Aspen California Connection

The winners write history. While serving drinks to software giants at the highest volume restaurant north of San Francisco, tourists from Colorado would walk up to my bar and exclaim, “We have a restaurant just like this in Aspen, Colorado.” The manager overheard their conversation and bought the visitors a drink. The manager had traveled across Interstate 80 to open a replica of the Colorado restaurant in the heart of the Sonoma wine country. “The owner develops land in the Rocky Mountains, but started buying property in Northern California. One day he took his wife to dinner. She complained about her margarita, ‘I wish there was a place I could get a decent margarita.’ Within a week, her husband started developing restaurants. The center of every dining hall held a bar with blenders stirring margaritas - Just like the tequila cocktails we serve in Colorado.” The name, Aspen, was new to me. Still I rarely heard about Aspen again until I started graduate school. The college offering me an MBA in International Business was only a stone’s throw to the owners new restaurant in Marin County, south of the Sonoma store. He let me transfer and work while I studied, yet it seemed like many of the locals were Colorado transplants. Real estate agents talked more about Denver than Tiburon. Flight attendants flying routes from Denver found themselves comfortably divorced in Marin. The entire logging town known as Mill Valley had residents with duo-citizenship in Aspen, Colorado. This intrigued me. I was studying international trade. Surrounded by business executives that liked my blended drinks, I realized that the rich either live in Colorado or arrive from Aspen. Like any researcher worth his salt, I had to find out for myself, but few roads led to the Rocky Mountains. After the Internet bubble burst in Silicon Valley, I found getting a job with the military in Jacksonville, Florida, easier than reading a map to the middle of the country. Colorado faded from view.