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 said that about Aspen, not long before he 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 didn't grow its own restaurant identity from nothing. It borrowed one, address by address, from a town up the valley where the rent had stopped making sense for a kitchen. 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.

None of that reads like a Willits business district building something separate from Aspen. It reads like Aspen's restaurant industry, priced out of its own storefronts, finding a second zip code it could afford.

What's actually on the block right now

The names on Market Street 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 inside one short stretch. Three of them are second locations of restaurants that started somewhere else in this valley first, and a fourth changed hands without changing address.

Why the same block keeps turning over

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."

Neuweg had run the Wienerstube in Aspen from 2008 until its 2011 closure and understood exactly why the revival would happen somewhere else. 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, the kind of stretch that keeps absorbing tenants whose original leases upvalley no longer pencil out.

That's a specific, traceable mechanism, not a vague sense that Willits is "growing." A restaurant closes in Aspen because the ground under it gets too expensive to hold a kitchen on. The same name, or a close relative of it, resurfaces a few miles downvalley because Market Street rents allow it. When that second lease eventually fails too, as it did for the Wienerstube, the address doesn't sit empty. Something else with a similar backstory takes it.

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 dark storefront on Market Street rarely stays dark for long, and it rarely reopens as something unfamiliar. It reopens as a name you probably already know from somewhere else in this valley, having moved for the same reason its predecessor did.

Six operators run on that one short block right now. More than half of them once had an address somewhere else in the Roaring Fork Valley first, and the block itself is the reason they're still in business.

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 addresses in this valley absorb Aspen's overflow is part of knowing what you're actually buying into.