Ask someone who has never driven Havana Street what it is like, and they will describe the same thing everyone describes: four-plus miles of pho next to pupusas next to injera, a strip where you can eat your way across three continents without moving your car more than a few blocks. That version is not wrong. It is just not where the actual news has been happening.

Ask someone who eats on Havana Street every week where to go right now, and most of them will point you to one intersection. This year gave them a good reason to.

The Corner Westword Just Named

In its 43rd Annual Best of Denver awards for 2026, Westword handed out a category built for exactly this corridor: Best International Food Intersection, and it went to South Havana Street and Yale Avenue. Not the whole four-mile run between Dartmouth and Sixth, one corner of it.

That corner is anchored by Leezakaya, the Japanese and Korean fusion spot at 2710 S Havana Street that chef Jong Wook Lee opened in 2023. It is also the address where the Havana Street Night Market has set up on the last Saturday of the month all season, running 6 to 10 p.m. from May through September. The final market of the year lands September 26, which means the same corner that just won a citywide award is also hosting the last big Saturday-night draw of the summer before the corridor's rhythm shifts into fall.

That is not a coincidence so much as a pattern. The award and the recurring event are pointing at the same forty yards of pavement.

The Year's New Names, and Where They Landed

The corridor had a genuinely busy year across its full four-plus miles, even though the single biggest piece of recognition landed at one exact corner.

Chef Liu's Kitchen came back after more than a decade away. Owner Zeng Liu had closed his original Szechuan and Northern Chinese restaurant in 2014 and moved to Oregon, then returned to Denver in 2020 and spent years waiting for the right spot on Havana Street specifically. He found it in Havana Plaza, taking over the space a ramen shop called Menya had vacated in January 2025. The doors reopened September 20, 2025, and by most accounts Liu picked up right where he left off.

Elsewhere on the corridor, Carniceria Aurora made the opposite move: instead of leaving, it grew. Sisters Maricela and Blanca Carillo founded the market in 2015 and ran it for years out of a 3,000-square-foot storefront. In December 2025 they moved just down the block into a space nearly triple the size, and built a full counter-service restaurant right at the entrance, serving tacos in sets of four for $9 alongside burritos, tortas and stews. It has no website and no social media. You find it by walking in.

Elsewhere on the same stretch, the year brought:

• Golf Ethiopian marking its 15th anniversary with a menu and space refresh, while keeping the traditional dishes that built its following.
• Pupusas La Salvadoreña building a following on more than a dozen filling combinations plus an all-day breakfast menu.
• Orejano, a Uruguayan spot serving fresh-baked empanadas and the Chivito Uruguayo, a stacked sandwich that's rare enough in Colorado that CPR News featured it as one of the state's only places doing Uruguayan food.
• Mariscos Los 3 Rios turning a former Denny's into a seafood house that serves dishes in pineapples, coconuts and stone bowls.

The whole run of activity has a bookend. Westword food writer Antony Bruno spent about a year working through the corridor one restaurant at a time for a column called Eat Up Havana, eventually visiting 47 restaurants representing 14 different cultures along the same four-mile stretch. His final stop, published in January 2026, was Carniceria Aurora's new counter. A journalist covering an entire commercial corridor restaurant by restaurant and still needing a full year to finish it tells you something about how dense the options actually are here.

The Same Four Miles, a Different Kind of Turnover

Shift focus from the Yale corner to the Gardens on Havana and the Birchtree Shopping Center at Havana and Jewell, and the story changes. This isn't decline. It's a different kind of churn, and it shows up in who's leaving and who's moving in behind them.

The anchors leaving are the big-box names: a hardware chain, a sporting goods chain, an insurance office, a convenience store franchise. What's replacing them, outside of a gym and a toy store, tends to be smaller and more specialized, and often food and drink. As of the district's own September 2025 leasing update, Havana Street reported itself 93 percent leased, which means this isn't a vacancy problem. It's a shift in what kind of tenant wants to be here, playing out at a completely different set of addresses than the ones collecting this year's headlines.

Put those two sections together and the corridor stops looking like one continuous four-mile experience. The single biggest piece of recognition sits at one intersection, while the actual turnover, new restaurants opening and retail chains leaving, is scattered up and down the full four-plus miles. Both stories are true at the same time, and both are worth knowing if you actually live here.

If You're Planning a Havana Street Night This Month

The practical version of all this: if you want the corner everyone is talking about, Leezakaya at Havana and Yale is where the Best of Denver title landed and where the season's last Night Market runs September 26 from 6 to 10 p.m., with the usual mix of local vendors and live music that's defined the series since May.

If you want the new-and-still-finding-its-footing version, Chef Liu's Kitchen in Havana Plaza and Carniceria Aurora's new counter are both less than a year old and worth the drive on their own.

And if you're the type who wants to see the churn in progress, a slow loop past the Gardens on Havana and Birchtree Shopping Center will show you exactly where a Lego store, a gym and a Turkish bakery are filling in for a hardware chain, a sporting goods store and a 7-Eleven.

None of that is the postcard version of Havana Street. It's the real one, and it changes almost every season.

If the difference between Havana Street's headline corner and its quieter turnover elsewhere is the kind of neighborhood detail you like knowing, Dowling Group keeps a close eye on what's actually happening across Aurora and the rest of the Denver metro, not just the median price on a listing sheet. Let Kerri be your guide.