Ode to the era of Donita’s

I suppose all good things come to an end, but when Donita’s Cantina closed in 2019, I felt the void. It felt unnatural. Admittedly, it had been a couple of years since I’d worked a shift or stopped in for a meal. So why this gut-wrenching, empty feeling?

“You’ll want at least two restaurant jobs.” This was the advice I received on moving to Crested Butte in 2010. I lucked out, because I found work at Donita’s. For me, it was a lens through which I fell in love with Crested Butte. Donita’s was authentic with an edgy character. The space was orderly and rough around the edges, like an old general store back east. It offered a familiar comfort.

The tin ceiling, handmade tablecloths, hanging flower baskets and that homemade cobbler: everything at Donita’s had a story. Its layout, from the dining room to the kitchen, had purpose. It didn’t take me long to realize that Donita’s character was the result of sisters Kay and Heli’s 20-year-long labor of love.

Neither Heli Peterson nor Kay Peterson Cook moved to Crested Butte with the intention of owning a restaurant. “I was unemployed at the time, and it just fell into place,” explained Kay. Kay’s husband, Don, had just started working for Linda Blackledge in 1980. Linda had dreamed of opening a Mexican restaurant where she could share her grandmother’s recipes. Don had worked for Linda for about one month before rupturing his spleen while skiing gates – yes, gates – on a patch of snow above Green Lake in July. “It was a seasonal tradition,” Kay explained.

“So I picked up Don’s shifts. Then I didn’t give him his job back. I thought, I like this!” Five years later Kay was a partial owner, and in 1999 she agreed to buy out her partners, with sister Heli becoming a partial owner shortly thereafter.

The two moved through the restaurant methodically yet naturally. When the restaurant was filling up quickly, Kay appeared instantly with chips, salsa and one of those 12-pound water jugs. And before you knew it, Heli was conversing with the customers, evoking belly-deep laughter. As wait staff, I felt like part of a fine-tuned machine. There was closeness and camaraderie from shift meal to closing.

Once the dining room was set and the kitchen prepped, staff shuffled into the bar, each with their choice of shift meal. “Seinfeld” playing from the bar television offered a meditative feel. That time was a welcomed cool-down from whatever adventure you’d gone on that day and a necessary transition into go-time. Working a July evening at Donita’s was a non-stop hustle. But fun – for staff and customers – was part of even the busiest of nights. Like prom-dress night, when each wait staffer, man or woman, sported their choice of prom dress from Mary Holder’s and Kay’s collections. Most were relics of the 1980s and ‘90s.

“We had some quirky, quirky weirdos that worked for us,” Heli recalled with a laugh. “There was a true sense of family. People stayed and worked for us; they didn’t job hop. That says something.”

Janae Deverell Pritchett, who started working at Donita’s in her early twenties, appreciated Kay’s and Heli’s “ability and willingness to tell you ‘how it was,’ without any fluff.” They worked as a sort of yin and yang. Heli would let certain things slide, but not Kay.

“Kay was always the boss-boss, and I was the boss that everyone related to,” chuckled Heli.

At Donita’s, you worked both for and with Kay and Heli. They were always there, working hard. “I liked being hands-on,” Kay said. “If I didn’t know it, I would learn it. Don learned how to fix every darn thing in the restaurant. Calling people to do

Previous page: Heli and Kay (in sombreros) joined friends and fans on the front steps of Donita’s in the restaurant’s final days.

This page top: A 1982 staff photo (including Kay’s early partners, Gary and Donita Reitze), at the restaurant’s original home, the Elk Mountain Lodge.

Below: Sisters Heli Mae Peterson and Kay Peterson Cook, the hands and heart of Donita’s.

repairs cost a lot of money. So he’d just go to town fixing things.”

The sisters’ care for Donita’s extended well beyond running a business. “There was a sense of fellowship with customers. It wasn’t the new groovy people who moved to town that came to eat here. It was the old-timers. If they wanted to go out to eat, they would come to Donita’s,” Kay recalled. Waiting tables, I learned the stories of locals, their families and the Crested Butte they called home. Donita’s came to be part of the customers’ Crested Butte experience because Heli and Kay welcomed them like family.

“What really kept me going back was the hug at the door from Heli or Kay,” recounted Sarah Keene. For the Keenes and so many, that welcome grew into friendship and care that went beyond Donita’s front steps. “After a day of skiing, my young niece would fall asleep at the table at Donita’s. So when she’d walk in every year, Heli would bring her some pillows.” Heli gifted those pillows to Sarah’s niece the last time they dined at Donita’s.

No Gunnison Valley restaurant boasts a 20-year life without offering something special. For Donita’s, it wasn’t just Heli’s homemade ice cream or Kay’s cobbler. It was also their genuine nature. That, combined with so many years in business, meant that Heli and Kay had a lot of loyal customers.

Bob Couchman, a longtime visitor to Crested Butte, first dined at Donita’s in the 1980s. “It was our go-to place when we were in town,” he said. For Bob and his wife Barb, the personal greeting, as much as the good food, kept them going back. In 2007, Barb passed away. Kay connected Bob with the Crested Butte Land Trust, with whom he worked to place a bench on the Lower Loop in Barb’s memory. “Kay and Heli were so supportive and sympathetic that it gave me a lot of solace and comfort,” said Bob. Donita’s had a way of making people feel like they belonged to something special, and I’m not sure it can be replaced.

“A marriage proposal was made on our front steps,” Kay recounted. “The Wolffs. They live on the Front Range, and their daughter loved Donita’s so much, she was proposed to there.” Those beautiful hanging flower baskets likely made for great proposal photos.

“Customers could come in, get their same favorite table and same food. You could eat and not go home broke, but go home full,” said Heli. For affordability, it was hard to beat a five-dollar enchilada, the special margarita and free chips and salsa.

In the back of the kitchen, hanging above the weekly schedule, was a handwritten chart used to track how many dinners were served each night. I loved this chart. Like almost everything at Donita’s, it was done by hand. No computers, no fancy “point-of-sale” system to place orders and track sales (though that did come eventually). What the chart showed was consistency. Each year, the crowds – and I mean crowds – showed up during holidays, and the locals filled in the gaps.

After Kay and Heli announced they would be closing Donita’s, “folks wanted to eat there as much as possible, and we had lines down the sidewalk,” Kay remembered.

Fans can still enjoy reminders of Donita’s. Kay and Heli will still make batches of salsa to gift, and every now and then someone requests a tray of enchiladas. While the 5,000-square-foot restaurant space has been renovated and split into five units, the original pressed and burnished tin ceiling remains. And the Donita’s flower garden, transplanted to Heli’s vegetable garden, “blooms like mad,” she said, with her trademark chuckle. b