Tom’s Home Cookin’ — the beloved Southern-style diner in Five Points that drew lines of regulars for their lunch-only servings of catfish, collards and cobbler — closed its doors forever on Thursday.
“This happened really quickly,” said Steve Jankousky, who co-owns Tom’s with his partner Tom Unterwagner. “The buyer was ready to go, and we’re handing over the keys on Monday.”
Tom’s customers knew its owners were “kicking the tires” in mid-November when on the market for $585,000. But a rushed sale ended up making for an abbreviated goodbye for a business that has served diners for more than 16 years.
“This is the most difficult tweet I’ve ever had to send,” the Friday morning, linking to a hand-written note that read, “Dear Friends. We are excited to tell you that we have sold the restaurant property and Tom’s Home Cookin’ is closed. Thank you for your patronage, support and friendship over the past 16½ years. It’s been one hell of a ride!”
Jankousky understands that saying goodbye will be hard, but he insists this is a good thing — for Five Points, and for he and Unterwagner. The pair moved their restaurant from Park Hill a few years after RTD light rail made Five Points an easy ride from downtown. In recent years, change in the neighborhood has reached a fierce pace, with new entrepreneurs joining the tenant mix along Welton Street. New housing has begun filling vacant lots, and homes and commercial buildings that suffered under years of benign neglect are being renovated.
“If change never happened, this neighborhood would just be a desolate ghetto,” Jankousky said. “How exciting is it that you drive down Welton Street and you see construction projects and new businesses open. It’s a really, really exciting time to be in Five Points. We’ve been here for 15 years, and we must’ve called the police a thousand times. Finally it’s a neighborhood where you really feel safe and wanna be in.”
The space will continue as a restaurant — thought not under the Tom’s Home Cookin’ name — and it will be under the leadership of a chef-owner who Denver diners are already familiar with.
“It’s going to be a restaurant that a chef-friend of ours is going to helm, so we’re thrilled all around,” said Jankousky, noting that the new owner purchased all of the restaurant’s equipment and most of its iconic, Southern-specific decorations. “I don’t want to steal the new place’s thunder. They’ll announce it whenever the time’s right. But it’s someone who’s already got a couple restaurants here.”
What does this news mean for Jankousky and Unterwagner, who have been together for more than 21 years? First, they hope to be able to retrain their bodies to sleep a couple hours later than their former life’s 4 a.m. alarm clock. And at the mention of retirement, Jankousky laughed — noting that they’ll eventually have to return to work.
“We’re going to take a few months off and figure it out,” Jankousky said. “We literally have no plans at all. We would have to give up drinking Burgundy if we were going to retire. We’ve tossed around going to work for somebody else for a while until we figure out what we want to be when we grow up.”
And what about a cookbook or a blog that would keep Tom’s recipes alive for the customers?
“We’ve thought about it,” Jankousky said. “We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff floating around in our heads. I don’t know if anything will ever come of it. The problem with a cookbook is, most of what Tom cooks, he just cooks on the fly. It’s not like there’s a recipe card and he’s reading off it.
“Nothing’s measured, everything is just tasting, tasting, tasting.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394, rbaca@denverpost.com or @bruvs
