LAMAR • The big, blocky hotel that was a Best Western and then a Rodeway Inn and then closed — dark, damaged and stained, full of outdated furniture and pigeons — was no place for the upscale restaurant that EJ Carpenter and Ezra Gutierrez had in mind. Or so they were told.

Gutierrez recalls the doubters. “You can’t sell wine out here. Why are you putting watermelon radishes on a salad? That doesn’t belong here.”

This was far southeast Colorado, much closer to rural Kansas than this state’s major, finer-dining populations. This was the Cow Palace Inn, a 50-year-old stop for truckers and goose hunters. Lamar’s cattlemen once knew it as a place to party and later a place for more nefarious behavior.

“Historically it was unprintable things,” Carpenter says.

It was never meant to be what it is now: a bright, earthy, fully renovated hotel with a sleek steakhouse and cocktail bar.

Or so Carpenter and his partner chef were told it was never meant to be.

“Even our food vendors were like, ‘You can’t do a concept like that,’” Carpenter says.

He and Gutierrez were no strangers to doubt. Opened in 2023, the combined Historic Cow Palace Inn and Tavern 1301 is only the latest result of the unlikely pair rising above their past on Colorado’s plains.

Take it from Anne-Marie Crampton, Lamar’s community development director: “The rebirth of the Cow Palace is something close to a miracle.”

It seems miraculous to some: snazzy suites stocked with wine, which is also poured down at the bar. One can grab a Bud Light, too. But more seem to be interested in an Old Fashioned.

“Our wine and craft cocktail sales outweigh our beer sales,” Gutierrez says.

Using meat and produce from local farms and gardens, his menu combines classics — burgers, steaks, brisket — with creative takes on Italian and Mexican learned from award-winning kitchens around Arizona, California and other parts of the world. New Zealand and Singapore were other stops on Gutierrez’s culinary journey out of his native Burlington in eastern Colorado.

The butternut squash enchiladas started as an experiment at Tavern 1301. They remain a local favorite.

Like the wine, cocktails and similarly beloved “tavern fondue,” the butternut squash enchiladas send a message to those doubters who thought this concept had no place in little Lamar.

“It’s not that people don’t want these things,” Gutierrez says. “It’s just that nobody’s offered them in the right way.”

The idea of Tavern 1301, he says: “Enough pizzazz and fun, but not so pretentious that it’s uncomfortable.”

That’s the idea of restaurants he and Carpenter grew back in Burlington and Wray on the plains farther north. Since a reimagining in 2016, Burlington’s Dish Room in particular has become a hit. It’s a place where a dirt-stained farmer might sit beside a white-collared foodie from Aspen or Chicago.

Hinting at the reality of dirty dishes behind the glitz, the name Dish Room was very intentional. Just as the “historic” in the name Historic Cow Palace Inn was very intentional: Built in 1972, it’s the place that people have known and yet it’s not. The horse racing, the skinny dipping, the hard drinking — that’s history.

The address is in the name Tavern 1301, also simple and intentional.

“If you go to a tavern in the city, it’s about good food, whereas taverns out here used to be about cheap booze,” Carpenter says. “So it was about blending that into a food place.”

Maybe it wasn’t the best name, he admits. Some still have the booze idea.

Oh well, Gutierrez says with a chuckle. “We were so beat up after the construction by the time we had to switch our minds to thinking about that.”

The hotel is now a wooden, glassy, brick and iron, Instagram-worthy picture of modern elegance. This is after three years of knocking down walls, replacing pipes and wires, ripping out vanities and replacing the carpet and furniture of 95 rooms. (In 2019, the previous overseer told the local paper the required renovations might cost upwards of $2 million.)

Carpenter and Gutierrez worked long nights between bites from a Walmart rotisserie chicken. It was grimy, bloody work. The kind of work they knew back on the farm.

“I grew up in a trailer house on 20 acres splitting wood,” Carpenter says. “I just wanted better.”

In 1998, he opened his first restaurant in Idalia, the farming outpost not far from home. He teamed up with a young, ambitious chef also from Burlington along the way. In 2006, Carpenter and Gutierrez opened 4th and Main Downtown Grille in Wray.

Gutierrez had known hard times by then. The high school football star was a shell of his former self after a motorcycle crash.

On the road to recovery, he dove into an Anthony Bourdain book.

“I read that, and it was like a rocket,” Gutierrez says.

Cooking was a childhood dream born from high-end restaurants his grandpa took him to in Arizona. Years later out of culinary school, 4th and Main was close to a dream. But Gutierrez wanted more.

So off he went to Arizona, picking up work in notable kitchens. More hard times awaited him here.

He was living in a home with a woman he had married. Then the housing market crashed, and the recession took hold.

“We got to the point where we were living in this little trailer. The water didn’t work,” Gutierrez says.

He’d shower wherever he could between work in construction, landscaping and cooking at an Italian restaurant. Gutierrez added another job: He cooked and sold pizzas out of a wood-fired oven he hauled around.

Roofing and landscaping by day, cooking by night. Gutierrez hardly slept. “I was drowning bad,” he says.

By 2015, he was ready to come home. He called Carpenter, who was on the verge of closing his Burlington restaurant. The recession had taken a toll on him, too.

“I was at the height of disaster,” Carpenter says. “But I was like, if we get Ezra back, we can do this.”

That they did. The reimagined Dish Room gained fast acclaim — catching the attention of Cow Palace ownership as the hotel sat vacant in 2020.

A hotel in little Lamar in need of an overhaul? In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic? It seemed the unlikeliest venture of all.

But there the hotel sat at a major crossroads for travelers — not so unlike the Dish Room. And here again was a small town like his own missing a certain something, Carpenter thought.

“In rural America you have church and high school football. There’s no other forum for people to gather,” he says. “And all the little diners have come and gone because they just weren’t big enough.”

The old Cow Palace? No way, Carpenter and Gutierrez were told.

“I guess I’m always like, where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Gutierrez says.

Again, they found a way — changing much while keeping some reminders of the old Cow Palace.

That includes the surprise canopy that greets guests in the converted, spacious dining room. Some trees are thought to date back to the hotel’s 1970s beginnings.

“They’re still growing,” Carpenter says.

On the menu

Tavern 1301 has a “12 buck lunch” menu. Among favorites: the pastrami Reuben; chicken fried steak; BBQ brisket mac and cheese; fried shrimp and hand-cut fries. And another: the poppers, Anaheim peppers wrapped in bacon, coated in gouda, cheddar and cream cheeses and drizzled in ranch and a house sauce.

The poppers also appear on the appetizer menu ($16). The Tavern Fondue melts together poblano, corn, basil and goat cheese to enjoy with a baguette. The taquitos of carnita pork, cheese and adobo are popular. And the Brussels Hash: Brussel sprouts, bacon, nuts, dried fruit, goat cheese and apple cider vinegar.

Several burgers ($13-$18) to choose from, including one topped with ham, bacon and a fried egg and another with bacon, white cheddar, garlic mayo, barbecue sauce and crispy onion. The Wolfman ($18) is a barbecue sandwich stacked with brisket, pork belly, ham, cheese and garlic mayo.

The butternut squash enchiladas ($22) blend ricotta, nuts, morita pepper, sweet corn and pico. The cherry adobo pork loin ($22) is another favorite signature dish.

Choice of 6-ounce and 12-ounce steaks ($26-$48): tenderloin filet, rib-eye and New York strip.

Pastas ($20-$20) are another specialty of well-traveled chef Ezra Gutierrez. He likes the Forest, Land and Sea: linguini under pork belly, clams, mushroom, garlic and other sauces. Owning partner EJ Carpenter likes the Dirty South: chicken, jalapeno beef sausage, chipotle gouda cream, chiles, onion and pico.

For dessert ($8): creme brulee and butter bread pudding.