Steve's Meat Market

Steve's Meat Market
The Holdout of Olde Town
Walk through Olde Town Arvada today and you'll find breweries packed with young families, patios strung with lights, and boutiques designed for window shopping. It's a place built for strolling, lingering, and Instagramming.
And then there's Steve's Meat Market.
The smell alone tells you this isn't another cocktail bar or bakery. Step near its back alley and you might catch it — metallic, musky, the scent of a full day's butchering. A decade ago, I remember walking behind Rheinlander Bakery and spotting dumpsters brimming with animal parts: heads, bones, the remnants of an elk or deer. It was jarring, but it was also the reality of what Steve's is. Not a shop for snacks. A processor of whole animals.
A Landmark with Deep Roots
The building dates back to 1890, first a livery stable, then a blacksmith shop, later an ironworks. In the mid-1980s, Steve's Meat Market set up shop. For hunters across Colorado, it became the go-to place to drop off elk, deer, bear — even mountain lion.
Steve's is not a butcher counter in the grocery store sense. It's an industrial operation in a historic shell. Hunters bring in hundreds of pounds of meat, and Steve's turns it into sausage, jerky, or Italian cuts from recipes passed down for decades.
In 2005, the business even won Arvada's Business of the Year after restoring its facade. Denver's 5280 Magazine called it Top of the Town three times. On paper, Steve's is an institution.
Two Realities, Side by Side
So why does Steve's sometimes look closed? Because it often is — at least to the casual passerby.
Their season runs September through March, syncing with Colorado's hunting calendar. Even then, you can't just wander in. Their website makes it clear: reservations required for all drop-offs. This isn't retail. It's scheduled, high-volume processing.
That disconnect fuels confusion. Online forums buzz with comments like, "Is this place even open?" Walk by in June, and it's shuttered. Step inside during the fall rush, and it's buzzing with carcasses coming through the door.
The same split shows up in reviews. Hunters rave about the quality, loyalty spanning decades. One longtime customer praised their "100 pounds of custom meat" as the best he'd ever had, after 35 years of business. Others mention helpful advice on finding taxidermists, or the unmatched variety of sausages.
But other reviews — often from casual encounters — tell a different story: long waits, staff called rude or abrasive. The reputation sticks. For some, Steve's is essential. For others, it's a mystery sealed behind a locked door.
Out of Place in a Changing Olde Town
This tension is about more than meat. It's about Olde Town itself.
The district has remade itself into a pedestrian-friendly, family-centered, nightlife hub. The kind of place where you can drift from craft beer to live music to a late-night dessert. In that ecosystem, Steve's feels alien.
It doesn't court walk-in traffic. It doesn't post Instagram specials. It doesn't care about window shoppers. It serves a different persona entirely — the hunter with 200 pounds of elk in the back of a pickup.
And that persona feels less and less visible on the sidewalks of Olde Town.
The Writing on the Wall
Steve's Meat Market has survived by being exactly what it's always been. But businesses don't live in a vacuum. Neighborhoods evolve, and Olde Town's trajectory is clear: more breweries, more restaurants, more polished storefronts. Less grit.
It's not hard to imagine a future where someone with enough money entices the owners into selling, and the building makes way for the next "new" Olde Town resident. Locals will shake their heads, say they remember when, and then order a cocktail in the same room where elk were once processed.
That's the paradox of Steve's. It is both a beloved staple and a business increasingly out of place. A landmark, but one with an expiration date written in the changing character of the street around it.
For now, Steve's still stands — a butcher shop in a nightlife district, a holdout from the Arvada that was.