Restaurants in Thornton, CO

The guide lists 371 places in Thornton, including 251 restaurants, 55 quick service spots, 38 cafes and 25 bars. Mexican restaurants top the category list at 44, with coffee shops and cafes at 38, pizza at 34 and sandwiches and delis at 26. Desserts and ice cream reach 21.

Independent places account for 45 percent of listings here. At 25.3 places per ten thousand residents, Thornton sits well below the 41.8 median across all cities in this guide.

167 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (19), Subway (10), McDonald's (9) and Taco Bell (6).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, Thornton ranks #330 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in Thornton by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Thornton?

327 of the 371 places here (88%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Thornton and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.