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- Where:
- 2239 W. 30th Ave., Denver (LoHi)
- The Draw:
- Seasonal dishes that sing with of-the-moment ingredients
- The Drawback:
- Very occasional culinary missteps, like oversalting a dish
- Noise Level:
- Medium
- What To Order:
- Grilled seasonal veggies, tinned fish board, pickle pizza, market pizza, seasonal risotto, sambal, olives
Cart-Driver’s grilled zucchini tipped me off to the LoHi location’s particular brand of joie de vivre, even before my first bite. Just as the plate of squash—Lincoln-Logged over a puddle of white miso Caesar dressing and showered with pecorino and breadcrumbs—was about to be plunked down before me, a car pulled up alongside the patio. A woman jumped out, opened her trunk, and began unloading a variety of farm goods. While setting down the plate, our server exclaimed, “Hey, that’s our zucchini farmer!”
On the other side of downtown, Cart-Driver’s RiNo flagship has been turning out a tightly edited menu of exquisitely blistered pizzas, as well as ice-cold oysters and a legendary chicken liver mousse, for 11 years. It conducts business out of a 640-square-foot shipping container that, while trendy, doesn’t allow for much menu innovation.
So it was only when the brand expanded to LoHi, taking over the beloved Z Cuisine space on the corner of 30th Avenue and Wyandot Street in 2019, that the concept fully came into its own: “The story of the carrettiera, or cart driver, is the story of the original farm-to-table purveyors of Southern Italy,” says the website. Every cart driver “had their specialty, and brought the freshest vegetables, seafood, or cured meats to small villages.”
After a forced remodel (the result of leaky pipes) closed the LoHi outpost for all of 2024, it reopened in early 2025 with a renewed passion for experimentation. While RiNo sticks to its staples, LoHi gets to play. “Pretty much anything that isn’t the same as RiNo comes from working with local farmers,” executive chef Jacob Thornton says. “We ask, ‘What do you have this week?’ And we make dishes around those ingredients.”
This means that sadly, the creamy, al dente risotto with Olathe corn, house crème fraîche, pickled Fresno chiles, and a garnish of edible flowers didn’t last a week past my last visit. Nor the Burrata special, festooned with sun-rich, Boulder County–grown tomatoes from Toohey & Sons, nor the Palisade peach pizza with its shock of fresh basil. But that’s exactly the point: These dishes are fleeting and even more delicious for it.
Their replacements will lean more heavily on bitter greens, squash, root veggies, and local meats. An early example is the seasonal market pizza with Grama Grass & Livestock’s braised beef shank, Esoterra baby leeks, pickled Toohey & Sons Jimmy Nardello peppers, and Altius arugula pesto. “That’s four relationships represented on one pizza,” Thornton says.
Things that won’t change: the staple pizzas, including the daisy (one of the city’s best examples of the classic Margherita trifecta of Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil); the eponymous Cart-Driver, which comes with mozzarella, crumbled sausage, red chile flakes, and Toohey & Sons kale; and the trendy but worthy pickle pizza with tangy, herby yogurt ranch, house-made pickles, full-bodied Gran Cacio cheese, and feathery dill fronds. (On one visit, I dined with a friend who has celiac disease. Not only did the staff check in with her ahead of time, but they also baked a sturdy and nicely browned gluten-free crust—no soggy bottoms here—that we both found very good.)
Other musts include the marinated Castelvetrano olives tossed in green chile vinegar and the conserva, a selection of tinned fish (always Matiz wild sardines, plus a daily special), fresh-baked piada, smoked sambal, and compound butter. Normally I love Cart-Driver’s soft-as-silk chicken liver mousse, but my most recent order was so oversalted that even the lovely compote couldn’t balance the starter. My only other complaint is that the delightful grilled maitake and oyster mushrooms, served over whipped tahini and drizzled with Calabrian chile crisp, isn’t sided by bread for scooping up every last bit.
That green chile vinegar on the olives, though, and the homemade pickles on the pizza—those small touches add up big. The little pot of sambal that comes as an accoutrement is not an afterthought. Instead, peppers are roasted with garlic and onion, passed through a meat grinder, smoked three times, and seasoned with tamari and coconut aminos. Likewise, the seasonal compound butter is a revelation; Thornton says it (along with the mostarda, compote, and pickles) changes with the staff’s whims and creativity.
Service is easy, conversational, and welcoming. Honestly, Cart-Driver LoHi revives the energy that once permeated Z Cuisine. The space is warm and familiar; it even still bears hallmarks of its predecessor (namely, the exposed brick and the loopy Z in the window above the bar). All of this is to say that if your only Cart-Driver experience has been in RiNo, it’s time to level up and make your way to LoHi.
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