CHEF PROFILES | COLORADO
At The Grandview, Chef Jeremy Wolgamott Cooks Between Two States
After 14 years in New Orleans, the chef built a Southern restaurant in Colorado around the table that carried him through hard times.
By Rebecca Thompson | Aug. 13, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Rebecca Thompson has held many jobs, from newspaper writer to middle-school teacher. As a restaurant critic, she’s reviewed the Michelin-starred to gas station BBQ.
Moving between Colorado and Louisiana taught Jeremy Wolgamott how to enter an unfamiliar place. He learned to read the people in it, find some common ground, and begin the slow business of making himself at home. Dinner helped. Wherever his family landed, the table offered a familiar geography, one with room for stories, care, and the reassurance of another plate arriving. “What got me through was the table.”
That idea now sits at the center of The Grandview, the longtime Olde Town Arvada tavern Wolgamott purchased in 2026, a short walk from his home. Inside an 1898 building, he has replaced the pub menu with gumbo, fried rainbow trout, braised pork shoulder, and other dishes that join 14 years of cooking in New Orleans with Colorado farms and seasons. He kept the restaurant’s name and history, turning the place into something that has followed him, in one form or another, since childhood: a table where people can settle in.
Wolgamott
Wolgamott is from Colorado, but his cooking life began in Louisiana. As a teenager in Baton Rouge, he worked in restaurant kitchens, then continued cooking while studying business at Louisiana Tech. The two places gave him different ways of understanding food. Louisiana taught him that seemingly simple dishes often hold generations of accumulated knowledge. Colorado taught him to watch the calendar.
“The growing season here is so much shorter than in Louisiana, where produce comes nearly year-round, so Colorado taught me to cook with a real sense of timing, to chase ingredients at their peak and let the calendar shape the menu,” he says.
In New Orleans, Wolgamott became head chef at High Hat Café, part of the revival of Freret Street as a dining district. He cooked fried catfish, red beans, greens, and a chicken-and-andouille gumbo built on an exceptionally dark roux. In 2014, New Orleans Magazine included it among the city’s best, an achievement roughly equivalent to receiving a compliment on barbecue in Texas: gratifying, although likely to start an argument.
Gumbo also became a lesson in technique. “You simply cannot rush that,” Wolgamott says of the roux. “You can't rush flavor either. It rewards attention and care, not shortcuts.” His version draws from Opelousas-style gumbo and arrives with potato salad in the bowl instead of rice. It is traditional until it isn’t, which says something about Wolgamott’s cooking. He respects the rules enough to know when he can bend one.
He later helped create Stokehold inside Port Orleans Brewing Company, where the chefs began developing dishes by tasting the brewery’s beers against trays of spices and sauces. He also worked at Coquette, then returned to Colorado and eventually became executive chef of Bistro Vendôme, helping move the longtime French restaurant from Larimer Square into a new Denver home in Park Hill.
His son finally settled the question of where home should be. After 14 years in New Orleans, Wolgamott had watched him live through repeated hurricane seasons. “He was nine at the time, and I didn't want him to sit through his fourth Category 4 hurricane,” Wolgamott says. “That was the moment it clicked that it was time to make the leap back.”
The move carried a specific plan: open a Southern restaurant in Colorado. Wolgamott left Bistro Vendôme in late 2024, introduced his cooking through a series of Restaurant Argot pop-ups, and worked as a server at Osteria Alberico, part of the Frasca Hospitality Group. After nearly three decades behind the line, he wanted to understand what a restaurant felt like from the other side of the table.
The Argot dinners also confirmed that Colorado diners would follow him toward a less stereotypical version of Southern food. “Southern cooking grew out of resourcefulness, people using what they had, which was often grains, beans, greens and vegetables alongside seafood and seasonal produce,” he says.
At The Grandview, that translates into fried Colorado trout with green rice and pickled peppers, pork shoulder over succotash salad, and weekly dishes shaped by what Wolgamott finds at the Arvada Farmers Market. Mondays bring red beans and rice. Crystal hot sauce waits on every table. The bar pours Sazeracs and Pimm’s Cups.
“The Grandview isn't a Cajun or a strictly New Orleans restaurant,” he says. “My guiding idea was never to force a Southern restaurant into Colorado, it was to be a Colorado restaurant that happens to be Southern.”
The gumbo carries Louisiana with it, down to the dark roux and the scoop of potato salad. The trout comes from Colorado, as do the market vegetables that move through the menu with the short growing season. Wolgamott has joined them inside a tavern ten minutes from his house, leaving room at the table for both of the places that taught him how to find his way home.
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