"Somewhere where there is respect for the community." That's what Jeff Rommel told Boulder Reporting Lab back in February, when he and his wife Alisha Mason were still deciding where Pekoe would land after their lease ran out at the Alpine Avenue storefront they'd occupied for years. Pekoe's Yelp listing now reads simply: closed.
If you've walked past the storefront lately, at 1225 Alpine, you already knew that. What you might not know is that Skratch Labs Table has moved into the plaza from Pearl Street. It now occupies 1245 Alpine Avenue, while Pekoe's former storefront at 1225 Alpine remains empty.
What Closed, and Where
Pekoe occupied the space originally built for the Beauty Centre back when the whole plaza went up in 1958. Rommel and Mason bought the business in 2020 and kept it running with longtime manager Nick De Maio, expanding the menu into pastries and boba alongside the tea program that had built the shop's regulars. It was one of the last true walk-in, family-owned storefronts left on that stretch, the kind of place where the barista knew your order before you finished saying it.
The lease simply reached its end. Rommel didn't frame it as a fight, just an exit he was hoping to make gracefully, ideally to another Boulder address where the rent still made sense for a two-person operation. As of this writing, no new location has surfaced publicly.
The Roofline Tells You What Kind of Place This Is
It's easy to think of a strip shopping center as interchangeable asphalt and stucco, but the plaza at Broadway and Alpine has a specific architectural signature that's easy to miss if you're only there for milk and a haircut. It was designed in 1958 by Boulder architect Hobart Wagener, and his jagged roofline on this building is a deliberate contrast to the curved roofline he gave Community Plaza two years later, directly across Alpine. Two buildings, two years apart, same architect, opposite silhouettes on purpose.
Ideal Market anchored the east end from day one, run for decades by co-owner Clark Chapman, who worked the floor himself until he retired in 1989. A local newspaper described that sale as symbolizing "the encroachment of faceless urbanization," a line Rommel later called true to a T when he talked about his own situation. The store operates as Whole Foods now, but the Ideal name and the original building shell are still there, still anchoring the same corner they've anchored since the Eisenhower administration.
That history matters here for one reason: this isn't a generic retail pad that any tenant could occupy. It's a fixed, historic footprint with a limited number of storefronts, which means every departure and every arrival gets noticed by the people who actually use this plaza every week, because there's nowhere else in the layout for a new business to hide.
Another Change in the Plaza
Pekoe wasn't the first small, personal business to leave this plaza. In 2024, Alive and Well, a wellness center chain based in Austin, expanded into the storefront next to Pekoe. Alpine Barbers, the shop generations of neighborhood men and boys still call by its old name, Charlie's, also left the plaza.
By the time Pekoe's lease ran out, the plaza had seen changes among its independent and larger businesses.
What Actually Moved In, and Where It Moved From
Here's the part that changes the story. The newest tenant in this same plaza is Skratch Labs Table, the food-and-bowl concept from Skratch Labs, the sports nutrition company founded by Dr. Allen Lim and Ian MacGregor to make hydration mixes without the artificial ingredients found in typical sports drinks. Skratch Labs Table relocated to 1245 Alpine Avenue in the Ideal Broadway Shops earlier this year, moving out of its original Pearl Street address.
Think about what that move actually means. Pearl Street Mall commands some of the highest retail rents in Colorado. A company that had already established itself downtown chose to leave that address for a strip center a mile and a half north, one with free parking and, according to the chef running the kitchen, a stronger sense of neighborhood connection than the tourist foot traffic on Pearl Street ever gave them.
A family-run tea shop has closed, while a homegrown Boulder brand has moved from Pearl Street into the same plaza. The plaza's tenant mix now includes an Austin wellness chain and a Boulder sports nutrition company that built its name over a decade before it ever needed a storefront.
Santo, the New Mexican restaurant known for stacked enchiladas and its tequila selection, has also settled into the plaza at 1265 Alpine, rounding out a stretch that now runs from wellness services to sit-down dining to a fast-casual bowl counter, all inside the same jagged-roofed building Wagener designed before any of these brands existed.
What This Actually Looks Like on a Tuesday
If your errand loop still includes Whole Foods at the east end, here's the honest inventory of what's around it this fall: a wellness center where the barbershop used to be, Santo for dinner, Skratch Labs Table for a bowl if you're coming off a ride, and an empty storefront at 1225 Alpine where the tea shop used to be. Whether something local fills that gap, or whether another business takes the space, is the open question hanging over this corner right now.
None of this changes what the plaza is at its core. It's still the same 1958 building, still anchored by the same grocery store under a new name, still serving the same walking radius of North Boulder homes it was built for almost seventy years ago. What's changed is the plaza's mix of businesses, and that's worth knowing next time you're circling the lot for a parking spot.
If you're curious what else has shifted in North Boulder this year, or you just want a second set of eyes on what a property near this corridor is actually worth given how the retail mix around it keeps moving, Marybeth Emerson knows this stretch of Broadway as well as anyone. Schedule a Consultation and we can walk through it together.
