Most mornings, Havana Street just looks like Havana Street. Strip malls, left-turn lanes, the same six restaurants you've been meaning to try since you moved in. Then Westword ran its 43rd Annual Best of Denver awards this year and handed the title of Best International Food Intersection to Havana and Yale, the exact corner that forms Village East's western edge. Suddenly the street you drive past twice a day on the way to King Soopers has a trophy.
That's the thing about living somewhere long enough. The remarkable becomes furniture. This is a look at what's actually sitting at the edges of the neighborhood right now, in the last stretch of summer 2026, and why the loop connecting a 1969 golf course, a mall parking lot with a live band, and a strip of restaurants representing a dozen countries is worth treating as a Saturday plan instead of three separate errands.
Colorado's Only Chivito Sits on Your Border
Start with the restaurant that made the award make sense. Orejano Casual Latin Cuisine, tucked into the South Havana corridor, is by its own owner's account the only Uruguayan restaurant in the entire state. Marcelo Alvariza spent years doing flooring and tile work before he opened it, and the signature dish he built the menu around is the Chivito Uruguayo, a sandwich whose name translates to baby lamb despite containing no lamb at all. The story behind that contradiction dates back nearly 80 years to a restaurant in Uruguay that ran out of the meat it meant to serve and improvised with everything else in the kitchen instead.
You do not need to know Uruguayan culinary history to eat well here. You need to know it exists, because a restaurant this specific rarely survives on foot traffic alone. It survives on a neighborhood that keeps coming back. Alongside it, Il Forno di Tutti has been recognized by 5280 Magazine among the best Italian restaurants in the Denver area, and Carniceria Aurora relocated earlier this year into a space nearly triple the size of its old one, with a butcher counter that makes leaving empty-handed a genuine act of willpower. None of these are new arrivals chasing a trend. They're businesses that have been quietly building reputations while the rest of Denver figured out where Havana Street actually is.
Three Calendars, One Weekend
The reason this stretch of Village East works as a plan and not just a list of good options is that its three biggest draws run on overlapping schedules through September. Here's how they line up right now.
| Anchor | Schedule | What's there |
|---|---|---|
| Aurora Hills Golf Course | Wed–Sun 6am–8pm, Mon–Tue 9am–5pm | Walkable 18-hole course, Tin Cup Restaurant on site |
| Mershop's Market Days, Town Center at Aurora | Last two Saturdays, June–September, 10am–2pm | Local produce, artisan vendors, live music 11am–1:30pm |
| Havana Street Night Market | Last Saturdays, May–September, 6pm–10pm | International food vendors at Leezakaya, 2710 S Havana St |
That means on the last Saturday of any given month between now and September, a resident can play nine holes in the morning, catch the tail end of Market Days in the afternoon, and walk the Night Market after dinner without leaving the neighborhood's own western edge.
Nine Holes Before the Market Opens
Aurora Hills Golf Course, at 50 S. Peoria St., isn't a destination course. It's a neighborhood one, and that's the point. Designed by Henry Hughes and opened in 1969, it holds the distinction of being Aurora's first public course. It plays as a par 72 or 73 depending on the tees, stretches roughly 6,600 yards, and is flat and walkable enough that you can skip the cart and still make good time.
Tin Cup Restaurant sits right on the property, so a round doesn't have to end at the parking lot. The course has also partnered with PEAK Golf Academy to expand its junior and adult lesson programs, adding personalized coaching on top of the city's long-running Kids Golf Free windows, where anyone 17 or younger can play at no charge alongside a paying adult. If you've got a kid who's curious about the game and a course five minutes from home, this is the season to find out if it sticks.
Utah Park sits just next door on Peoria, recently renovated and built around a 2.3-mile loop trail that's flat enough for a stroller and short enough for a lunch-break walk. It's the kind of park that does its job without asking for credit, which tracks with most of what's on this list.
Where Saturday Actually Starts
Town Center at Aurora's Mershop's Market Days has become the connective tissue of the neighborhood's summer, running the last two Saturdays of every month from June through September in the food court parking lot. It's not just produce and crafts. Each market runs a live set from 11am to 1:30pm, and this year's lineup has included Four the Record, Rented Tuxedo, and The Trouble Bound Band, with Dotsero Trio and The Wrecklunds rounding out the late-August dates. None of these are touring acts. They're the kind of bands that play because a mall parking lot on a Saturday morning is exactly their speed, and that's part of what makes it feel like a neighborhood event instead of a marketing push.
The market closes at 2pm, which leaves the rest of the afternoon open before the Night Market picks up the thread six hours later.
The Night Market Two Blocks Over
The Havana Street Night Market runs the last Saturday of the month from May through September, from 6 to 10pm, centered at Havana and Yale outside Leezakaya at 2710 S Havana Street. It's less a market in the produce-and-crafts sense and more a rotating food festival, built around the same international density that just earned the intersection its Best of Denver title. If Orejano or Il Forno di Tutti are already on your regular rotation, this is the night to branch into whatever else is sitting in the twenty-some shopping centers along that corridor.
If you've lived in Village East for more than a year, you've probably eaten well on Havana Street without ever thinking of it as a destination other people would drive to. This year, they are.
The Loop, Not the List
None of this requires a car trip across town. Aurora Hills, Utah Park, Town Center, and the Havana corridor sit close enough together that the late-summer weekend writes itself: golf and a walk in the morning, market and live music in the afternoon, and an international food crawl once the sun starts going down. What changed isn't the neighborhood. It's that Denver's food critics finally noticed what was already here, which is a strange kind of validation for something you never needed anyone else to confirm.
That's the version of Village East that doesn't show up in a listing description or a drive-by impression. It shows up on a Saturday, if you actually use the whole loop instead of just the piece closest to your driveway.
If you're weighing a move within Village East, curious what a home near this corridor is worth, or just want a second opinion from people who know these streets well, Gerlock Homes is happy to talk it through. Request a free home valuation or schedule a no-pressure consultation whenever you're ready.
