Zeppelin Station’s dynamic dining just welcomed two additional options. La Rola Urban Colombian Food and YA•YE ( You Are what You Eat) both joined the roster, serving vastly different, equally delicious cuisine.
YA•YE’s menu is ripe with puns and pop culture references, lending humor to the serious cuisine. The entire menu is organic, plant-based, dairy-free, gluten-free, refined sugar-free and seed-based oil-free. The food is bright, delicious and remarkably filling. “Eating colorfully is very important,” said owner Krissy Ostermiller, going on to explain that bright plates support nutritional diversity as much as visual appeal.
For Ostermiller, the noble crusade to get people eating healthfully is more than just business. Her passion for plant-based eating has led the chef — who has no formal kitchen training — to develop the menu through a combination of experimentation and tinkering with recipes she found online. The list is comprised of juices, nut milks, smoothies and smoothie bowls, snacks, salads, soups, savory bowls and desserts. The food is imaginative, with many of the flavors managing to improve upon rather than just replicate the classics. The Caeser Augustus ($10) comes with romaine, lacinato kale, hemp cheese, chickpeas, croutons and cashew caesar, all of which are produced in-house. The jalapeno-cheddar biscuit ($2) is rich and buttery, despite the absence of dairy, with cheese flavors coming from a hardy dose of nutritional yeast. Da Buddha ($14) combines spinach, quinoa, sweet potatoes, purple cabbage, avocado, marinated portabello mushrooms and tahini dressing.
La Rola’s cuisine could not be more unlike YA•YE’s. The Colombian hot dogs ($7 for the millionaire and $9 for the billionaire) — with shredded chicken, ham, bacon bits, mozzarella, diced onions, mashed potato chips, pineapple sauce, pink sauce, ketchup and a hard-boiled quail egg — are the most decadent thing in the food hall, if not the entire neighborhood. The empanadas ($3 for one, $10 for four and $20 for 12) are available in four options — ground beef, shredded chicken, pork or mushroom. The natural juices ($5) — including passionfruit, mango and soursop — are entirely too refreshing and lack the over-abundant sweetness that plagues many of their cohorts. Owners Andrea Martínez, Karen Martínez and María Teresa Garzón — who have been operating out of a food truck since 2017 — have done a good job of providing indulgent street food in a city that is tragically lacking in Colombian food.
The range of options at Zeppelin is becoming more and more well-curated to appeal across palates, diets and desires. The addition of La Rola and YA•YE helps to solidify the location’s ongoing international appeal.
Both concepts are now open at Zeppelin Station at 3501 Wazee St., Suite #100, Denver.
La Rola is open Monday 11 a.m. – 8 p.m., Tuesday – Thursday 11 a.m. – 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. – 1o p.m., and Sunday 12 p.m. – 6 p.m. YA•YE is open Monday – Friday 8:30 a.m. – 6 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. – 6 p.m., and Sunday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
All photography by Adrienne Thomas.
Oh yeah. I’m goin here. Thanks!