Three Saints Revival closed after two and one-half years in downtown Denver. (The Denver Post/Three Saints Revival)
A downtown landlord is suing Three Saints Revival and that former Mediterranean restaurant’s owner, Robert Thompson, for $577,000 in back rent and buildout costs.
Thompson, who founded Punch Bowl Social and is now focused on his upcoming Camp Pickle, a pickleball-centric eatery in Centennial, opened Three Saints Revival in 2021. The colorful restaurant filled about 5,500 square feet at Union Tower West, 1801 Wewatta St.
Robert Thompson
“This is a standard contract dispute and while we won’t get into the ‘we said/they said’ details, we will speak to the untenable environment surrounding Three Saints Revival,” Thompson said of the lawsuit in a statement, before listing reasons for his restaurant’s closure.
Thompson called “the area behind Union Station ground zero for downtown Denver’s most debilitating challenges” and noted the city’s high office vacancy rates in recent years. “When there’s a void in downtown visitation, the wrong type of element fills in,” he added, claiming that the 1800 block of Wewatta has been “tormented by a myriad of conditions.”
“Homeless camps on our sidewalks, rampant crime including staff and guest vehicles being broken into…human excrement on the doorstep, drug-addled populations running through our dining room and locking themselves in the bathrooms,” the entrepreneur tallied.
Three Saints Revival closed in February after just two and one-half years at 1801 Wewatta. Thompson said that 80 percent of the restaurant’s clientele was women.
“We heard over and over that they loved Three Saints but did not feel comfortable visiting that part of town, especially after dark,” he told BusinessDen on Wednesday. “Regardless of how many accolades we received or how many awards we won, we could not overcome the legitimate fear for personal safety felt by our guests and the lack of office traffic.”
Union Tower West is a mixed-use building completed in 2017. Boston-based Beacon Capital Partners bought the office space there last year. The rest of the 12-story building, which includes the Hotel Indigo, is owned by the Denver developer McWhinney.
And McWhinney said that Three Saints Revival’s problems date back to its beginnings.
An exterior view of the Union Tower West building at 1801 Wewatta St. (Courtesy McWhinney)
Within a few months of their lease being signed in 2021, it was amended to allow for a $400,000 loan from McWhinney “when it became clear that TSR did not have enough equity to complete the restaurant buildout,” according to a May 24 lawsuit. That loan, given at an interest rate of 12 percent, was personally guaranteed by Thompson, McWhinney said.
In 2023, the lease was amended two more times as the restaurant dropped some breakfast and lunch offerings and transferred breakfast operations to the Indigo, according to the lawsuit. But TSR still failed to pay rent, McWhinney said, and then closed in mid-February.
“Due to TSR’s ongoing business failures, (McWhinney) agreed to several lease amendments over the course of the parties’ relationship to try and TSR as best it could,” the lawsuit claims. “Despite these efforts, TSR failed to perform its obligations under the lease.”
The landlord alleges it is owed $110,000 for rent and $467,000 on the buildout loan. Thompson hasn’t made monthly payments on the loan since November, McWhinney said.
The landlord is suing for breach of contract and unjust enrichment. Its lawyers are Jonathan Pray and Lance Collins in the Denver office of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
