Wienerstube Closed Again. The Space on Market Street Didn't.

"It's my town. I love it, but the rent is too expensive there."

—Vladan Djordjevic, quoted by The Aspen Times.

The Post Independent reported that Vladan Djordjevic and partner Nemanja Ilic reopened the Wienerstube in a 3,000-square-foot space on Market Street in Willits Town Center. The original Wienerstube ran in Aspen for 45 years before it closed in January 2011, when the building that housed it came down to make room for the Aspen Art Museum. Djordjevic spent years wanting to bring it back. When he finally did, he brought it downvalley instead of back to Aspen, into a space between what was then Capitol Creek Brewery and Mezzaluna.

That space is now called Alpine House. Wienerstube Willits has closed. If you've eaten on Market Street in the last year or so and wondered what happened to the schnitzel place, that's the answer.

The pattern predates the Wienerstube

Willits Town Center's restaurant lineup has included businesses with roots elsewhere in the valley. By 2018, Zane's Tavern, a Snowmass Village original from the mid-1990s that had already added an Aspen location in 2006, was preparing to open a third address in Willits. The Aspen Times noted at the time that this would make Zane's the fourth restaurant with Aspen roots to land on Market Street, joining the Wienerstube, Mezzaluna and Mawa's Kitchen. Mezzaluna had opened in Aspen in 1987 and put its second location in Willits in 2017, thirty years into the original's run.

Together, these openings show how restaurants with Aspen roots have also established locations in Willits.

What's in and around Willits Town Center right now

The names in and around Willits Town Center as of this fall:

• Alpine House occupies the former Wienerstube space between where Capitol Creek Brewery used to be and Mezzaluna.
• Mezzaluna Willits has been open since 2017, the second location of the Aspen restaurant that started in 1987.
• Zane's Tavern Willits carries forward the Snowmass Village original that later expanded into Aspen and then here.
• Westbound & Down Brewing now runs the taproom that used to operate as Capitol Creek Brewery, same address on Market Street, new ownership and beer list.
• Wild Fig Willits, which opened in October 2025 on Harris Street inside the Town Center, is the second location of a restaurant whose original address sits farther up the valley.
• Willits Grill keeps running out of the gas station near the Willits roundabout, serving breakfast, lunch and pizza on a schedule that starts as early as 5 a.m.

Six operators in and around Willits Town Center. Three are additional locations of restaurants that began elsewhere in the valley, and a fourth changed hands without changing address.

The Aspen connection

The Aspen side of this pattern is spelled out by the people who lived it. When Djordjevic and Ilic were preparing to reopen the Wienerstube, the restaurant's former Aspen owner, Harald Neuweg, wrote them a letter that Belinski, the local Willits developer's representative, later shared with reporters.

"With the rental prices a bit out of control, I do understand your decision."

—Harald Neuweg, quoted by the Post Independent.

Neuweg had run the Wienerstube in Aspen from 2008 until its 2011 closure. Belinski, who has represented Willits Town Center's developer through multiple leasing cycles, described Market Street as evolving into what he called a second restaurant row for the Town Center.

Those accounts document one connection between Aspen rents and a Willits restaurant, not an explanation for every move or closure.

The anchors that don't move

Not everything on this stretch turns over on the same clock. Two businesses have held their ground since they arrived and don't behave like the restaurant tenants around them.

The Hoffmann Hotel, a boutique property across from Willits Town Center, opened in 2023 overlooking Kodiak Lake. Its restaurant and bar, Hoffmann House, has served the same lakeside room every night since the hotel opened, unaffected by whatever is happening two blocks over on Market Street.

TACAW, The Arts Campus at Willits, opened in the summer of 2021 at 400 Robinson Street and has run theater, film, music and after-school programming continuously since. It's the one calendar on this stretch that isn't tied to which restaurant currently holds a given lease.

A few minutes away on Sunset Drive, Woody Creek Distillers pours its Colorado potato vodka out of a tasting room that has outlasted several of its Market Street neighbors already, made from potatoes grown in a valley that was once one of the largest potato-growing regions in the country before the crop nearly disappeared and then came back through local distillers.

Why this matters if you already live here

If you've lived in the mid-valley long enough to remember the Wienerstube's first Willits opening, the value of understanding this pattern isn't nostalgia. It's practical. A familiar restaurant name from elsewhere in the valley may also have a Willits address.

Six operators run in and around Willits Town Center right now. Three of the six are additional locations of restaurants that started elsewhere in the Roaring Fork Valley.

If you're weighing what a home near Willits Town Center is really worth, the restaurant churn on Market Street is one of those local facts that never shows up in a listing description. Sam Augustine tracks it anyway, because knowing which valley restaurants have established additional locations in Willits is part of knowing what you're actually buying into.