This Denver restaurant opened two locations during the pandemic. One of them burned in the Marshall Fire.

Childhood friends Don Gragg and Scott and Brian Boyd have had one of the more surreal experiences running a Denver restaurant — their first — together.

The Rotary opened in 2018 at local food hall Avanti. For 18 months, it gained a loyal following, and then the pandemic shut down all indoor dining. As seating returned but capacity restrictions lingered, Gragg and the Boyd brothers tried to weather COVID-19 alongside six other food stalls in their building.

Then in January 2021, they finally opened The Rotary at its own brick-and-mortar location, within a small business district on Holly Street in Hilltop. And nearly a year later, on Dec. 15, the team was excited to debut a second neighborhood location in Louisville.

Just 15 days later, on Dec. 30, that restaurant was destroyed in the Marshall Fire.

“It was kind of the ideal situation to open up a place,” Scott Boyd said of The Rotary’s start three years ago inside a bustling food hall. “We went from the ideal scenario to borderline the absolute worst.”

On Thursday, Boyd returned to his Louisville restaurant.

“It’s brutal in there,” Boyd said, describing the blown-out windows and doors, burnt walls, burst pipes, water-logged and now frozen surfaces and smoke damage to what’s left of the equipment.

Still, he’s thankful: “We are insured, and we’re insured for business loss. And our staff should be (insured for) up to 60 days. Not that that’s long, but at least it’s long enough to help people until they find something else.”

The Rotary was one of seven businesses destroyed in Louisville and Superior and is just a small portion of the half-billion dollar destruction that’s currently estimated in the area.