Chris Sietos, who has co-owned the Lupita’s building with Georges, his sister, since the 1970s, said Oxley and the owners couldn’t come to an agreement on a price of the property.
Oxley described her interactions with the landlords as “a slap in the face.”
Sietos said he and the other owners are finalizing the paperwork to sell the building to an investor next month. He said the investor has expressed plans to redevelop the building and install a high-end Mexican restaurant that will sell mainly seafood dishes.
The 60-year-old Oxley said she plans to open another Mexican-American restaurant in Aurora after she takes some time to regroup and care for her 98-year-old father.
“I promise I’m going to take a break and charge my batteries a little bit, and I’m going to come back in a new location with a new place,” she said.
Oxley said while she would like to reopen in Aurora, she’ll likely leave the East Colfax corridor.
”Colfax is not getting any better,” she said.
Oxley said she plans to name her new restaurant Mama Rosa’s after her mother, Rosa Moreno, who died in 2013. Moreno perfected many of the recipes used at Lupita’s for decades.
Photo by Philip B. Poston/Sentinel Colorado
Oxley took the reins of the former Lupita’s — she kept the name from the previous owner — space on East Montview Boulevard in 1994. After emigrating from Peru in 1977, she got her break in managing a hospitality business by running a snack shop near the old Stapleton Airport in the early 1990s. With the help of friends and extensive trial and error, Oxley learned how to cook Mexican food on the fly. She had to close Lupita’s right after its grand opening so she could teach herself how to cook traditional Mexican dishes, she said.
“I asked a Mexican friend to teach me and shut the doors again for three weeks while I learned,” Oxley told the Sentinel in a 2012 interview.
But Oxley’s offerings of sopapillas, burritos and deep-fried ice cream solidified her outpost as an East Colfax mainstay, even as development in the neighborhood waxed and waned.
”I have like four generations of customers in a lot of families,” she said. “I see them having their babies and having their kids, and their kids having kids and now they’re crying. Now Lupita’s is going to be gone. It’s awful.”
A gaggle of both local and national politicians and celebrities have frequented Oxley’s haunt, too. She rattled off the names of several city politicos, former U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, former U.S. Treasurer Rosario Martin and state business legend Jake Jabs, when reflecting on some of her more prominent customers.
But the majority of Oxley’s business came from older Aurorans like Dee and Wanda Hickman, a retired Aurora couple who watched live music while enjoying a meal at the restaurant almost every Friday for the past 17 years.
”We’re very disappointed,” Wanda said of she and her husband’s thoughts on Lupita’s closing. “But we support (Oxley) in her decision … we’ll go wherever she goes.”
Oxley said she doesn’t know what kinds of events or offerings will take place in the restaurant now that she’s gone, but she’s optimistic any new tenants will continue to cater to the senior community.
”It’s a place for seniors to come and have fun,” she said. “They can barely walk and they have walkers, but this was their place to come and have fun … It’s going to be missed.”