Fresh off a James Beard Award nomination for outstanding cocktail service, the owners of Denver bar Yacht Club are solidifying their presence in the city with a new restaurant based on their collective memories of their hometown Southern cuisine.
Rougarou (pronounced roo-guh-roo) will open at an indoor-outdoor restaurant space on 2844 Welton St. in July, said co-owner Mary Allison Wright. She is embarking on the venture with the same crew she opened Yacht Club with in 2021: her brother, John David Wright, and her husband, McLain Hedges.
On the menu will be an assortment of delicacies that’ll raise an eyebrow or two, especially for those unfamiliar with Louisiana Creole cooking or other hyper-regional dishes found in Southern states. But they will make more sense if you’ve experienced Yacht Club’s alluring (and sometimes perplexing) combination of cocktails, close quarters and hot dogs.
For the founding trio, who were all born in Chattanooga, Tenn., they are dishes from their childhoods and adult travels in a region they know all too well.
An example is Hedges’ stepmom’s strawberry salad, one of several vegetarian options at Rougarou. There will also be a daily rotation of “Chicken on a Stick,” named for a beloved Chevron gas station in Oxford, Miss., where Hedges and Wright attended college.
Other plates are re-imaginations or well-crafted updates, she said. They’re partly the reason for the restaurant’s name: Rougarou is a Cajun folk creature that resembles the werewolf, a shape-shifting beast. Rougarou’s mains include hot and sour catfish with dirty rice and red beans; “Grandad’s” chicken with Virginia white barbecue sauce; and a tamal pie with oxtail, coleslaw, Rougarou hot sauce and a buttered Saltine cracker.
The smaller plates read just as intoxicating: boiled peanuts with kudzu blossom, pickled shrimp with Rougarou hot sauce and a West Indies crab salad nicknamed the “West Denvies” crab salad in honor of the owners’ adopted hometown.
“This is really, I think, our ultimate love letter to the people and places and food that have made us who we are,” Wright said.
The restaurant will also have a front-facing retail space named Overpour after her and Hedges’ earlier wine shop, Proper Pour. Inspired by Bacchanal Fine Wine & Spirits in New Orleans, the shop will sell wine, housewares and snacks that customers can take home or uncork and unwrap in the restaurant’s back patio, she said.
Drinks at Rougarou — which is located in the former Dunbar Kitchen and Taphouse building in Five Points, will center around a martini menu, which Wright said is the “ultimate palette” to accompany the food. And with cocktails like the “Champagnekiller,” with white rum, pisco, mango, coconut, buttermilk and champagne, the same creativity that garnered her and Hedges a trip to the James Beard Awards last week will be on full display.
And like the weekly Sunday jam sessions at Yacht Club, artists and bands will play live at Rougarou as part of regular residencies, Wright said.
The couple was nominated for Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service, which went to Ignacio “Nacho” Jimenez of Superbueno in New York City. But they did win the Spirited Award for the Best U.S. Cocktail Bar from the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation in 2024.
Like a werewolf morphing under a full moon, Rougarou’s kitchen will be open until 1 a.m. (It’ll be closed Wednesdays.)
“It’s part of what we admire about big cities, right,” Wright said of serving food late at night. “I think that as Denver grows, it’s important to honor those things.”
In the future, she and her family hope to find a permanent location for Door Prize, a pop-up they ran during the pandemic that consisted of a meat and a choice of three sides. They are also keeping tabs on restaurant spaces in Chattanooga, she said.
Given that the hot dogs at Yacht Club have taken on a life of their own, they will remain exclusively at the bar, Wright said.
