A man from out of state built a life list around a pizza buffet chain, and this August it led him straight to the corner of North Academy Boulevard and Austin Bluffs Parkway. That is not a sentence most Garden Ranch residents expected to write about their own intersection, but here we are.
On Monday, June 15, Pizza Ranch opened its doors at 3958 N. Academy Blvd, Suite 117, tucked behind the long-running Mi Mexico restaurant. If you live in Garden Ranch, you already know this stretch of Academy. It is the corridor you use for gas, fast food, and the occasional dentist appointment on your way to or from the university. What you may not know is that this particular opening turned a familiar errand run into a genuine stop on a nationwide pilgrimage, and that it says something worth knowing about how this block is filling in.
What actually opened, and where
Pizza Ranch is a buffet-style chain founded in 1981 by Adrie Groeneweg in Hull, Iowa. It has grown to more than 200 locations across 15 states, but until this June, Colorado had exactly one: Pueblo. The Colorado Springs location is only the second in the state, which is the detail that turns a routine grand opening into something a completionist would plan a trip around.
The space itself has a past life. It was previously used by Vanguard Church before being redeveloped for the restaurant, part of what the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department described on Facebook as a roughly $1 million project.
"It's a $1-Million project to bring in the restaurant popular for its Pizza Buffet."
That is the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department's own framing, and it matches what showed up in the building permits: a full renovation of an existing structure rather than new construction from the ground up.
Who is actually running it
This is not a distant franchise office dropping a location into your neighborhood and walking away. The Colorado Springs Pizza Ranch is owned by Tim and Allison Kealy, who partnered with Glen and Bambi Grady, the same couple who already runs the Pueblo location. In other words, the people bringing a second Pizza Ranch to Colorado are the same people who successfully ran the first one. That is a meaningfully different story than a cold franchise expansion, and it is the kind of ownership detail that tends to get lost in aggregator write-ups that only care about the address.
Quick facts on the opening:
- Address: 3958 N. Academy Blvd, Suite 117, behind Mi Mexico
- Opened: Monday, June 15, 2026
- Ownership: Tim and Allison Kealy, in partnership with Glen and Bambi Grady of the Pueblo location
- Building: renovated from a former Vanguard Church space
- Status: Colorado's second Pizza Ranch location, after Pueblo
The buffet, and a pricing quirk worth knowing before you go
Pizza Ranch runs a buffet that includes pizza, chicken, salads, sides, and dessert. What is less obvious until you actually check the schedule is that the price moves depending on the day and the meal, which matters if you are deciding between a Tuesday dinner run and a Friday one.
| Day | Lunch | Dinner |
|---|---|---|
| Monday through Wednesday | $15.75 | $19.29 |
| Thursday and Friday | $15.75 | $19.99 |
Lunch holds steady at $15.75 across the early-week stretch, but dinner creeps up by 70 cents once you hit Thursday, and the gap between a Monday lunch and a Friday dinner runs about $4.25. If you are the kind of household that treats buffet night as a budget line item rather than an impulse decision, that is the number to actually plan around, not the general "$15 to $20" range you will see quoted elsewhere.
The man who made this a pilgrimage stop
Here is where the story stops being just another restaurant opening. Jason Halkias has visited 225 Pizza Ranch locations across 15 states, a quest that has attracted coverage from stations well outside Colorado, including one in Montana. He made a stop at the Pueblo location back in July 2024, and when the Colorado Springs location neared completion, he told a local news station he expected to make the trip in mid-August.
Two Pizza Ranch locations in one state, two years apart, both checked off by the same traveler methodically working his way through the chain. That is not a marketing stunt. It is one person's genuine hobby intersecting with your neighborhood's building permits, and it is the kind of detail that makes a strip mall opening feel like it belongs to a bigger story than the four walls suggest.
What it joins on that stretch of Academy
Pizza Ranch did not land on an empty corner. Mi Mexico, the restaurant it now sits behind at 3956 N. Academy Blvd, has been part of this stretch for years. The chain traces back to Antonio Amador, who opened his first restaurant in Bellingham, Washington in 1991, then expanded into Colorado in 1999 with his cousin Modesto Ramos. That means Mi Mexico has anchored this corner of Academy for more than a quarter century, well before most of the newer construction along the corridor existed.
What you now have, in the span of about 20 feet, is a family-run Mexican restaurant with nearly three decades of history on this exact block and a family-run buffet chain making its second attempt at the Colorado market, both locally owned rather than corporate-managed. That is a different texture than the drive-through row this stretch of Academy is usually associated with, and it is worth knowing if your dinner rotation has gotten stale.
Garden Ranch itself sits just south of this corridor, laid out largely in the 1970s with wide cul-de-sacs and mature evergreens, bordered by Austin Bluffs Open Space and within easy reach of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs campus. The neighborhood was built around convenience to exactly this kind of commercial strip, so a shift in what actually anchors that strip is not a small thing for the people who live a five-minute drive away.
What this means for a Tuesday night
If you live in Garden Ranch, the practical version of this story is simple. You now have a second sit-down, family-friendly buffet option on a corridor that previously ran heavy on fast food, and it sits directly behind a restaurant that has already earned two decades of local loyalty. The pricing table above is the part you actually need before you go, since a Thursday dinner costs more than a Monday lunch by a wider margin than the chain's general marketing suggests.
And if a friend from out of town ever asks why there is apparently a nationwide fan base for a pizza buffet chain, you now have an answer with a number attached to it. Jason Halkias did not pick this corner at random. It took him two years and 225 stops to get here, and this June, the map finally led him to Garden Ranch's own stretch of Academy.
If you are weighing a move to this part of Colorado Springs, or already live here and are curious what your home might be worth in a market where the corridor around you keeps adding to its story, Kevin James Bond is happy to talk through it, no pressure, just a straight answer. Let's Connect.
