Vegan restaurant in Minturn to close with party featuring Denver hip-hop duo Calm

If you have not yet tried the Rainbow’s End Cafe’s signature “vegan comfort food,” you have a few more days to behold the magic that converts plant-based ingredients into familiar restaurant items like milkshakes and mozzarella sticks.

The restaurant will be open for the remainder of this week, from noon to 7 p.m., culminating with a party on Saturday.

The restaurant’s future is unsure after that, according to owner/chef couple Heather and Randy Zaccardo. They’d like to come back after an offseason break but they’re not sure if it’s going to be possible.

For now, the restaurant is hoping to have a great week and end it with a good party including music from Denver hip-hop duo Calm, blues songwriter Hannah Bell, and giveaways from Solstice Sweets.

And, of course, there will be vegan food specials.

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Randy Zaccardo says the vegan food at the Rainbow’s End Cafe is unlike anything available in the Mountain West. Zaccardo developed the menu — designed to mimic an ordinary, non-vegan Americana restaurant — over years of work and travel. After seeing there were very few if any vegan restaurants in Western Colorado, he found a spot in Minturn and decided to give it a try.

Before arriving in the Eagle River Valley, Randy Zaccardo worked as a chef in Europe for years, but the pandemic put an end to his Amsterdam-based restaurant. The Zaccardos moved back the the United States, settling in the Vail area where Randy also lived in the late 2000s.

Zaccardo said upon returning, he knew there were many more vegans than when he left, and he started thinking about what it would take to bring a vegan restaurant to the area.

When an opportunity presented itself to open a spot in the Agora gathering space in Minturn, Zaccardo jumped on it, opening this summer. He said right away vegans began visiting from all over the state, and locals who happened upon the restaurant were often fooled by the menu items.

“People would come in and they wouldn’t realize it was vegan, even after eating it,” he said.

In his buffalo chicken sandwich, for example, Rainbow’s End’s signature buffalo sauce uses an oat-based replacement for butter, leaving the flavor of the buffalo sauce intact. Piled high with lettuce, tomato and pickles, it’s easy for the imitation chicken portion of the sandwich to get lost in your mouth and assumed to be the chicken-nugget-style chicken that’s common in chicken sandwiches in the U.S.

The restaurant’s theme is comfort food, and Zaccardo said his Italian upbringing, in combination with his personal desire to take on a plant-based diet, drove him to find vegan replacements for items he grew up enjoying, like meatballs and mozzarella sticks.

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The mozzarella sticks were among the trickiest to figure out, with Heather Zaccardo experimenting endlessly while Randy, a mozzarella-stick aficionado, critiqued the outcome.

After years of trial and error, the couple created a vegan mozzarella stick that can truly be confused for its non-vegan counterpart. Alongside their vegan ranch dipping sauce — another Rainbow’s End Cafe signature item — the Zaccardos have indeed found the comfort items sought by many.

But now what will they do with it? It’s a question the Zaccardos are currently pondering.

The Rainbow’s End Cafe has 70 bottles of vegan ranch dressing and 50 bottles of vegan buffalo sauce for sale out of the Minturn shop this week; the Zaccardos are hoping to sell it all, and Randy thinks he may really have something scaleable with their mozzarella sticks. Ultimately, they’d like to see some of their items for sale at grocery stores.

“Everybody who has tried these items, whether they’re vegan or not, has complimented them,” he said.

The Rainbow’s End Cafe closing party will take place from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday at the Agora, located at 152 Main Street in Minturn.