It’s the comeback story the whole city has been rooting for: Starting this weekend, Jim Pittenger will once again have a brick-and-mortar location of Biker Jim’s that’s all his own when his new stall opens at Avanti.
In June 2024, Pittenger made the heartbreaking decision to step away from the business he’d started by slinging sausages from a cart in 2005, earning praise from fans far and wide. In 2010, when Anthony Bourdain visited the Mile High, he, famously, wasn’t too impressed with the city — save for the wild boar, rattlesnake, elk and reindeer sausages that Pittenger fed him. “Thank you for all your good work in making Denver a wonderful place to be,” Bourdain told Biker Jim at the time.
But things started to go awry for Pittenger after he partnered with a new CEO, Andrew Soulakis, in 2020 to help get the business through the pandemic slump. Instead, “none of what he promised came to fruition, and I gave control and ownership of Biker Jim’s away for nothing. I didn’t know that right away, but little by little I watched all the good that I had worked for, with so much passion and love ebb away,” Pittenger shared in a statement last year, as he announced that he was leaving the company…