Most limited-seating tasting menu concepts take themselves very seriously. Buttoned-up waiters explain where scallops were harvested, which hillside the herbs came from, and the provenance of the fir clippings scattered on the table. It’s all choreographed to an eclectic playlist with obscure songs you’ve likely never heard of.
This is not how chef Brian De Sousa does it.
His new concept, The Guest, delivers meticulously executed dishes in a highly exclusive setting located in a hidden room inside his downtown event space, The Regular. Prices start at $190 per person. The music playing is whatever De Sousa and chef Sydney Younggreen, his culinary partner and wife, actually listen to. Think top 40 hits and ‘90s R&B, not curated jazz meant to posture. Lighting, velvet textures, handblown glassware, the smell of charcoal is all meant to bring diners into the present moment. But don’t expect an in depth epitaph on sourcing or intention.
“We want it to feel like you’re coming to a dinner party,” said Younggreen. “Not a formal, intimidating tasting menu.”
Mushroom French Toast and Leek Cappuccinos
After making it past the hostess and The Regular’s sprawling bar and dining room, diners are led down a hallway and through a door to an intimate, neatly decorated white room. After being seated, the first thing they’ll likely notice is the absence of a menu.
“I don’t want you reading everything like Dr. Gadget,” De Sousa stated. “If I give you the ingredients upfront, you’ll start overthinking. You might never order something like mushroom French toast. But if I just give it to you? You eat it. You like it. That’s it.”
Removing the menu until the end can also help people relax, said the chef, something he sees as essential.
“It creates a connection,” he added. “You start looking at each other like, ‘What is this? Why is this coming out like a cappuccino?’ And you’re alive in the moment.”
Sometimes, waiters will even present a dish without telling you what’s in it, coming back a few moments later and asking you to guess.
The inaugural 11-course menu started with fantastical creations including a duck donut, leek cappuccino with lobster served in a coffee cup, and a green apple presented three ways as grilled, pickled, and as a broth. The meal then led into heartier offerings like a perfectly grilled lobster tail in “almost burnt cream” and aji amarillo. Then it finished with dessert.
As a keepsake once the dinner is done, guests receive a wax sealed envelope with De Sousa’s hand-drawn menu inside.
A Culinary Path With No Map
De Sousa has no formal culinary education. He didn’t grow up cooking beside a grandmother or obsessing over cookbooks. Rather, as he puts it, he just decided to start cooking one day. After getting a kitchen job, he felt it was time to push himself in tougher establishments. So, he left to work in several spots in New York, including Eric Ripert’s famed Le Bernardin.
“I learned to cook by watching,” he shared. “You won’t get a recipe book. You won’t get a chef teaching you secrets. So you better pay attention.”
Today, when it comes to his menus, his main source of inspiration is himself.
“I try to get influence from within,” he said. “I learned the most from cooking my own food, making my own recipes and playing around with ingredients that I found interesting…and from memories. Flavor memories are always going to be on your mind and your palate.”
When designing a tasting menu, De Sousa sits down with a blank piece of paper and starts drawing.
“I write ideas, doodles, whatever comes. Then comes the actual execution, trying to turn something that you imagine into reality. That can be a pain in the ass,” he laughed.
While De Sousa works from instinct, Younggreen, a trained pastry chef who runs The Guest and The Regular’s operations, events, and pastry development, arrived at food through academia. After studying physiology at CU Boulder and running a healthy-eating blog, she moved to New York for culinary school where she attended a farm-to-table program led by Dan Barber of Blue Hill.
From Lower East Side Balcony to Downtown Denver Eatery
The Guest’s first iteration began in New York City on a Lower East Side balcony. Younggreen and De Sousa would host friends, then friends of friends, and, eventually, strangers. Tasting menus emerged from whatever they could shop for, prep, and plate in a day.
After moving back to Colorado, they reinvented The Guest as a 16-seat BYOB dining room in their A-frame attic home in Boulder during the pandemic. Once word spread, a year’s worth of dinners sold out.
Since many of the diners were already traveling from Denver to Boulder, and the couple wanted a larger-city energy with more room to grow. So, in 2021, Younggreen and De Sousa began building out what would eventually become The Regular in downtown Denver. The project took nearly two years to complete due to permitting and construction delays, finally opening in 2023.
“We focused on The Regular when we first opened because that took up a majority of the space,” said De Sousa. “But The Guest was always intended to be in that white room.”
After making a strategic decision to partner with Culinary Creative Group and convert The Regular from a full-service restaurant into an event space in February 2025, the pair was finally able to revive The Guest.
“There’s a lot of good that can come from being partners,” Younggreen said. “And reopening The Guest felt like coming back to the heart of why we started in the first place.”
And it seems to have been the right decision. The Guest was sold out through December, with 1,600 people on the waitlist. The next menu will arrive in March, bringing brighter spring flavors.
“I wouldn’t choose anyone else to do this with,” said De Sousa on working with his wife.“This isn’t a restaurant for us, this is the life we want to build.”
Visit The Guest Thursday through Saturday, check reservations for times. 1432 Market St., Denver, theregulardenver.com
