Malinche Audiobar’s narrow ground-floor unit has enough room to fit 35 people. Customers sit along the bar or at a smattering of tables, while chef Jose Avila and his staff pour mezcal and prepare startlingly refined dishes, such as roasted octopus in black miso and chilmole and, for dessert, nixtamalized custard with fresh pear and salmon roe glazed in a mixture of yuzu and piloncillo cane sugar.

But food and liquor weren’t the driving forces behindMalinche, which opened in October at 1541 Platte St. It was music.

Avila researched a type of Japanese bar called a “kissa,” where vinyl pressings of jazz and instrumental records reign supreme and customers dedicate themselves to listening as much as they do to imbibing.

He hired professional sound engineers to install Technics turntables on the bar top, high-quality amplifiers and speakers on the bar back and two massive speakers encased in stained-wood cabinets at the front of the room. He branded his menu’s fusion of Japanese and Mexican cuisines “Nikkei-Mexa,” a term that also describes his adaptation of a traditional kissa to highlight the music and culture of his Latin American upbringing.

Malinche’s opening was one ofthe most anticipated in Denver, in part because it wasthe first of four concepts Avila plans to reveal over the next few months. It was also the latest in an eclectic collection of bars and restaurants showcasing expensive sound systems and curated record collections as their primary appeal.

Sometimes called listening bars or hi-fi bars, the establishments have proliferated on the East and West coasts and are gathering a following in Denver. Their popularity in the United States has coincided with the steady resurgence of vinyl record sales — which have reached or surpassed $1 billion every year since 2021, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — and a cautious return to nightlife in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I think music and sound in restaurants is sometimes misunderstood by everyone from the designer to the people working in the dining room,” said restaurateur Bobby Stuckey, whose Boulder flagship Frasca Food and Winereceived the James Beard Award for outstanding restaurant this year and has won a Michelin star three years running.

“You have to meet your customers where they are and come see what experience they’re looking for. Music has to play to that.”

Music is personal

• Historic La Vista Motel reopens on East Colfax with on-site coffee shop and bar
• $10,000 for decor and more: Here’s what it takes to build holiday pop-up bars
• 29 pop-up bars where you can find holiday cheer in Denver and beyond
• A less traditional Thankgiving Eve tradition: Downtown Denver caviar service in lieu of holiday traffic
• After 50 years, Boulder’s famed Dark Horse bar to be demolished, move to make way for housing development

Dinner at Frasca is an intensive affair that can last up to three hours. The service stands out, while the music there is relegated to the background, if it’s audible at all, Stuckey said.

Not so at Sunday Vinyl, the bar and restaurant he opened on the platform at Denver’s Union Station in 2019. He based its concept on one of his favorite leisure activities: listening to records with his wife on Sunday mornings.

Sunday Vinyl is equipped with a sound system that wows with its sheer size and sleek design. The McIntosh turntable at the front has an acrylic platter that glows blue, while a stack of McIntosh amplifiers and five-foot-tall speakers by the Italian brand Sonus faber stand beneath a portrait of a young, smiling Stevie Wonder. The price listed on the Sonus faber website for a pair of such speakers is $75,000.

“If music is going to be your POV, you kind of have to invest in that,” Stuckey said. “If you’re a steakhouse that’s doing incredible steaks, you’ve got to probably invest in a more expensive grill than someone who doesn’t need that.”

The allure of Stuckey’s restaurant and its central location drew a line of customers the night ofPaul McCartney’s headlining show at Coors Field in October 2025. And although the bartender spun a greatest hits compilation of McCartney’s post-Beatles band on the turntable, the speakers were playing a broader playlist of Beatles songs.

Those who noticed the playlist was not in sync with the records on the turntable could’ve found the experience dissonant — something that the owners of ESP Hifi, at 1029 Santa Fe Dr., wouldn’t be comfortable with.

“Audio and music are personal,” said ESP co-owner William Minter, who declined an interview but responded to e-mailed questions. So, he is suspicious of businesses using vinyl and kissas as an aesthetic instead of for their intimacy and sonic qualities. “It would be a shame if it became wallpaper to add on to a bar.”

Minter and his business partners opened ESP in 2021 after an influential trip to Japan, where they say they visited four dozen kissas — a concept that began in the 1920s for people who couldn’t find jazz music anywhere else. The shelves along ESP’s back wall are filled with obscure jazz, rock and Japanese city pop records. A sound system like theirs, with tube amplifiers, vintage Klipsch speakers and a four-channel rotary mixer, can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“There is certainly a trend of having an analog system, records on the back bar, caring about acoustics and audio in the bar setting,” Minter said. “But for me, the thing I fell in love with in Japan is not these additions to the Western bar experience, but that the owner cared in such a personal way about these things and made each their own.”

ESP’s “floating hours” right after opening are the best for those looking for a kissa experience. A bartender will pick a record — say, Steve Hiett’s 1983 instrumental guitar album, “Down on the Road by the Beach” — and play both sides or use a second turntable to segue into another record. (Table chatter tends to usurp the music later in the night.)

For audiophiles, visiting ESP during floating hours is like slipping into a warm bath. Few bars have the same deference and reverence for kissas. Mitchell Foster, another of ESP’s founders, characterized the majority of the bars spinning vinyl in the U.S. as being “copies of copies of bars [that] were inspired by OG listening bars in Japan.”

“Many of the owners of these establishments have never been to Japan to experience the real thing… and it shows,” Foster said by email.

A universal language

Plenty of bars and breweries use straightforward vinyl nights as a way to attract customers. Examples include Odell Brewing’s Sloan’s Lake taproom in Denver and the Vine Street Pub, which lets customers bring in a record to play in exchange for a beer or a side of French fries. Others, like Wobble HiFi, a listening bar that opened in Fort Collins this year, host listening parties for artists releasing new albums.

At least one more vinyl-centric destination is launching in the near future. Pon Pon, a European-style dive bar in RiNo, has its own set of turntables where DJs spin dance and rock records on the weekends; its owners are planning a second bar with a higher-quality sound system near the Ogden Theatre on East Colfax Avenue.

As for Malinche’s Avila, count him among those who haven’t been to Japan. He’s visiting the country for the first time next year.

His love of music stretches back to when he was a child in Mexico City, falling asleep in chairs at festive family functions or holding hands and swaying with his aunties. “There’s the DJ, you know,” Avila said. “You don’t really need anything else.”

His own tastes make room for both heavy metal and Kenny G, a curiosity he developed working at Tower Records. At Malinche, he wants curators to spin older albums that others likely haven’t heard.

More so than kissas, a major influence was Avila’s knowledge of Mexico and its capital, where music and food were both loud and up close. He traded Japanese whiskeys for mezcals that hang from glass jugs above the bar. Instead of housing speakers or records, one wall is dedicated to a large papier-mache sculpture of Mayahuel, an Aztec goddess of mezcal and pulque, an alcoholic drink made using fermented parts of the agave plant.

Unlike ESP, Malinche isn’t beholden strictly to playing vinyl. At times, a phone connected to the mixer shuffles through a streaming playlist of Latin rock, cumbia and South American folk music. Avila said he views Malinche as a community hub with music as the “universal language,” a connection stretching back thousands of years to the Aztecs.

He noted similarities between Mexican and Japanese culture that made it easier to blend concepts into his own kind of listening bar. Both are hardworking and care greatly about every detail, he said. But the reality of that approach comes with a hefty price tag.

“Once you do it professionally, it’s a different deal,” he said. “All the equipment… everything adds more zeroes to the equation.”

Subscribe to our new food newsletter, Stuffed, to get Denver food and drink news sent straight to your inbox.