Denver, CO | Modern Regional Chinese Restaurant | Dinner & Wine Club Subscription

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Key results
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• Revenue that keeps a restaurant open: club income James calls "the difference between staying open and closing," and what keeps Hop Alley's kitchen fully salaried
• 8 months of renewals and counting, with early members ordering the same two bottles of wine every time
• A creative outlet for a 10-year-old menu, giving the kitchen a canvas the regular dinner service doesn't allow

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The house Sichuan peppercorns built

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Chef/Owner Tommy Lee opened Hop Alley in Denver's RiNo neighborhood in 2015. The name is a nod to the city's original Chinatown, a stretch of Larimer Street that thrived in the 1880s before it was burned down. A Denver native and first-generation Chinese American, Chef Tommy built the menu around his Cantonese roots and a love of Sichuan cooking. Tongue-numbing peppercorns and fermented chile pastes come with a soundtrack of hip-hop in the dining room.

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A decade later, the accolades have piled up. Hop Alley has earned multiple Michelin Bib Gourmands, a Michelin Exceptional Cocktails Award, and back-to-back James Beard semifinalist nods. That list includes a 2025 nomination for the restaurant's wine program, a rare honor for a Chinese kitchen.

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General Manager James Axe has been part of that run, and he talks about the teamwork essential to its success. "We are a bit of a family here, and it's fun to come to work and be with this group of people every single day. We work together and we work hard for each other," he says. That same energy carries into the dining room, where the team's approach to guests isn't just about the food, it's about making sure everyone who walks in has a good time.

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A kitchen ready to play with something new

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Recently, Hop Alley rolled out its first major menu overhaul in almost ten years. Some dishes had held their spot for a decade simply because guests loved them too much to let go, a sign of how hard it is to retire a fan favorite even when a kitchen is ready to try something new.

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That appetite for reinvention is part of why the club mattered to James from the start. Takeout revenue was already meaningful for the restaurant, and a recurring, once-a-month commitment gave the kitchen a second outlet: a chance for the team to show off skills that don't always fit onto a regular dinner menu. "This is another way for the people in the kitchen to really show off what they can do," he says.

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A date circled on the calendar

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Hop Alley runs its subscription, the Hop Alley Dinner & Wine Club, as a monthly, pre-ordered dinner and wine pairing delivered across Denver and Boulder. Each month's menu is built specifically for the club, featuring dishes inspired by the season that never make it onto the regular dining room menu. Members also get pairing notes straight from the chef and the team, along with first access to events, tastings, and new offerings before anyone else hears about them.

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What's made the workload manageable, James says, is the cadence Table22 brings to something that could otherwise feel overwhelming. Running a recurring dinner without support means constantly working against the clock. With Table22's platform and support in place, the date simply becomes something circled on the calendar each month, a predictable and repeatable system. James has run recurring dinners like this before at other restaurants, so he knows exactly how much time and stress that takes off his plate.

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There's a lot of the back end work that I no longer have to do, from printing labels to scheduling delivery drivers and all that stuff I used to have to jump through hoops for. It really makes my life easy.

— James Axe, General Manager, Hop Alley

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The math behind a fully-salaried kitchen

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Zoom out to a full year of the club, and the impact expands beyond creative freedom into significant financial results for his team. "If we're doing it for 12 months, the revenue coming back, it is kind of the difference between restaurants staying open and closing," James says. That revenue also opens up something James takes real pride in: an entirely salaried kitchen, a structure that's easier to commit to when the numbers back it up. "I think that doing things like this make that entirely possible at the end of the year," he says.

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The regulars who never miss a month

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What's surprised James most about running a club so far is the loyalty behind the offering. Members have now stuck with the club for eight straight months, ordering the same wine, showing up in the same delivery window, becoming familiar in a way James didn't expect from a recurring dinner. Some subscribers order two bottles of wine with every single dinner, a detail the team has started to notice and quietly reward with an extra touch here and there.

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James also recognizes names on the club roster from the reservation book, guests who dined in before they ever subscribed, and hopes the reverse is happening too: subscribers in Boulder and Denver discovering Hop Alley through the club and eventually making the trip in. "I would imagine that they're ordering and they found us on Table22, they would want to come try the restaurant."

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Advice from the inside

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James's advice to another operator weighing a club of their own is straightforward: don't overthink it. "It's worth it," he says. "If you can have fun with it, prepare for it, be ahead of it, then it's a lot easier than it can look like from the background."

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As Hop Alley heads into its next chapter, the club has become one more place for the kitchen to keep pushing, backed with more structured financial stability to keep their team and their ethos going strong.

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Our platform, your kitchen. Welcome to the club.