The Couple Quietly Building Half of Evergreen's Restaurant Scene

"We thought we'd been almost everywhere, but clearly not."

That's what Alex Wolfe said this year at Taste of Evergreen, standing at the Evergreen Lake House on September 15 with a plate from a kitchen she'd never heard of. Alex and her husband Michael live in Chief Hosa. They eat around town on a regular basis, the way most people who live in Evergreen do. And at an event built specifically to let people sample nearly every restaurant in town in one afternoon, they still ran into two names that were new to them: Murphy's Mountain Grill and Evoke 1923.

That's an odd thing to hear about a town this size, until you notice something about those two restaurants. They're owned by the same couple.

One Couple, Two Very Different Restaurants

Rand and Tiffani Packer moved to Evergreen in 2016. The following year, they opened Murphy's Mountain Grill on Highway 74, a small creekside spot known for burgers built with a choice of beef, elk, or grilled chicken, plus milkshakes and a patio that sits close enough to the water to hear it. Inside it feels like a mountain restaurant, with wood throughout and a relaxed, easygoing pace.

Evoke 1923 is the opposite kind of restaurant. It opened in October 2024 inside a building most people driving past would assume had always been fine dining. Chef Rand curates a rotating menu built around global technique, elk loin, seared scallops, matcha dumplings, the kind of plating that shows up in food magazines rather than family road-trip reviews. Two restaurants, same owners, almost nothing else in common except the zip code.

That's part of why locals miss the connection. Murphy's reads as a casual burger joint. Evoke 1923 reads as an occasion restaurant tucked off Spruce Lane. Nothing about either one's branding tells you they're related, so most people file them as two separate additions to the Evergreen dining scene instead of one couple's decade-long project.

A Building With Four Previous Lives

Evoke 1923 sits inside a structure that's done more work than its current single dinner menu suggests. Built in 1923, the building started as a hotel. At some point it became a ranch property. Later it served as a practice space for the Colorado Philharmonic. By the 1970s it had turned into a restaurant for the first time, eventually operating for years as the Bistro at Marshdale before the Packers took it over.

"We love Evergreen, and it's an honor to own a piece of history in this town," Tiffani Packer has said of the building. When they bought it, they kept the century-old fireplace and repainted the walls and floors rather than gutting the space, which is part of why regulars who remember it as the Bistro still recognize the room even with a new name on the door.

Evergreen celebrated its 150th anniversary last year, and a building that's cycled through five identities in that same span is a fairly literal illustration of how a small mountain town keeps reinventing its own commercial corridor without losing the bones of what was there before.

Where the Packers Are Headed Next

The Packers haven't stopped at two restaurants. They've also opened the Muddy Buck in Evergreen, and they've been working on a third concept outside town entirely: La Rocca Rossa, an upscale Italian steakhouse set to take over the former Cafe Prague space in Morrison, built around open-flame meats and a curated wine list.

"I want to allow Denver people to get out of the city and enjoy the view," Rand has said about the pull of running a restaurant in the foothills rather than downtown. It's a small comment, but it explains why a couple with a growing footprint keeps building west of Denver instead of in it. The tradeoff between a shorter commute for city customers and repeat business from a smaller local base is one every restaurant in Evergreen has to solve, and the Packers have solved it by building enough variety, casual, fine dining, and now a Morrison expansion, that the same last name shows up at multiple price points without most customers ever clocking it.

What Else Showed Up at the Lake House

The Packers aren't the whole story at Taste of Evergreen. The Frame Shop Lounge, which opened this year, won the event's Sweet Bites category with a butterscotch pudding that beat out longer-established competitors in both the judges' vote and the popular vote. Notka, a non-alcoholic spirits company based in Floyd Hill, took second in the judged Sips category and first in people's choice for a Butterfly Pea Lavender Lemondrop. Its founder has described how the whole idea started as a joke over lunch at The Lazy Butcher, when someone suggested a Bloody Mary made without vodka, and the name got trademarked within about a week of that conversation.

A handful of other names filled out the room this year:

• Cactus Jack's Saloon and Grill
• Trusan Cuisines
• Kittredge's Blackbird Cafe
• The Lucky Charm Mobile Bar

None of these are new to Evergreen in the way Frame Shop or Notka are, but their presence at the same event, alongside a decade-old burger spot and a year-old fine dining room that share an owner, is the real point. Evergreen's food scene has enough moving pieces now that an annual tasting event exists specifically because no single resident, however long they've lived here, can keep track of it all just by driving Highway 74 or walking Main Street.

Alex Wolfe has probably eaten at Murphy's Mountain Grill. She may not have realized until this September that the fine dining room she'd been meaning to try for a special occasion was built by the same two people.

If you're planning your own Taste of Evergreen recap for next year, or just want to compare notes on which table surprised you most, The Fox Group is always up for that conversation. We eat around here too.