Zest Kitchen & Bar

We wanted to try out the new vegetarian and vegan joint, Zest, as their cocktail menu looked intriguing and they bill themselves as offering "globally inspired seasonal cuisine featuring organic, local, sustainable ingredients, when available".  That sounded like it had potential.  Zest is located in the spot that used to house Acme Burger.  The decor has not changed too much - but about 1/3rd of the space is now evidently a dance floor complete with DJ booth.  

We thought we'd start with a couple of small plates and drinks.  I asked for some ideas and we were told that the parmesan stuffed mushrooms were the most popular item on the menu.  We also ordered the sweet potato fries.  I ordered the jalepeno margarita as well.

We thought that the staff at Zest was friendly.  Unfortunately the food was really, really bad.  The mushrooms really had zero flavor and we had trouble finding any parmesan in them.  The baked sweet potato fries were a stack of baked sweet potato devoid of seasoning.  Off!

So they can't cook - but maybe the mixologist at Zest could save the day?  Restaurants that turn into night clubs perhaps trend towards drink-focused, so I had hopes for the "bar" half of the menu.  Unfortunately, the jalepeno margarita tasted like you had muddled some jarred peppers into a glass of Cuervo margarita mix.  Just a sugary bomb.  Given the skills that are on display lately in the SLC bar scene at places like Pallet, Finca, The Wild Grape and Bar X - it's impossible not to come down hard on Zest.

Given that it was St. Patrick's day, I decided to have a Jameson and call it good.

The Verdict? I like to be constructive with my feedback but sometimes you gotta hope that restauranteurs will just cash it in and make space for someone else.  The space currently occupied by Zest is such a nice location that I'm hoping we'll eventually see a tenant that lives up to its potential.

Taqueria 27

I found Taqueria 27 on Twitter and made a mental note to stop in since I drive by the restaurant almost every day.  I didn't take the time to check out their website so I wasn't sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised.  Taqueria 27 does quick takes on some pretty complex ideas, then wraps them in a tortilla and calls it a taco (sometimes it is, sometimes that is a stretch, but it was always delicious).

Our meal progressed from decent to mind-blowing.  We started with the roasted guacamole, which was one option among six guacamoles.  Good flavor with roasted chiles, garlic, lime and cilantro, but it certainly could have benefitted from more of those ingredients as it was super mild.

We also grabbed some house margaritas, which were mixed with blood orange, citrus and agave nectar.  A bit tangier than I'm used to, I really appreciated that they had tried something new (if only slightly) for their house recipe.  If it weren't for all of the other appealing drinks on the menu I would say I'd order these again.  Can't go wrong with a house marg here.

The tequila menu was fairly extensive although you're not going to find anything too exotic outside of the "extra anjeos".  I would love to see some of the reposados and anejos built out with a few boutique options, but was pleased to see some favorites on the menu for sure.

Our tacos all came at once.

I'll work up in order of what we enjoyed.  The fish taco was a grouper that was "flash fried" and topped with slaw, cilantro-lime crema and jalepeno tartar sauce.  This was a perfectly fine fish taco, but I would note that it is deep fried, not exactly flash fried, in grease that was nearing the end of its useful life.  I can't complain because the result was a perfectly cooked fish taco, but be ready for fried if you order fried.

Both of the other tacos we ordered were fantastic and we were split on which was best.  The special that day was a pork skirt steak marinated in sriracha and soy sauces then served with an asian slaw.  I was skeptical about pork skirt steak but it was every bit as lean and tender as the more commonly seen beef skirt.  The asian flavors were cool, but it still pretty much felt like a taco - so kudos to Taqueria 27 for making everything work together without creating a tortilla-wrapped spring roll.  This one was a flour tortilla, and I might go flour on them all next time as it was particularly good.

The last two tacos to mention were the duck confit.  Given the time requirements around traditional confit methods (cooking the duck in its own fat), I thought it was pretty unique to find a taco joint able to create this.  The taco is finished with fire-roasted veggies, leeks and chipotle crema.  By far my favorite item of the night.

The Verdict?  Taqueria 27 is haute cuisine made into tacos that span the cullinary gambit at a reasonable price.  I haven't found the unique mixture of well-executed interesting cooking, price and quick, casual atmosphere anywhere else in SLC (yet).  The environment is fun for a date but also friendly to kids.  The drinks are good.

Note: hopefully this is the last post where you see dreamy photos with a light haze around them - I ordered a new lens for my iphone camera, which should fix the issue.

Eva

I've been to Eva once before and had a decent experience but wanted to document the latest visit here.  I was with a couple of friends and we had a chance to try quite a few menu items.  Here's the rub with Eva: if I'm paying you to create food for me, it should be better than what I can do for myself, or less expensive (in terms of time, money or both).  I'm not sure that Eva met that hurdle for us.  The photos are really poor this time due to bad lighting and my continued unwillingness to carry a proper camera to the dinner table... sorry.

We started out with the roasted beets and goat cheese topped with garlic chips, mint and hazelnut vinaigrette.  If this looks good to you, I have good news - you can go to costco and purchase the cooked baby beets, slice them up, throw some goat cheese on there and you will have this dish!  Honestly, it wasn't exciting at all.

We also tried out the Brussels Sprouts, the "most popular item on the menu".  The preparation is a shredded sprout with toasted hazelnuts and cider vinegar.  I thought the flavor was pretty good though I  wasn't blown away.

The best dish of the night was the tri-tip bruschetta - a thin-sliced tri-tip steak bruschetta with lemon, parmesan, aioli and radicchio.  My only critique on this one is that I'm used to a medium or mid-rare preparation on a tri-tip steak, and the steak in this dish is cooked well done.

The oink-oink-oink was the final dish in our first round of small plates.  This is a skewer with pork belly, bacon and pork tenderloin.  Anyone who reads this blog knows that I love pork belly, which is why I was so frustrated to receive the overcooked skewer of pork that came out with this order.  The tenderloin was rubbery and burnt and the pork belly was a sub-par cut of meat made worse by too much cooking.  Off.

We went around a second time and the first arrival was the wood-fired flatbread served with truffled white bean, arugula pesto and olive tapanade.  This plate was OK - the flatbread had tons of potential but I felt like the pesto wasn't very balanced and the truffled white bean was underwhelming.

I wanted to try the calamari and it was probably the number two most disappointing item on the menu behind the oink-oink.  It was served with a few fried jalepeno chips, but really had zero flavor going on.  Think about how Long John Silver would cook calamari and you get the jist.

We had the spanish organic green salad with manchego, marcona almonds, red peppers and honey truffle vinaigrette.  This salad was pretty good - I would definitely repeat it if I was back at Eva.

The grilled asparagus topped with a poached egg, romano cheese, chopped proscuitto and jalepeno aioli was pretty good as well and stood out as one of the better items of our night.  Maybe I'm spoiled by Finca's take on this dish, which is infinitely more well-executed, but I was a bit let down by Eva's asparagus.

Lastly, I have to mention that I ordered the Eva's whiskey - which is a wood-fired lemon muddled in Maker's on the rocks.  Maybe just a function of Utah liquor laws, but this is basically a water with a spritz of whiskey and a charred lemon.  Not a fan.

I would tell you how the crab cakes were that we ordered, but they never came.

The Verdict?  Eva's has a super interesting menu but is foiled by terrible execution on all fronts.  I don't recommend it but I suppose there is hope for the joint if they import some chefs.  Nice beards, plaid, checkers, paisley and vintage floral only cover up so much.  If you're thinking about Eva - do yourself a favor and head over to Finca instead.

SLC Pop

We decided to try out SLC Pop last weekend on a whim when Chef Katie Weinner posted some avaialbe seats on their Facebook page. It was a really cool experience and I'll mostly just use my iPhone shots to tell the story. The event is held at the Nata Gallery, which Katie and her partner Mike Burtis have leased as a multi-dimensional community space which will host meals for SLC Pop as well as other events. Check out their Kickstarter video for details, but it seems like a space that could be used similarly to the Missio Dei space that The SLC Foodie uses for all of her events. I love people who are trying to build up the food and culture scene in Salt Lake City, so I love the thought behind the Nata Gallery.

When we arrived we got an original take on the BLT - a pork rind topped with tomato, beet green and fry sauce. It was a single bite course, but a fun idea and tasty for sure.

Next course was a raddish and some Amish butter served in a jar filled with applewood smoke. Chef Katie told us that we could wait a while to open the jar if we would like a smokier flavor, so we waited a good five minutes to sample the jar.  The combo of radish with salt and butter is a typical French snack, but usually served over a baguette or crouton in my experience.  Two complaints about this - the smoke just didn't permeate anything for me and without a bread to perch the dish on we basically ended up eating a raddish and then a little fork full of butter.  I dig the creative presentation and I highly support the use of a smoke gun whenever possible, but this was the only flop of the night for me.  

Releasing the smoke was fun!

The next dish was number three on my top three tastes of the night list.  Presented as an "edible rock", we got some Barely Buzzed shortbread (made with a local lavender-and-espresso-rubbed cheese of the same name).  The shortbread was served with honeyed goat cheese stuffed medjool dates (from Trader Joe's!) with cocoa nib salt, butternut squash butter with honey and pepper jam.  The shortbread was killer alone but the flavor combos were all interesting on this plate.

The next dish was the cheese course and the soup course all in one, and I would put this in the running for the best soup I have ever had.  Did you hear that?  True.  It was a smoked mozzarella cream with chunks of smoked fresh mozzarella, topped with a pear and triple creme brie soup.  Forget the photo, this soup may have been worth the price of admission.

We came back to earth for the next course and enjoyed a Sri Lankan beet curry over coconut Daikon noodles and topped with some beet greens.  The Daikon noodles are soaked in coconut milk and end up tasting a lot like they are actually just slices of coconut.  The beet curry was good - I think that there was some coffee involved in the recipe, which makes beets particularly awesome.

The next course rounds out our top three, coming in at number two.  It was a purple polenta (made with blue corn) topped with jalepeno elk sausage and green apple.  Really tasty and the elk was farm raised so it had a very different flavor than most of the elk I've had in the past - much more mellow.  I wish we had received more than a few bites of this one.

The palette cleanser was a citrus granita with agave nectar and violet caviar.  I was glad to see a bit of molecular work its way into the meal with the caviar.  

The next course wasn't really food, but it was fun.  We got a painter's pallet with a variety of edible ink, including violet, yogurt powder, fizzy thingers (?), finger lime caramel (yum), orange curd, chocolate caramel, red wine and beet-buddha hand.  Then we got rice paper and were told to paint a picture and then eat it.  This was all pretty funny and it would have only been better if we would have all shared our art around the room.

Here is my lovely creation.  The eyes are done in pistachio paste, in case you were wondering.

Next we started into the desserts.  The first course was a slow roasted pineapple confit, but since pineapples don't really have their own fat for confit roasting, butter was used instead.  This was served with a tangerine zabaglione with honey comb and amoretti.  It was good and the amoretti cookies were probably the highlight.

The next dessert course was a beet cereal with Kaffir lime milk.  I won't lie - when I saw that one of the previous SLC Pop dinners had featured a cereal I was pretty bummed.  I hate cereal.  But Chef Katie gave us the download on how she had dehydrated then fried up the beet chips, and I do love beets, so I gave it a try.  I did enjoy this dish and the lime milk added a super interesting flavor to the mix.  I just told myself I wasn't really eating cereal and it all worked out in the end.

We finished the night with petit fours: a thyme macaroon, whiskey gummies, red wine meringue, guiness chocolate cake and the house take on a Butterfinger.  The chocolate cake was dry, but everything else was delicious and the coffee was good too!

It is really hard to comment on the SLC Pop experience as an unbiased critic because it is such a personal event.  The chefs really involve you in what they are doing - we went back and checked out the kitchen and even got the backstory on the bathroom sink at Nata.  Overall, the dinner showcases some of the best culinary talent that our city has to offer and for that reason I would put this on your tick list if you care about food in Salt Lake.  The only qualm I have is that we left hungry.  If we had bumped a couple of the portions in size I think the meal would have been perfect, but if you arrive hungry you might consider following your 10 courses at SLC Pop with a hamburger at The Green Pig next door.  The other thing I want to add is that this dinner felt very much like it belonged in Salt Lake City - not sure if that will make sense to anyone but the vibe was local and I loved that about the meal.

The verdict?  I was really glad that I went and felt that every course had something unique and interesting to offer.  For the price ($75 per person), you're also getting bargain access to some of the same folks who can charge a whole lot more at events like Mist.  I'm looking forward to engaging Katie on some other events in the future - she said they are very open to customizing meals for groups so hit them up if you've got an idea.

Plum Alley

Plum Alley has been on my to-try list for a while now.  I had a birthday a couple of weeks ago and the wife decided that we should go to dinner (despite the fact that she had already planned  a surprise whiskey and cheese tasting with some friends for the next night).  Since this was a last-minute thing, we wanted to hit a place with a patio so that we could bring our little one and she wouldn't cause any trouble (outdoor dining is a key to bringing toddlers along).  We decided to check out the Copper Onion patio, but on the way saw that Plum Alley now has outdoor seating.  Done.

The patio is a great space with a few seating configuration options.  I was initially impressed by how small the menu is (this is NOT a bad thing when done well) and by how well-chosen the beer list was.  The only thing we knew coming in was that we'd be trying the pork belly steam buns.  So, we ordered those as well as the sesame corn (sesame aoili and cilantro).

We thought we were ordering the corn for our daughter as an emergency back up item in case the rest of our meal wasn't to her taste, but it was the surprise of the evening.  All three of us fought for it - the charred kernels were a particularly nice touch.

It was a proud moment for me to see my daughter enjoy her first taste of pork belly.  May there be many more of these moments in our future.  The pork belly is sauced with cincalok glaze that would have the potential to overwhelm the flavor of the dish, but it was done well and restraint was the key to a balanced appetizer that I wouldn't ever come back without ordering again.

Green papaya salad came next and was really nice.  Fresh peppers added enough spice to keep it interesting and the papaya was really fresh.  This was a good cleanser between the heavy appetizers and the heavy entrees.

For entrees we ordered pad see ew.  It was great - really amazing flavor to the smoked pork that combined enough asian influence with a light enough sauce to allow the flavors of the meat to come out (something I feel like doesn't happen at your standard Thai joint).  Crisp brocoli rabe was key to rounding this dish out.  I'd do it again.

Our waiter had asked if I like spicy.  Usually, in Utah, spicy means something has pepper on it.  I love spicy food.  I wasn't worried.  So, duck curry.

The primary ingredient in this dish is meanness.  And some sort of heinous peppers that blew out my taste buds for the next two days.  I want to be clear - this dish was not well done.  The spice overwhelmed any flavors that might be hiding underneath the rivers of capsaicin.  We both tried the curry and came to the same conclusion - pain and no flavor.  It was so over the top that I wondered if they had knocked something into the curry accidentally.  Has anyone else tried this dish?  Did we just get unlucky or was what we experienced the intention?

I did my best to put that fire out with a Red Rock Elephino (one of the better double IPAs out there, in my opinion).

The Verdict?  I will go back to Plum Alley as it was a great environment with a mostly well crafted menu.  While I'm going to be gun shy for a while about anything demarcated as spicy from this kitchen, everything other than the curry was a delight - particularly the meats, which fused asian and continental in a way I've never experienced before.

Per Noi Trattoria

When I was living in DC, my wife and I decided that we would become "regulars" at a restaurant nearby our apartment.  We didn't have too much money to spare so we had to find the right mix of price and something we wouldn't grow tired of.  The goal was to eat at the same restaurant once a week.  What we found was a hole-in-the-wall Italian place with incredible, authentic food run by a family who always cared deeply about the experience had by every diner in the room, every night.  It was great for about a year, and then they sold the place to a Korean investor, and things fell apart.  So it goes - we did what we could to make it last.

I hadn't thought about that little place until last Saturday night when I visited Per Noi.  We were greeted by the owner, whose grandmother shares a first name with my wife.  He told us a few jokes and expressed genuine gratitude that we had come in.  We had the treat of dining with Josh and Becky from  theslcfoodie.com and Vintage Mixer.  They had been to Italy recently and were also struck by how much Per Noi carried the same feel as some of the family run joints they found on their trip.  

We popped a bottle of tempranillo (here's to the $7 corkage fee!) and started off with an order of Arancini.  This dish is more commonly seen prepared as smaller nuggets of meat, risotto and peas, but here it was one baseball-sized portion that we split 4 ways, served with marinara sauce.

We shared a mixed greens salad that was great.

And our entrees were the Gnocchi Bolognese and the Linguini Pescatore.  I would say that the Gnocchi was very, very above average and was sauced with a very average (but good) bolognese.  The flavors here were less subtle and complex than you'd find at Fresco, site of my last Bolognese sampling, but I wasn't disappointed.

The Linguini Pescatore was a pleasant surprise.  Sauced with the same marinara base as all the other pastas, the generous helpings of shrimp, scallops, mussels and fish made this entree worthwhile.  It was hearty and none of the seafood detracted from the plate, which is often the case when kitchens make a dish that employs such a mash up of ocean creatures.

After the entrees we split a cannoli four ways and it did not disappoint.  I don't usually dig on cannoli, but this one was delicious.  Here is the kicker, my friends: we split our bill two ways, and after an appetizer, salad, two entrees and a dessert, the total was $29.  We paid about double that for cocktails beforehand at Finca... I was pretty happy and shocked.

The Verdict?  Love Per Noi for what it is: a family-run Italian joint that makes the best gnocchi in town and is 100% devoid of pretense.  They care deeply about the food they are serving and, perhaps even more, about the welcome they provide to guests of all stripes.  I'll be back often!

Ruth's Diner

Ruth's has been an SLC staple for a long time. They tout themselves as the second oldest restaurant in Utah and I highly recommend that you cruise over to their history page and read a bit about the colorful founder herself. This place has survived for a reason. It isn't haute cuisine and it isn't trendy, but it is hard to deny the vibe and the food isn't bad at all. I've eaten at Ruth's a few times and there is a clear issue with their breakfast: the complimentary mile high biscuits that they start you off with before most of their plates are more calories that I normally consume for an entire meal. They are both delicious and beautiful, but most people are full after one such rusk.

This time around I was looking to order off menu, but my out-of-towner sister came through and ordered a classic so that you could get a good idea of what's available at Ruth's. I have heard tale of a polenta benedict, and it sounded great. The menu encourages patrons to ask for anything they're interested in regardless of whether or not your entree of choice is listed, so I asked. Our server said he'd be happy to have them do me up some polenta benedict so I was feeling pretty blithe. Here is what I got:

Two comments. First, the basic elements of eggs benedict are there and done well with a bit of a greasy spoon flair (as they should be). Second, there was no polenta on my plate - just cornbread. The dish wasn't bad at all but I'll admit I felt a little betrayed when I found that my polenta was made of cornbread.

My sis and her soon to be husband stayed a bit more in the wheelhouse at Ruth's and ordered a smoked salmon omelet and the Ruth's combo (eggs, pancakes, breakfast meats and hash browns). Both of these entrees are good but my advice is to lean towards the breakfast combo. Ruth's is as much about the fantastic patio as it is about the food and you won't be disappointed if you come looking for a classic big breakfast. I've never had anything I didn't enjoy here, but I feel like they really do their best on the basics (the coffee is passable for me and will only disappoint those who read this and think "uh-oh").

Speaking of the patio - it is the only way to dine at Ruth's if the weather is even half decent. I'd recommend against sitting inside during the summer as the doors usually stay open and the flies prefer the indoor dining. In the winter, dining indoors is no problem. But if the patio is open, that is where you want to be enjoying great views of Emigration Canyon up and out of the SLC haze. 

The verdict? Ruth's does great at what they have been doing for a very long time. Come looking for breakfast basics done right and you'll leave happy, and be sure to sit outside if you can!