Not long ago on a drive through Cañon City, we stopped at The Owl Cigar Store, a local staple with a deceiving name.

Cigars are not sold here. Burgers have been the speciality inside the bar that looks about the same since the Santilli brothers started it in the 1940s.

We found a third-generation member of the family flipping burgers. What kept Dani Santilli here?

“I don’t know,” she said over the grill. “It’s just family legacy.”

We’ve heard a similar answer from other multi-generational families we’ve met over the years while writing on restaurants around the state. These are some of the families to thank for some of our favorite eats — including a fried taco.

Close to Opening Day at Coors Field in Denver, we popped into Mexico City Lounge. A Mexican immigrant, Willie Garcia, opened the place in the 1960s along Larimer Street, decades before the Rockies moved down the road and forced big changes to the business.

Some things didn’t change, such as Grandma Esther’s menudo. But for better and for worse, things got busier than any of Garcia’s kids and in-laws ever imagined.

They kept it up long enough for the third generation, David Muniz, to take over.

“I know my grandpa and grandma are looking down on me,” he said. “I know they’re proud.”

Making ancestors proud. That’s another common refrain of Colorado’s long-going families in food.

They include farmers such as Dennis Clark. His great-great grandpa is one to thank for Palisade’s peach heritage, having arrived from Iowa in 1897 and going on to plant one of the valley’s first trees.

The years have not been easy, Clark told us. Far from it.

“We’ve made it a long time,” he said. “If I was the last, that would be the end of the book, and so be it.”

His daughter nearby seemed intent on keeping the pages turning.

Elsewhere in western Colorado, the grown children of Dave and Kay James have been intent on growing James Ranch. The Durango land that their parents came to in the 1960s now produces the beef, pork, cheese, veggies, eggs and other goods found at the farm-to-table restaurant and market.

We visited in 2019, when the facility was under construction.

“I look at it as the foundation for future generations,” Cynthia James Stewart said.

The gift to the next generation will be a gift for us all — a true, lasting taste of Colorado, grown and raised in our valleys of plenty.

“A Taste of the High Country,” reads the sign for the little building turning heads of drivers through the canyon en route to Estes Park. That’s the busy shop of Colorado Cherry Co., one of four in the state.

The originators of the beloved cherry pie, Katherine and Oswald Lehnert, never thought they’d see an expansion of the stand they started at their home.

“And I assure you, (they) never thought it would be fourth generation,” grandson Anthony said.

His son, Elias, now oversees a stand in Denver. He couldn’t resist, he said. “It’s a cool legacy that we have.”

A legacy similar to another family behind familiar, cherished sweets. At the hilltop factory of Patsy’s in Colorado Springs, we found the third generation of Niswongers preparing candies beloved for more than a century.

“We still do things the old-fashioned way,” Si Niswonger told us. “We do it the way we were taught growing up.”

There’s no other way to do it, we kept hearing on our food tour. We stopped at Pueblo’s Pass Key Restaurant, home of the so-called “Best Italian Sausage Sandwich in the World.”

Mary Jo Pagano’s late husband, John, created the Pass Key Special in the early 1950s. The ongoing success, she said, had to do with the meat coming from the same family-owned butcher in town, with the bread from the same family-owned bakery.

The secret was no secret at all, the family matriarch said. It’s something Pagano has always told her kids and grandkids running Pass Key:

“John and I always told everybody, ‘As long as you stay with what you know and keep honest and be consistent with what you serve, you will be OK.’”