Four Years of "Any Day Now": What Actually Changed on Belcaro's Corner This Summer
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
For four years, the sign in the window at Noodle Express said the same thing in different words: we might have to close soon. The restaurant posted it in February 2022, and diners packed the counter so hard the kitchen ran out of food before dinner. The sign came back in the summer of 2024, warning that the lease was ending in August, and the extension came anyway. By the time the real notice went up this spring, the one that meant it, longtime regulars could be forgiven for assuming it was another false alarm.
It wasn't. On June 2, the Belcaro King Soopers at 825 South Colorado Boulevard closed for good after more than fifty years on that corner. Noodle Express had already served its last bowl of dan dan noodles a few days earlier. The corner that anchored grocery runs and Wednesday takeout for two generations of Belcaro households is now waiting on a demolition permit. What's less understood, and what actually matters for anyone living within walking distance, is how much of this happened on a real calendar versus how much is still just a concept.
Noodle Express opened in a former Rubio's space in February 2020, one of the worst possible months to launch a restaurant, and spent its first year fighting a pandemic instead of building a following. By early 2022 it had one anyway, built almost entirely on word of mouth around its Szechuan menu: chong qing chicken, mapo tofu, spicy boiled fish, dishes that had nothing to do with the generic name on the sign.
That's when the first closure notice appeared. The landlord wasn't planning to renew the lease because the surrounding shopping center was slated for redevelopment, at some unspecified point in the future. Diners showed up in numbers large enough to force a renegotiation, and the restaurant stayed open on borrowed time.
The pattern repeated in the summer of 2024, with a sign announcing the lease was up at the end of August and no extension had been offered yet. An extension came through again. For two years running, the actual demolition stayed exactly where it had been in 2022: a plan on paper, not a bulldozer on site.
Here's the full arc, compressed:
Osaka Sushi, which shared the building with Noodle Express, hadn't announced a closing date as of this spring. If it's still serving, it's on the same borrowed time the rest of the block has been running on since 2022.
The gap between the first warning and the actual closure is the part worth sitting with. Four years is a long time to live next to a project that's always "coming soon." It's also long enough that when the closure finally arrived, it arrived fast: a King Soopers that had anchored the corner for half a century closed on a Tuesday and its replacement opened the next morning.
The timing wasn't a coincidence. King Soopers had been building its replacement store for over a year, a $37.1 million, 103,000-square-foot location at 4201 East Arkansas Avenue in Virginia Village, on land that used to be the Colorado Department of Transportation's headquarters. The new store opened June 3 with a Murray's Cheese Shop counter, a King Soopers gas station, and a Starbucks built in, none of which the old Belcaro location had room for.
For Belcaro residents, the practical shift is about a mile, not a neighborhood. Anyone whose weekly grocery run started at Exposition and Colorado Boulevard now drives or walks a bit further south on the same corridor. The store itself is bigger and newer. What's gone is the walk-to-it convenience that came from having a grocery anchor sitting inside the neighborhood's own footprint rather than just south of it.
This is where the record gets more interesting than the rumor mill suggested. The redevelopment that's been "coming" since 2022 has, in fact, changed shape more than once, and the version that finally got approved is smaller than what was originally floated.
Kentro Group's earlier concept for the shopping center site at the southwest corner of Exposition and Colorado included a structure as tall as twelve stories. After pushback from neighbors, the developer agreed not to seek a rezoning, and the plan that actually cleared its first city review this spring is a four-story, wraparound building with 347 to 350 residential units, roughly 569 structured parking spaces, a clubhouse, a fitness center, and multiple private courtyards. It complies with existing zoning, capped at 55 feet, with an undisclosed share of affordable units required under Denver's Mandatory Affordable Housing rules.
That concept plan received city approval in May 2026 and is now moving into the site development phase, the stage where infrastructure, transportation, and design get worked out in detail. No construction start date has been announced. The existing retail and restaurant buildings, including the one that housed Noodle Express and Osaka Sushi, are slated for demolition to make way for the new construction, but "slated for" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Given how long the last redevelopment took to move from rumor to reality, residents budgeting their mental map of the neighborhood around a fast turnaround should probably budget for a longer one.
None of this leaves the neighborhood without options, it just means the walk gets a little longer for some of them. Belcaro sits close enough to Whole Foods, Target, and Natural Grocers that residents who relied on the Colorado Boulevard King Soopers for quick trips have other full-service grocery options within a short drive. For sit-down and takeout, the restaurant rows in Bonnie Brae and along Old South Gaylord Street have long served Belcaro households directly, and that hasn't changed with the shopping center's closure. Cherry Creek North's dining and shopping district is also a short bike ride away for anyone looking for a wider range of options while the corner sorts itself out.
If Osaka Sushi is still open, it's worth a visit sooner rather than later. The building it shares with the old Noodle Express space is part of the same shopping center parcel headed for redevelopment, and the four-year pattern on this block suggests things can change with less notice than expected once the demolition permits actually start moving.
The honest way to describe Belcaro's commercial corner right now is mid-transition, not post-transition. The grocery store swap happened in a single week. The restaurant that outlasted two separate closure scares finally ran out of extensions. And the building that replaces all of it exists only as an approved concept, with a site plan still being worked out and no shovel in the ground. For a neighborhood that spent four years hearing "any day now," the accurate forecast this fall is patience: the corner has changed, but the next version of it is still on paper.
If you're weighing what a changing commercial corridor means for property values or timing a move in or out of Belcaro, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks this market daily. Mckinze Casey works with Denver's central neighborhoods, Belcaro included, and can walk you through what redevelopment like this tends to mean for a block over time. Request a Private Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
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