The list of restaurants Kevin Nguyen and his firm have designed over the last 10 years reads like a “who’s who” of the modern Denver dining scene.
There’s Hop Alley, the first restaurant project he and his partner took on. The owner, Tommy Lee, later hired him to design Uncle Wash Park and Molino Chido, the latter a chef-driven taco shop that debuted inside Stanley Marketplace in Aurora late last year.
Then there was Spencer White and his partners, who brought Nguyen on to design River North hot spots Dio Mio and Redeemer Pizza. Both had their challenges: The fire department didn’t love their initial idea of hanging paper planes from the ceiling at Dio Mio, and Nguyen had to execute a difficult job at Redeemer Pizza, opening the front for sit-down diners and the back as a pickup and takeout order counter.
But a good relationship meant they would work together again on Johnny Bechamel’s, an Italian restaurant that opened next to Uncle Wash Park in December. With Molino Chido decked out in lime green chairs, and Johnny Bechamel’s chairs a subdued shade of seafoam, Nguyen’s wife has started referring to this as his “Green Era.”
Nguyen’s firm has also designed three of the seven restaurants in Denver with Michelin stars: Beckon, Bruto and the two-starred The Wolf’s Tailor.
Altogether, he’s responsible for the interiors of more than three dozen concepts.
“He’s probably been the architect of every one of your favorite restaurants,” said Mike Waldinger, CEO of the Colorado chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). “If itap got a Michelin star, there’s a darn good chance that Kevin was the designer of that restaurant.”
His contributions to the city’s literal culinary landscape were recognized in October by AIA Colorado, which named him its architect of the year. It’s the institute’s top honor, one that Nguyen is chalking up as a win for the city’s dining scene at large.
“I’m excited, probably more so, to see that Denver as a food scene is still growing,” Nguyen, 41, said of his ever-expanding list of clients. “And then secondarily, it means that I can still have a business and do the work that we love doing.”
His firm, Regular Architecture, is currently at work on a handful of projects, including Dear Emilia, the sister concept to Michelin-recommended Restaurant Olivia, which will open in late January at 3615 Delgany St., Denver.
Nguyen’s love of food developed when he was a child, eating the dishes made by members of his large Vietnamese-Mexican family in Aurora. Now food and drink have become his vocation.
“I don’t really want to admit this, but I have sort of become like the ultimate foodie,” he said, aware of the term’s archetype — an enjoyer of the finer things — and the spoils that come with his chosen line of work.
One of the first jobs Nguyen took after his studies at the University of Colorado was with Galloway & Co.. There, he was tasked with designing prototypes for fast-food franchises, including Jack in the Box and Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers. The job, Nguyen said, familiarized him with the inner workings of restaurants and their safety regulations.
Following a lead from a former professor, he and Scott Lawrence, his friend and peer in college, earned a contract to design Hop Alley. It’s where he first met Lee. They formed a firm, Nguyen Lawrence, and secured projects from restaurant owners looking for sleek designs for their own kitchens and dining rooms.
Nguyen continued the firm when Lawrence left for an academic position at the University of Idaho, changing its name to Regular Architecture. He hired two junior interior designers and rented an office, graduating from the early days of late nights crouched inside job sites, he and Lawrence working under the laptop light.
“What he’s doing now is so much more at a different level than what we were doing,” Lawrence said.
In recent years, Regular Architecture has designed the lively interior of Xiquita Restaurante y Bar in Uptown; the bagel shop/Japanese food counter of Odell’s Bagel and its owner’s new restaurant, Florence Supper Club; the storefront of dumpling hotspot Yuan Wonton; and Insee Father Noodles House, a noodle shop whose owner wanted to make it look like a 20th-century house in Thailand and decorated it with her own mementos of home.
His restaurant design is similar to his personal style: minimal, clean edges and bold, solid colors. The restaurateur’s identity is represented via cultural adornments, family photographs or artwork plastered along the walls. Bars are prominently featured, as is natural light, which he said improves working conditions for staff.
He prioritizes the work of chefs and other employees. It’s perhaps one of the reasons why so many chefs and restaurant owners keep hiring him to spruce up their interiors.
“He’s always super willing to deal with curveballs,” said Dio Mio’s White, noting his willingness to listen to feedback and redraw layouts.
Johnny Bechamel’s space was previously used by restaurateur Jared Leonard, who flipped through several concepts before abandoning the property. Nguyen’s main renovations brought the bar from the back of the room to the front, an open window into the buzzing new restaurant.
The owners of the European-inspired BearLeek called Nguyen up last year to ask for his help redesigning the basement used for years by Osaka Ramen.
“Probably the biggest failure of Osaka was that it was a basement restaurant that didn’t feel like you were in a basement,” Nguyen said. “That was our entire thing from day one. We were like, ‘I just want to make a freaking crazy night dungeon that just feels exciting.'”
The basement is now painted in dark colors and features splashes of blue and red neon lights. His firm custom-made light fixtures that are shaped like giant cigarettes — a nod to the restaurant industry’s iconic cigarette break — and hover over the dining tables. Framed photos in one section of the hall document the city spots where BearLeek chef Harrison Porter takes his own mid-shift smoke breaks.
“I was surprised how well they were able to envision the changeover,” BearLeek general manager Tara Marcellus said. “It’s kind of a hard thing to get into a space that’s already so well established.”
One project put him in touch with his roots. While designing the interior of Sap Sua, a modern Vietnamese restaurant on East Colfax Avenue, Nguyen reached out to one of his Vietnamese aunts for advice, someone he said used to get out of bed at midnight to fix up bowls of pho for her relatives.
The magnified life of the “ideal minority”: that was his upbringing, he said. He was named AIA Colorado’s Young Architect of the Year in 2019. In a career that’s largely white and male, Nguyen’s recent win for Architect of the Year led to other people of color reaching out to him over Instagram and asking how he grew his business to where it is today.
Nguyen is happy to help, serving as an ACE Mentor at local schools and volunteering Friday mornings at Food for Thought, a Denver nonprofit where he packs groceries for the children of low-income parents to take home from school.
Mentorship and continuing education are ingrained in the architecture career path, partly because of how intensive it is to get an architecture degree. Nguyen has taken that attitude to the restaurant world, developing relationships with hospitality workers and eating well while he’s at it.
“As architects, we have an inherent responsibility because of the impact and influence we have on every space that everybody walks into,” he said. “We have an inherent responsibility to do our best to push those boundaries in the use of those spaces as far as we can.”
When Lawrence visited Nguyen recently, the pair went out to eat, hitting up to six restaurants in one day, Lawrence said. He noticed how Nguyen would ask the staff not just about business, but about their life outside of work.
“It was very clear that there was a community there, that he was there building a community,” Lawrence said.
While he says he’d rather be behind the scenes, the AIA Colorado win has given him confidence going into the new year. He’s also pondering a major goal he’s yet to cross off his list: designing the exterior of a building.
“We haven’t done a building,” he said, the thought left lingering in the air.
