Oct 05, 2026
Kyle Cooke
Kyle Cooke is the news editor at Rocky Mountain PBS.more
NEWS
DENVER — The Mosaic Community Campus, occupying 25 acres on the eastern edge of Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood, feels like a Hollywood set for a college movie. A bronze statue of a wildcat overlooks a verdant quad that is pockmarked by disc golf baskets. There’s a garden, a bookstore and a 72-foot-tall carillon that periodically chimes above the steady traffic on Quebec Street. But there are no professors or co-eds here. The dorms are now affordable housing units. A Protestant church worships in the former bookstore on weekends.
Founded in the late 19th century as the Colorado Women’s College, the campus changed hands multiple times over the decades after never quite reaching its lofty goal to become the “Vassar of the West.” Johnson & Wales, a private university with multiple campuses known for their This is where I met Julian Salas. He spends more than 70 hours a week in one of the Mosaic kitchens, arriving most days around 4 a.m. and rarely leaving before 5 p.m. Salas, 31, is the founder of Don Zorros Molino, a tortilla business he started three years ago with his wife, Christina. In 2022, Salas moved his family from his hometown of Chicago to Denver in search of, he said, a safer place to start and raise a family (they now have two sons). Salas got a job at the Mexican restaurant My Neighbor Félix. Building on skills he first learned from his grandmother, Salas started making corn tortillas from scratch at home, using a countertop, hand-crank mill (molino, in Spanish) to turn corn into masa, the dough he would press and cook into tortillas. He shared the tortillas with his coworkers, who began placing orders. “I had people say, ‘Hey, bring me 5 pounds for tomorrow,’” Salas said. In less than a year, he had a steady customer base and was fielding orders from other chefs for their restaurants. It became time to turn his hobby into a business. Today, Salas is part of a growing number of Denver chefs producing corn tortillas from scratch, work that is steering the conversation around the city’s Mexican cuisine away from the kitschy (Casa Bonita) and colossal (Chipotle), and toward something more classic. These chefs and their handmade tortillas have brought significant attention to the city’s ascendant food scene, from nationwide best-of lists to
