Abigail Flores-Johnson

Abigail Flores-Johnson reports on food, beer and entertainment for the Coloradoan, with coverage built around how people eat, drink and spend their free time in Northern Colorado. Her work tracks new restaurants and bars, major closures and the businesses reshaping local corridors, alongside guides to festivals, live music and seasonal events. She uses practical, detail-heavy stories and lists to help readers decide where to go and what to do, keeping a consistent focus on the local scene rather than national celebrity culture.

Food and drink openings, closures and recognition

Flores-Johnson consistently covers the arc of the local dining scene, from openings to closures and what they mean for regulars. She reports on new arrivals such as Shake Shack’s first Northern Colorado location, noting specifics like its address, hours and proximity to key shopping areas.

She also follows the progress of new grocery development, including construction on a Natural Grocers in Midtown, treating retail projects as part of the everyday food landscape rather than standalone business items.

Closures are treated with equal attention, particularly when they involve long-standing fixtures. Her story on Los Tarascos explains why the restaurant is closing after 31 years, grounding the news in the owners’ perspective and the place the business holds for its customers. She returns to the theme of loss and continuity in pieces on “big closures and what’s next” in Fort Collins and in roundups of restaurants locals still wish would return, framing nostalgia as another way residents relate to the city’s food culture.

Flores-Johnson also connects local establishments to national recognition. She covers USA TODAY naming Social one of the country’s best bars, then uses that as a springboard to highlight other Fort Collins bars that could have deserved mention. Similarly, she reports on La Boutique’s French Dip being selected as one of America’s best sandwiches, tying the national list back to her own previous coverage of the sandwich in a local “Lunch in My City” series.

Those stories show a pattern: she uses national spotlights to reaffirm the value of local venues and to point readers toward specific dishes and drinks worth seeking out.

Guides to festivals and live entertainment

Beyond restaurants and bars, Flores-Johnson spends significant time on event preview and guide coverage, especially where food, drink and entertainment meet. Her work on Taste of Fort Collins lays out headliners Modest Mouse and Lil Jon while detailing the mix of food trucks, breweries, distilleries and vendors that define the festival’s atmosphere.

She includes ticket sale timing, price changes and vendor lists, positioning the story as a tool for planning as much as a music announcement.

She applies the same approach to FoCo Fall Fest, explaining the expanded three-day format, the street footprint, the number of vendors and the blend of live music, yoga sessions and kid-focused activities. In her Juneteenth coverage, she walks through the weekend’s schedule performance by performance and activity by activity, emphasizing how different cultural programming fits into the broader celebration. Even when contributing to coverage of the FoCoMX music festival, her role aligns with this pattern of giving readers concrete options for where to go and what to see across multiple venues.

Flores-Johnson’s event work also covers more niche or playful happenings. Her stories on Dude Dad’s Mini Golf Open describe game-themed mini golf holes, the expansion from one to two courses and the charity component benefitting a local nonprofit serving children with developmental disabilities. She includes operating hours for each festival day and notes how the courses are designed around board and video games, underscoring her interest in experiences that blend entertainment with community fundraising.

Service lists and everyday city life

List-driven service journalism is a recurring format in Flores-Johnson’s work, particularly around dining and nightlife. Her “Fort Collins area bars we wish made USA TODAY’s best of 2026 list” piece uses a national ranking as a hook, then builds a curated set of local bars with brief rationales that highlight what each adds to the scene. The “9 Fort Collins taco spots you need on your radar” story similarly functions as a guided tour of local taquerias, combining context about standout places like The Taco Stop with clear suggestions on where to go.

She extends that list motif into memory and sentiment. In “5 Fort Collins restaurants locals still wish would return,” Flores-Johnson revisits closed establishments in a way that mirrors how residents talk about their city’s past, turning the piece into a catalog of shared experiences as much as a restaurant list. Her coverage of FoCo Fall Fest and other events also uses list-style breakdowns of vendors, performances and activities, reinforcing the impression that she favors formats that let readers scan and choose quickly.

Her beat also touches everyday retail and infrastructure when they intersect with leisure.

In a story on Miniso, she explains what the brand is, why it has become popular in the area and how concepts like blind boxes fit into contemporary shopping culture. She has covered traffic changes such as final lane closures at the College and Trilby intersection, giving readers practical information on timing and impact that affects access to businesses and venues along that corridor.

Taken together with her reporting on the Natural Grocers construction, these pieces show that she treats the physical and commercial layout of the city - stores, roads, festival streets - as part of the entertainment and lifestyle beat she covers day to day.