Buckhorn Exchange is the oldest restaurant in Denver, feeding people in this building since 1893 and preserving something of the Wild West atmosphere of frontier Colorado more authentically than any museum could. The Buckhorn Exchange was opened by Henry H. Zietz, known as Shorty Scout, who had worked as a scout and guide for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show and who held Liquor License Number 1 — the first license issued in Denver under Colorado law. The building looks from the outside like a modest saloon; inside it is one of the most extraordinary environments in the American West.
Walls and ceilings are covered with more than five hundred mounted animal heads and full taxidermy specimens — elk, bison, bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and dozens of other species — collected over more than a century. Buffalo Bill Cody, Theodore Roosevelt, and Sitting Bull all ate here in the restaurant's early decades. The Buckhorn Exchange holds Colorado State Liquor License Number 1 continuously since 1893.
The menu features bison, elk, and rattlesnake alongside conventional steak dishes, a nod to the frontier heritage the restaurant has maintained more stubbornly than any other Denver institution.