DINING REVIEW: Phantom Canyon still serves success after 15 busy years

By Nathaniel Glen, Colorado Springs Gazette

Phantom Canyon Brewing Co. is such a stalwart of the downtown dining and carousing scene that it is hard to imagine a time before it was here.

It’s hard to imagine a time when its stately address, the Cheyenne Building, with its heavy oak doors, gorgeous local stone and high, tin ceilings, was slated for demolition in favor of a parking lot, until Phantom’s owner, geeky Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who was then just a geeky Denver brewer, bought the decrepit building, fixed it up, and used it to introduce the city to the relatively new concept of a microbrew pub.

I was mulling all this over a frothy pint of Phantom’s Anniversary Ale at the bar recently.

It was a weeknight and the place was packed with both after-work drinkers and folks sitting down to cloth-napkin dinners. Servers navigated the perilously boisterous bar, hoisting trays of hot food. The bartender pulled fresh pints from an old beer engine.

Upstairs, the clack of billiard balls mixed with the clink of glasses.

It’s been just over 15 years since Phantom opened, and what I find hardest to imagine is how the place has managed to not be haunted by the complacency of its own success.

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