Dirty martini bucatini; samosa agnolotti; everything-seasoned cavatelli stroganoff. The highly anticipated Boombots Pasta Shop is finally here. The restaurant debuted on Saturday, Nov. 8, to a queue of eager carb lovers wrapped around the block.
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“There were 50 people at the door when we opened,” said Cliff Blauvelt, who owns Boombots with his wife, Cara Blauvelt. “The response from this community, specifically in Denver as a whole, has been so wonderful. People are so kind and excited to try our food,” adds Cara.
The space seats about 50, so they hit max capacity instantly.
The Blauvelts first entered Denver’s restaurant zeitgeist through their “rowdy lil sandwich shop,” Odie B’s, which has two outposts, one at 2651 W. 38th Ave. in the Sunnyside neighborhood and the other at 1350 40th St. Boombots is connected to the original location on 38th via a door the team refers to as “the pasta portal.”
“It’s way different than Odie B’s,” Cliff explained. “Going through the door is like, ‘Wow this is wild how different it is.’” Boombots, in Cliff’s words, is the “bougie older brother” of Odie B’s, characterized by dark woods, earth tones, terrazzo countertops, and custom wallpaper accents styled after luxury fashion houses (a la Gucci) with playful pasta motifs woven into the design.
But what is a Boombot? “I started looking for a fun, silly sort of slang name out there that we could use,” Cliff said. “Boombots comes from an Andy Kaufman and Rodney Dangerfield skit on Saturday Night Live. The doctor’s name was ‘Boombotz,’ which is Italian slang for idiot … that’s where [our slogans] ‘eat like an idiot’ and ‘stupid good pasta’ come from.”
The Blauvelts had been noodling around with the idea for a pasta shop for a while when the art gallery next door to Odie B’s Sunnyside spot suddenly became available. “Our landlords were cool and said, ‘We can be creative with the space if you’re interested,’” Cliff recalled. “The idea of having a neighbor wasn’t something I wanted, fighting over trash or oil or whatever. So that’s when we thought we could use the same kitchen to do p.m. service on the other side.”
Unfortunately, permitting delays dragged on for six months. So Cliff took another tack.
“I eventually got tired of waiting. I got a hold of the mayor’s phone number, called and texted, laid it all out that I’m a Denver kid, here are the restaurants I’ve owned, we’re paying rent this whole time,” he said.
To offset the cost, the pair began hosting public pop-ups in the Boombots space after they got their pasta extruder (a machine that creates different pasta shapes) on Nov. 1, 2024. They’ve now had it for a year.
Now that Boombots is officially open, the couple is figuring out how to juggle the two restaurants and experimenting with waitlists to avoid lines piling out the door. Eventually, they plan to offer happy hour and expand to seven days a week.
“The [Odie B’s] side cooks all the food and it passes through a window,” Cliff explained. “There’s some serious logistics that go into running completely different concepts out of one kitchen.”
After Odie B’s closes for the day, its kitchen morphs into a pasta-making station. Every afternoon, equipment is rolled around, the pasta cooker is detached and reattached, the flat-top rotates, and prep stations shift entirely.
Executive chef, Connor Gushen, who hails from Cart Driver, helms the kitchen; pastry chef Nora Dylan, two-time runner-up for Colorado Springs’ Chef of the Year, who first met Cliff as his intern at Steuben’s years ago, crafts the desserts; and bar lead Lee Clark, who most recently was at The Wolf’s Tailor, pours the drinks.
The menu is where the all-star team truly gets to shine. Classic Italian shapes meet unexpected global inspiration in the form of smoked duck and green chili lumache, everything seasoned cavatelli stroganoff, samosa agnolotti, and more. The pasta doughs push boundaries with varieties like olive pasta and porcini-infused pasta. Don’t overlook the appetizers and desserts, which include east and west coast oysters, a meat and cheese board, “Big Ass Mozz Stix,” and a standout pumpkin coconut cake.
The bar program mirrors the food’s global lens with regional spirits, funky varietals, and unexpected items like a pasta water martini and the Gucci Gang (made with tequila, gochujang simple, tamarind and grapefruit soda). In addition to red, white, rose, and orange wines, there’s a variety of beers and even sake.
Like Odie B’s, Boombots is a recovery-friendly workplace, so the non-alcoholic beverage program is equally prioritized, avoiding faux spirits in favor of flavor-forward drinks. “It doesn’t have to taste like booze to be NA,” Cliff said.
According to the pair, like sandwiches, pasta offers an endless world of possibilities.
“We use sandwiches at Odie B’s as an excuse. You can put anything between bread and call it a sandwich,” Cliff said. “Pasta is the same. The pasta world is wide open. You can do anything you want, look at it through a different lens, and make it fun and creative.”