John Scarffe, Nederland. The building at 110 North Jefferson Street at the west side of the Town Hall parking lot, most recently housing the Kathmandu restaurant, has been undergoing renovations since June. Owner Resham Gurung has owned the restaurant for 21 years serving Nepalese and Indian cuisine.
Kathmandu Restaurants bring award-winning authentic Himalayan cuisine to Colorado, according to the website. Resham Gurung opened the Nederland restaurant in the mountain town of Nederland in 1999.
The restaurant was so successful that a second location was opened in Boulder in 2015, managed by her husband Lok Malla. The restaurants are family owned and operated, and meals are prepared from the finest ingredients.
Kathmandu Restaurant offers catering services for private parties, weddings, business meetings, family gatherings, and reunions. Meals can be delivered and served on site, or you can pick-up in-house.
During construction, the restaurant serves takeout at 95 East First Street with some outdoor seating. The restaurant temporarily relocated to First Street on June 9.
Resham said the building construction is expected to take six to eight months. The building had a flat roof, and the old roof was causing water damage. The project also includes working on reinforcing and frost proofing the existing foundation. The intention is to place apartments on top of the existing building footprint, and a new permit was applied for.
The building is very old, and the project is very complex. While the scope of the project is larger than anticipated; The end result will preserve the character of the restaurant and central business district.
Harris Dewart LLC located at 80 Big Springs Drive, Suite 301, in Nederland, whose owners are Hunter Harris and Andrew Dewart, were excited to team up with architect Debbie Davenport of Caribou Ridge Architecture, and mechanical engineering firm Reno James Engineering, along with structural engineer Stephen Pendergrast.
Andrew Dewart indicated that, “It’s been a team of a lot of people spending a lot of hours to preserve the character of the restaurant and bring it up to current safety, health, and building codes.”
Hunter said that in 2015 another contractor had pulled a permit and had plans to execute the project. Since the first permit was pulled, the Town of Nederland and the state adopted new codes. They had to go back to the drawing board and get new architectural, mechanical, and structural plans for Gurung and Malla.
Harris Dewart LLC will completely remodel the restaurant on the first floor with new handicapped bathrooms and one handicapped-accessible apartment on the first floor. The second floor will contain four apartments with the goal of a mixed-use occupancy building.
The restaurant will receive all new underground and above ground plumbing, new mechanical and electrical systems and a commercial sprinkler system throughout for fire protection. Upon excavation it was verified that the entire north side of the building had been undermined by drainage and a poorly placed groundwater infiltrator.
Engineers recommended working on the east, south, and west sides of the foundation first before allowing shoring of the north wall so it would not collapse when they excavated for the north foundation. The four tall concrete shear walls allowed them to eliminate a lot of angled steel bracing.
The building will include an exoskeleton around the existing building composed of steel columns and beams, which will create a one-hour rated floor assembly to separate the occupancies. Once the steel columns go up and steel beams go across, they will remove the old existing roof of the building, and they will have all of the columns, beams, and joists supporting a second floor.
Hunter indicated that it has been Resham’s goal to add apartments and renovate the restaurant for many years.
Before Resham purchased it, the building housed Ned Mex. Before that the restaurant was called Moon Time and Marvin’s Gardens.
The renovation process peeled back paint on the building and revealed signs belonging to previous owners. Nederland Resident Bill Ikler took a photograph of the building when they peeled off the façade, and signs for former restaurants were still there and had just been covered up.
Ikler first visited Nederland in 1972 and moved to the area in 1973. He remembered a restaurant in the building called Harlow’s. “What I remember is Lilian Harlow was the owner and baked her own bread and pies, a restaurant with antiques.”
Her lunch prices were reasonable and had great pie. It was green cinder block. A friend remembered she had a bowling game where you actually bowled in about 1974.
In the 1980s, the building was owned by Marvin Lewis, called Marvin’s Gardens, and it ran for several years,” Ikler said. He showed movies in the restaurant, and Marvin ran for mayor once.
Marvin built a large size scale model of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose airplane, which was a gigantic cargo seaplane, maybe the biggest plane ever built. Marvin was into that plane, so he worked on building a working 12-foot model on a pool table in the restaurant, and it took five years.
Nederland Resident Brent Warren filmed a documentary, called Marvin’s Fly’n Boat. The documentary is an inspiring story of a man, his dream, and the people who made it come true, according to the documentary trailer.
Marvin Lewis loved the Spruce Goose. Almost finished, Marvin passed away. Members of the Boulder, Colorado, Aeromodelling Club took over the challenge and finished and flew Marvin’s passion.
Renovations will continue for the next several months until Kathmandu can move back home. In the meantime, please continue to enjoy Kathmandu’s cuisine at the temporary location at the corner of East First Street and Snyder.
(Originally published in the October 29, 2020, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
