Walk up Bridge Street toward Gondola One this month and the corner at Hanson Ranch Road looks exactly like it did last winter. There's a line at Big Bear Bistro for breakfast burritos. The patio at the Red Lion Restaurant still has chairs out. If you'd been following the talk around town for the past year, you might have expected scaffolding by now. The Red Lion Building was supposed to be coming down. It isn't. Not yet.
That gap between what people have been saying and what's actually scheduled to happen is the real story at the top of Bridge Street right now. The redevelopment is real, the tenant changes are real, and several long-running businesses are genuinely losing their spaces. But the timeline everyone's been repeating is off by a full ski season, and the businesses that are moving aren't scrambling. Most of them have been planning their next act for a year or more.
The building that isn't coming down this winter
The Red Lion Building dates to Vail's 1962-63 opening season, and it's owned outright now by Denver developer Jeff Selby, who bought in with partners back in 1979. He and his son Charlie Selby have proposed a renovation that would tear down the current street-level Red Lion Restaurant space and rebuild it with more retail and expanded outdoor seating, along with a new below-grade event space where the restaurant's kitchen used to be.
The applicants went before Vail's Planning & Environmental Commission in July 2026 asking to increase outdoor patio area by 41 percent, from 748 square feet to 1,259 square feet. That's a meaningful jump in seating for one of the busiest corners in the village, and it's part of why the project has already cleared its major approval hurdle.
Here's the part that got lost in the retelling: town staff have confirmed that construction won't start until spring 2027, after one more full ski season with the building operating as it is now. The Red Lion Restaurant and Big Bear Bistro are both staying open through the coming winter. If you've been putting off a visit because you assumed the doors were closing any day, they're not. You have a full season.
Two leases, two different endings
Not every business in that building gets the same outcome, though, and that's worth sitting with for a minute.
Big Bear Bistro has occupied its spot at 297 Hanson Ranch Road for 18 years. Owner Vidette Gehl's lease wasn't renewed as part of the redevelopment plan, and she's spent this year searching for a new home in Vail Village or possibly Lionshead. She's confirmed she's staying put through the coming ski season while she looks, which matches the delayed construction timeline. Gehl already has some insurance against the uncertainty: last winter she opened a second location, Little Bear Café, in EagleVail's Alpinist building, staffed in part by a former Big Bear cook and his wife who worked there when it first opened in 2008. This summer she extended Little Bear's hours past 5 p.m. for the first time, betting that locals tired of paying for Vail Village parking would rather stay closer to home for an evening drink.
Down the row, Blü Cow has occupied its street-level space off Seibert Circle since 2014, though the business itself traces back to 1967, when it opened as the Blue Cow, a Swiss hot dog stand. Owner Simone Larese is also losing her lease and fielding offers elsewhere in town.
Meanwhile Rod Linafelter, co-owner of the Red Lion Restaurant since 1963, got a different offer entirely: dibs on reconfigured dining and kitchen space in the rebuilt building, at a higher rent. He's also been scouting other Bridge Street locations in case the numbers don't work. Same building, same redevelopment, three different outcomes. That's the nuance that a single "iconic building torn down" headline flattens.
What moves into the empty storefronts
The person most publicly excited about all of this is Scott Rednor, who moved from New Jersey to Vail in 2009 to sing après-ski sets with Phil Long at the Red Lion and opened Shakedown Bar in the building's basement three years later. Rednor has toured as a guitarist with acts including Lenny Kravitz, Dave Matthews, and Blues Traveler, and he's treating the redevelopment as expansion rather than displacement.
He's taking over Big Bear Bistro's street-level space for a new East Coast-style deli and tequila bar. And once the old Red Lion Restaurant space is demolished and rebuilt, he'll open a full-service restaurant and concert venue below the new storefronts, called Harper & Charly's after his two daughters. He's described it as something in the spirit of Aspen's Belly Up, and if it opens as planned it will be the first indoor concert and event space in Vail Village since 8150, the venue in the old Crossroads building, closed in 2007 to make way for the Solaris Residences.
Here's a summary of where things stand as of this September:
| Business | Status | What's next |
|---|---|---|
| Red Lion Restaurant | Operating through the coming ski season | Reconfigured space offered to current owner at higher rent |
| Big Bear Bistro | Operating through the coming ski season | Lease not renewed; owner searching for new Village or Lionshead space |
| Blü Cow | Operating through the coming ski season | Lease not renewed; owner fielding other offers |
| Shakedown Bar | Staying in place | Expanding into Big Bear's vacated street-level space |
| Harper & Charly's | Not yet open | Planned below-grade concert venue and restaurant, construction tied to spring 2027 timeline |
A different clock, one block away
It's worth separating the Red Lion story from what's happening one block up, because the two get conflated constantly and they're running on entirely different schedules.
Los Amigos, the cantina at the base of Gondola One known for its sunny deck and its view of skiers taking the Pepi's Face death slide, closed this past April after 53 years. Its second-generation owner, Brad Kaemmer, whose family also ran La Piñata, Pistachio's, and the Toy Shop on Bridge Street over the decades, is turning the space into a members-only dining and lifestyle club called the Sixty Two Society. It's a $9 million buildout in the historic commercial building at the top of Bridge Street that locals still call the Vista Bahn Building, after the old lift it once sat beside. Construction began in May, membership is capped at 62, and the dining room is set to be open to the public even though the club itself is exclusive. It's a separate building, a separate developer, and a season ahead of the Red Lion project on its own calendar.
What's actually new to try this season
Beyond the two headline projects, the village picked up a genuinely new dining option this year. Zuma opened at the Sebastian this summer, the first American mountain-town outpost for chef Rainer Becker's Japanese izakaya concept, which started in London in the early 2000s and has since expanded to more than two dozen locations across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. It runs an open kitchen with a sushi bar and robata counter.
The Vail Farmers' Market and Art Show still has a few Sundays left this season, running through October 4 along East Meadow Drive from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Vail Oktoberfest wrapped its second weekend in Vail Village on September 20, following the Lionshead weekend on September 11 through 13. And the mountain's currently scheduled to open for the season on November 13, with the free Friday concert series kicking off that same day and running through December 4.
None of that changes the timeline at the top of Bridge Street. But it's the reason the corner still feels alive while the paperwork for its next chapter works its way through. The construction fence is coming. It's just coming next spring, not this one.
If you're curious how changes like these on Bridge Street tend to ripple into what happens with village real estate over time, Dana Gumber has been tracking Vail Village's commercial and residential cycles closely enough to put this season in context. Reach out to talk through it.
