Walk Main Street between 5th and 6th Avenue this month and you'll hit fencing instead of storefronts. The candy smell that's drifted out of the same doorway since 1946 is gone. So is the porch where three generations of the Foote family sold fudge to people getting off the Summit Stage.
Elsewhere on Main Street, something new opened in June with a balloon archway and live music on the patio.
Those two facts are usually reported as separate stories: a hotel project finally breaking ground, a restaurant opening its second location. Read together, they say something neither says alone. The visible change on Main Street this year isn't spread evenly across the strip. It's concentrated at two very different scales, one entire block paused for construction, one new storefront filling in elsewhere, and that unevenness is what actually explains what you're seeing when you walk the street right now.
What's Actually Behind the Fence
The block is Foote's Rest, and it's bigger than most people realize. Developer Kelly Foote's grandparents opened the Foote's Rest Sweet Shoppe there in 1946, and the building has been on the National Register of Historic Places for years. What's under construction now isn't just the candy shop. It's the whole block Foote's family and the town locked into a development agreement back in 2017, running the full stretch of Main Street between 5th and 6th Avenue.
The project broke ground in December 2025 after PCL Construction confirmed the redevelopment at $90.5 million. When it's finished, Colorado-based Greenwood Hospitality Group will run it as a boutique hotel under Marriott's Tribute Portfolio brand. The scope, once you list it out, explains why the fencing covers an entire block rather than a single storefront:
- An 80-room hotel built around the historic footprint
- Five separate kitchens, one for the hotel restaurant, one for the entertainment venue, one on the rooftop, plus smaller kitchens in two of the preserved buildings
- A 10,000-square-foot rooftop and a 4,000-square-foot event space
- A 13,000-square-foot entertainment venue
- Six historic structures preserved on site, including the Sweet Shoppe itself, three original log cabins, a blacksmith shop being rebuilt as the Blacksmith Saloon, and the Staley-Rouse House, which is being physically relocated to the corner of 5th Avenue and Main Street
That last detail matters if you've wondered whether the town is trading its history for a hotel. It isn't, not entirely. The Sweet Shoppe is expected to reopen once the hotel does, selling the same fudge inside the same preserved building. But "once the hotel does" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Foote has described a roughly 24-month construction schedule, with a target of opening by Thanksgiving 2027. That means the block stays behind fencing through this fall and the next before it's set to host another one.
Why This Took Nearly a Decade to Start
If you've lived in Frisco for a while, you've probably heard about this hotel before and stopped expecting it to happen. There's a reason for that. The town approved the first development agreement in 2017. Then the design process, several rounds of amendments, and a lengthy historic preservation review pushed the timeline out further. By the time everything was close to locked down, the pandemic hit, and Foote has said that effectively froze hospitality financing across the industry for years.
Construction costs didn't cooperate either. At one point during the stalled years, estimates on the project climbed by more than $10 million in under a year. Boutique hotels are also harder to finance than standard branded properties, according to Norris Design principal Elena Scott, who worked on the project. All of that is why a block that first appeared in public plans back in 2017 didn't see a shovel in the ground until December 2025.
Whether the finished version lives up to nine years of waiting is a question for 2027. For now, the practical fact is simpler: the block is closed, the timeline is public, and the Sweet Shoppe isn't coming back this year or next.
The New Kitchen That Opened While Construction Waits
While that block sat behind fencing, the actual new addition to Main Street's food scene this year came from a different kind of story. Fritangas, a Mexican restaurant, opened its second Summit County location on Main Street on June 2, with a grand opening that included live music and an inflatable balloon archway in red and yellow out front.
The owner, Herson Daniel Olivares, is a first-generation graduate of Colorado Mountain College who came to the United States in 2000. Since then he's built a small portfolio of businesses in Summit County, an ATM company, a house-flipping side venture, and now two Fritangas locations, the original in Silverthorne on Annie Road and the new one at 409 Main St. in Frisco.
Olivares built the menu around dishes he says Main Street had gone without for years: huaraches, sopas, gorditas, pambazos, and marinated pork cooked in the style he grew up with in Mexico City. The top seller so far is the torta cubana, a sandwich built with multiple meats, ham, and cheese. Olivares put it plainly when describing what he thought the street was missing.
"Some really authentic food."
It's a small business by the standard of a five-kitchen, 80-room hotel. But it's also the clearest example this year of actual growth landing on Main Street in real time, rather than growth that's been promised since 2017 and still isn't set to open until Thanksgiving 2027.
What This Means If You're Walking Main Street This Fall
The practical takeaway is narrower than either story on its own suggests. The construction at Foote's Rest is real and it's going to be there for a while, but it's contained to one block between 5th and 6th Avenue. It's not a corridor-wide disruption. Everything else on Main Street, the shops, the other restaurants, the sidewalks running north and south of that block, is unaffected by the fencing itself.
What's changed in terms of actual new places to go is smaller than the size of the construction project might imply. One new restaurant opened this year. One long-running one went dark for at least two years, with a promise to return inside a much bigger building than the one it left. If you're used to measuring change on Main Street by counting new storefronts, this year the count is thin. If you're measuring it by square footage under construction, it's the biggest single project the street has seen in years.
Both things are true at once, and neither cancels the other out. That's the actual shape of Main Street heading into fall 2026: a big multi-year project consuming one block while smaller, independent additions like Fritangas fill in elsewhere, one storefront at a time.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property nearby, or just want a straight read on how downtown Frisco is likely to look and feel once the Foote's Rest project wraps, Jon Sells Colorado is a good place to start that conversation. Let's Connect.
