Vail Village Lost Los Amigos and Leonora This Year. Look Who's Replacing Them.

"Vail is home base," Brad Kaemmer said this year, explaining why he chose to rebuild his new restaurant on the exact block where his parents poured drinks in the mid-1960s. He wasn't being sentimental about the town in general. He meant the address.

That detail matters more than it first appears, because if you only skimmed the headlines from Vail Village this year, you'd think the street had been handed over to outside money. Los Amigos, the deck where a generation of skiers ended their day with pitchers of Coors and nachos, is closing. Leonora, the Sebastian's signature restaurant, is gone. Two anchor spots on Bridge Street, both replaced within months of each other. From a distance that reads like a resort town losing its local character to investors chasing the next big brand.

Look at who's actually moving into those two spaces and the story flips.

The Kaemmers Never Left the Block

Los Amigos is becoming The Sixty Two Society, a members-only alpine club with a public dining room, and the person behind it is Brad Kaemmer, who grew up in Vail because his parents built their lives here. John and Julie Kaemmer arrived in the mid-1960s and opened the London Bar and Grille, which later became the Clock Tower Inn. The family went on to run Pistachio's, which became Vendetta's, and La Piñata, which eventually became Los Amigos itself. They later moved into retail with the Toy Shop on Bridge Street and the Velveteen Rabbit inside the Vail Village Inn.

So when Brad Kaemmer's $9 million project takes over the Los Amigos space, it isn't a family cashing out and a stranger cashing in. It's the third act of a business the Kaemmers have been running, in one form or another, on that same stretch of Bridge Street since before most of the buildings around it existed.

The name is a nod to 1962, the year Vail opened, and membership is capped at 62 people. The plan relocates the entrance from Bridge Street to the Gondola One plaza and adds a fire pit for anyone walking by, member or not. The dining room stays open to the public, with members getting priority on reservations and access to private lounge space. The project has been under construction through the year, with Kaemmer targeting a summer opening.

"Some people are like, 'Oh, how could you?'" Kaemmer has said of taking over the Los Amigos space. "What they don't understand is that my parents opened La Piñata long before Los Amigos."

That's not a developer's talking point. That's a family correcting the record on their own history.

The One Genuine Outsider

Leonora's replacement is a different story, and it's worth being honest about that difference rather than smoothing it over. Zuma, the Japanese izakaya chain founded in London in 2002 by chef Rainer Becker, opened inside the Sebastian on June 11 of this year. It's Zuma's first location in an American mountain town and its fifth in the United States, joining outposts in Miami, New York, Las Vegas, and Boston. Nothing about the brand has roots in the Vail Valley. It's an international restaurant group choosing Vail as its next market, the same calculation it made for Cortina and Gstaad.

That distinction matters for reading this year correctly. Zuma is the exception that proves the rule. Everything else changing hands on Bridge Street this year has a Vail surname attached to it. Zuma doesn't, and it's the only one that doesn't.

The Staff Who Learned the Street Before They Opened On It

The third major change is easy to miss if you're only counting closures, because La Brasserie didn't replace anyone. It opened in a space on Bridge Street on Bastille Day, July 14, and the team behind it, Drennan, chef Tyson Amick, and beverage director Joseph Newton, spent years working the floors and bars at Matsuhisa and Root and Flower before opening their own place a few doors down.

The menu leans classic French: mousseline de foie gras, quiche Lorraine, cordon bleu, a whole roasted chicken finished crisp in garlic and thyme. The bar program does the same kind of work Newton did before, pulling in local touches like a black truffle distillate from Archetype Distillery in Vail Village, sprayed over ice in a cocktail built on duck fat-infused rye and cognac. None of that is borrowed talent flown in from somewhere else. It's people who already knew Vail Village's rhythms, its regulars, and its ingredient suppliers, deciding to run their own room instead of someone else's.

Not every spot on the street is in flux this year. El Segundo, the taqueria and tequila bar the Montauk Seafood Grill team opened back in 2019, is still doing the same brisk business it always has on Gore Creek Drive, untouched by any of this. The turnover this year is concentrated in exactly two addresses. It just happens that those two addresses are the ones everyone in town has an opinion about.

What's Happening Underneath the Street

While the restaurant scene reshuffles above ground, the town itself is mid-project on two fronts that will shape how you actually move through Vail this fall.

The Lionshead demolition clears the way for new construction at the Montelisse site, with excavation and shoring to follow once building permits are approved. The recreation path project is more disruptive for daily foot traffic: it includes a new pedestrian bridge over Red Sandstone Creek and realigned crossings meant to improve safety, but it also means a detour along the North Frontage Road for the length of the project. If your regular walk or bike commute runs through that stretch, plan on the detour lasting into mid-November.

Both projects sit at the opposite end of town from Bridge Street, which is worth noting on its own. Vail isn't just changing at its most visible corner this year. Lionshead is mid-transition too, just less visibly to anyone who doesn't walk that particular path.

The Pattern, Not Just the List

Put the restaurant changes and the construction calendar side by side and a clearer picture forms than either one gives alone. The businesses replacing Los Amigos and Leonora aren't outside capital discovering Vail for the first time. They're a family finishing a third generation on the same block and a kitchen and bar crew stepping out from under Matsuhisa's and Root and Flower's names to put their own on the door. Zuma is the one true import in the mix, and it landed inside a hotel rather than displacing a homegrown business on the street itself.

That's a different story than the one visitors and even some newer residents tend to assume when a familiar restaurant closes. It's not always a sign the town is being remade by people with no stake in it. Sometimes it's the opposite: the people with the deepest stake finally getting the chance to build something of their own.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property values or timing near Bridge Street, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks these shifts as they happen rather than after the fact. Work With Ben at Kleimer Company for that conversation, whenever you're ready to have it.