Mary Brown Malouf

What do you want to be when you grow up?” At some point every child is asked this question. Very few of them ended up in the professional life they wished for when they were 5 or 6.

Tom Bench, owner of Hollow Tree Honey, always wanted to be a beekeeper.

“Like a lot of kids, I spent a lot of time running around catching bees in a Mason jar. I was fascinated by them and loved looking at them up close,” he says. “But I really wanted to taste honey from my own bees.”

Now he looks at thousands of bees every day. And tastes their honey.

Bench majored in Environmental and Sustainability studies at The University of Utah and became interested in local food systems and their effect on local economies. Afterwards, he went to USU to specifically study his favorite arthropods. He learned how vital bees are to our food system—many foods we eat are pollinated by and wouldn’t exist without bees, almonds for example. There are more than 16,000 kinds of bees. What Bench is interested in is apis, the Western honeybees brought to the east coast of America in 1622; it was 231 years before they reached the west coast. With professor Amy Sibul, who had studied bees at USU, and Salt Lake County Bee Inspector Chris Rodesch, Bench began work on a project to establish a bee colony at the U and to be a beekeeper.

Hollow Tree Honey gives away a packet of wildflower seeds with their honey.

“It took 50 or 60 hours of writing proposals to get the first two hives,” Bench says. “Now there are 20.”

Bench worked with the U program for several years before going out on his own. He and a partner, Adam Maxwell, each got two hives.

Bench’s bees live mostly in the foothills of Davis County in an orchard at an altitude of more than 8,000 feet. He packages the honey from each location separately.

“The quantity fluctuates from season to season, but usually we harvest 10,000 to 15,000 pounds of honey a year. We’ll never be a really big operation,” says Bench. “Because we still harvest the old-school way—unheated and unfiltered.”

The company started by selling at farmers markets; now Hollow Tree Honey is sold in many local stores including Harmons. And Bench spends most of his time tending hives.

“That means opening up the hive and checking for overcrowding, mites and foulbrood, but mainly, you’re making sure there’s a healthy queen. You don’t see the queen herself but you do see the eggs—that’s the sign of a healthy hive.”

As the saying goes: If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Beekeeper knows this.

Available at Harmons, hollowtreehoney.com, 385-355-4233

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Photo courtesy Traeger Grills

Man + fire + food. It was the simplest cooking equation of all. Cooked food may have begun accidentally, with a prehistoric person dropping food into flames and discovering deliciousness, albeit probably on the well-done side. However it happened, cooked food was the key to human civilization. It gave us immediate access to nutrients which allowed early humans to do more than forage for food all day. We could grow our brains bigger, paint on the walls and invent things like the wheel, more efficient sharp, pointy sticks and computers and monster trucks. 

And, now, the big brains at Traeger Grills have come up with the new equation: man + fire + food + technology.

Above: Traeger Grills use wood pellets instead of logs, chunks or charcoal and WiFire tech.

The Traeger Grills are the first computerized grills, words that didn’t make sense to me, a lifelong traditional cook, until I toured Traeger HQ in SugarHouse. I could tell right away from the space that I was in a tech hive—the sleek design, open spaces, the obvious emphasis on company community, the people buzzing around on hoverboards. Definitely digital space. And as Michael Colston, veep of product development put it, “We are a technology company that produces hard goods.”

The brilliance of Traeger grilling, before we get to the computerized part, is the use of extruded wood pellets instead of chunks of wood as fuel. They look like dog food and lack the soul of a hand-hewn log, they are, Colston explained, way better. A better, sharp, pointy stick, basically.

IF YOU GO
Address: 1215 E. Wilmington Ave.
Web: traegergrills.com
Phone: 801-701-7180

“We make these from sawdust of previously used-wood,” he explains. “We are using something that would otherwise be thrown away. The pellets are still pure wood—alder, oak, mesquite and fruitwood—sourced from places where those trees are native and naturally used—and they are much more energy-efficient and produce fewer particulate matter than conventional wood. Plus, they still impart the flavors from the original wood.” So you can use fuels appropriate to the food, like Northwest alder for fish, or Texas mesquite for beef.

But the jaw-dropping feature of Traeger grills is that they have an app. The Traeger app, cheekily called “WiFire” (Tinder was taken) lets you preset the desired temperature and cooking time. Meanwhile, the grill knows how many pellets to feed in and controls the fans to keep the cooking temperature precisely consistent.

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Shaken or Stirred? Have it your way. There are two ways to drink at Grand America. One is the classic hotel bar way—the Gibson Lounge has some of the glamorous décor implied by its Gay Nineties name, and it’s inhabited mostly by guests of the hotel or post-partyers from a hotel event—wedding guests with loosened ties who won’t go away or the one last cocktail conventioneer. Our bartender, Christopher Stephenson, is dressed in proper black and white, as if Bertie Wooster or Nick Charles had been the last gentleman he served. He garnishes your Grand Old-fashioned with an expertly simple orange zest. 

The other way is to join the party in the Lobby Bar. Open to the crossroads halls of the Grand’s mazeways, the Lobby Bar feels posh. Chairs are overstuffed and comfy, gathered into groups for easy conversation. The tall ceilings, grand piano and fireplace give the place the Continental feel it’s striving for and the servers pay attention and pamper you—maybe this is where Nora Charles hangs out. On the weekends, live jazz gives the room some rhythm, but not too loudly. They know they’re playing background music, though everyone applauds politely at the end of a number. Either way, you can order from the Grand’s menu to fuel the final effort towards home for the night.  

By the way, if you don’t know who Nick and Nora Charles or Bertie Wooster are, you deserve to drink sweet and sour mix. Look it up. 

555 S. Main St., SLC, 801-258-6000, grandamerica.com

It used to be that Americans demanded, above all, consistency. Our mobile society, as it moved around the country, wanted the security of knowing they could get the same Big Mac in Maine that they could get in Arizona. We were brand loyal to gas stations, automobiles and hotels. That was then.

“Now people want differentiation,” says Abby Murtagh, general manager of Hilton Hotel Salt Lake City Center.

Turns out, travelers are demanding to know where they are. Cookie-cutter businesses have less appeal than unique ones. So the challenge is, how to change from one philosophy to another? How do you make a hotel that’s based its image on reliable sameness to one that is different from any other? How do you make a national brand into a local one?

Spencers for Steaks and Chops Executive Chef Sebastian Lowery.

Salt Lake Hilton’s Spencers for Steaks and Chops Executive Chef Sebastian Lowery decided the change should start in the kitchen. That’s why we are standing on the 3rd floor of Salt Lake’s downtown hotel watching the honeybees’ busyness around their hives—there are four of them flourishing on the roof outside the plate glass window. How did this come about?

“I wanted to start growing herbs and vegetables in the boxes around our patio,” says Lowery. “After I got corporate approval, I called Bug Farms to see if they could help me get started and help me with maintenance. They steered me to Sarah Duke—she takes care of our gardens now—and she introduced me to Craig Huntzinger of Bees Brothers. Together we came up with the plan to put hives on the roof. I don’t have time to run a hotel kitchen, tend a garden and keep bees, but with this team, it’s possible.”

And that means local will soon be on the plate at Spencers Steaks and Chops, in the cocktails at the bar and that VIP guests will be presented with Bees Brothers’ honey and bee-based products, like 3-oz. jars (acceptable to TSA) of honey from the Hilton.

As an example of how his kitchen will be using their new honey, Chef presents me with a honey-cinnamon ice cream cone. It’s delicious—perfectly creamy with all the complex sweetness of honey.

Lowery and Murtagh have more than local on their mind, though.

“The next generation is looking for businesses to be more globally responsible,” says Murtagh. “The Salt Lake Valley and the world needs bees,” says Lowery.

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Back where it belongs, in its trolley car at Trolley Square, the Trolley Wing Company has returned. Bar owner Jess Wilkerson, was evicted in 2010 when the 100-plus year-old trolley car was mothballed to make way for Whole Foods and has been wandering in the wilderness ever since, running trolley-car-less locations in Midvale and Sugar House. When Trolley Square’s owners restored the car, Wilkerson jumped at the chance to bring the namesake Trolley Wing Company original 16 bar stools and famed wings back to whence they came. You can get them at other locations in the Salt Lake City area—and even order from GrubHub— but there’s nothing like ordering from the original. 602 S. 700 East, SLC, trolleywingco.com

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A not-quite-tropical paradise is just upstairs over the popular Tinwell Bar on Main Street, perfect for your next beach party—there’s no ocean so there’s no beach but that just means no sticky sand but there may be a blue plastic shark balanced on the edge of your drink and that’s as close as you want to get to a shark anyway.

This is how they did tiki drinks before they knew kitsch could border on cultural appropriation. Ever wonder what tiki actually means? It’s a Maori word and it refers to those big wooden carved statues that used to stand guard in front of Trader Vic’s. The figures represent Tiki, the first man created by Tane—many Polynesian cultures use Tiki to honor deified ancestors. In 1930s the California idea of tropical was seized by a rum-runner from Texas and New Orleans, Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt, who started Don the Beachcomber. Tintiki follows in the sandy footprints of D the BC. As you should too, when you drink here—and by the way, your drink is rum, rum and more rum, in drinks concocted by Stuart Ford, resident Rum Wizard and Tiki boss. Example: the Wray M.F., (pictured, a nod to the club’s signature drink the AMF), made with Dented Brick Gin, brandy, Wray & Nephew rum, blanco tequila, fresh ginger, pineapple and Giffard Blue Curacao. (As bar co-owner Amy Eldredge points out, that’s the good kind—lots of tiki drinks depend on blue curacao and the bad kind tastes like lighter fluid.)

Eldredge and Ford will be teaching a Rum & Tiki series in mid-July where guests can learn about a variety of Tiki topics while enjoying their beverage offerings.

Every Tuesday is Tiki Tuesday from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m., and once a month or so local DJ’s play a vinyl set featuring vintage tropical-type music (think Harry Belafonte and banana tallies) Tintiki is also open every Friday and Saturday night from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. 

837 Main St., SLC, 801-953-1769. tinwellbar.com

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Food doesn’t have to be beautiful, I reminded myself. I had ordered the fresh coriander noodles at SLC Eatery, the new restaurant from chefs Logen Crew and Paul Chamberlain. It sounded beautiful—braised lamb shoulder with peanuts, bok choy and a fermented black bean sauce. It looked awful—brown meat shreds on OD green ribbons of pasta. I closed my eyes. I took a bite. It was beautiful again—an amazingly acute balance of flavors and textures.

Chef Logen Crew has been a quiet but unmistakably major talent in Utah kitchens for a long time—at the now-closed and much-lamented Fresco, at a series of Trios, at Log Haven, at Current Fish & Oyster. He now has a restaurant of his own, where he can push the inventiveness once latent when he worked for another person’s vision. Try agnolotti with blue prawn and mushrooms, the pasta texture eliding with the shrimp filling; at the table a server pours a clear brown stream of bacon consomme over the pasta. Or tender calamari, the white rings tossed with mushrooms in a cilantro aioli spiked with Tajin and jalapeno and garnished with cubes of fried rice—a tour de force of textures that you don’t appreciate until after the first chew. Other entrees we tried were equally mysterious and delightful: slices of rare smoked beef with Brussels sprouts and black garlic over…grits? There are more—lots of of Asian influence from Korean-American co-owner Paul Chamberlain. Then there’s The Cart: A dim sum cart holding the day’s small plates is rolled around the tables throughout the meal. Choose what you want—each tiny bite is an explosion of flavor.

The warm chocolate mousse surprised with Fernet-infused marshmallows, the classic bitter balancing the squishy sweet confection. SLC Eatery should bag these and sell them. The point of the new place is to “offer an adventure.” says Crew. “In some restaurants, if you change anything, even a salad, customers revolt. We want to change the menu as we feel inspired. But people do develop favorites.” He encourages you to call ahead if you want something you loved. Like the coriander noodles.

1017 S. Main St., SLC, slceatery.com, 801-355-7952