Spencer Windes

Eat Drink SLC is one of the most popular food festivals in the city, a two-day circus of yum that takes over Tracy Aviary in September. This year was another excellent event. Here are four things that stood out amongst the dozens of combustible choices.

The sibling bar and restaurant Copper Common and Copper Onion had two stand-out dishes: a duck prosciutto that came with a spicy pepper remoulade, and unctuous salmon mousse served in an endive leaf for a bit of bitter to the bite.  Their Dew Drop cocktail featured local botanical gin, chartreuse, and a honeydew-cucumber-lime cordial. Redolent of melon, it cut through the ample fat of the food offerings without being too boozy. 

Two South Valley standouts, Sandy’s Tiberon and the Midvale steakhouse Hoof and Vine, brought the meat to the event, with a seared elk loin and dry-aged beef tartare that paired very well with the Krasno red blend wine from the nearby tent of Klet Brda, the Slovenian wine cooperative and importer. Their orange wine was also a treat.

Nomad Eatery’s new outpost, Nomad East, brought a mini pizza oven to the aviary, and it paid off—their Children of the Corn pizza was hot and fresh. It’s weird to describe pizza as creamy, but with garlic cream sauce, mozzarella and cotija cheese, this is a dairy-forward slice set off with the spice of chorizo and serrano chile, green onion, and of course pops of sweet corn. The last time I ate corn on a pizza it was standing on a street corner in Marseille. Nomad’s pies break out of the stale rut of most American pizzerias. 

Perhaps the best thing I ate wasn’t a dish at all, but a cup full of beautiful cherry tomatoes provided by the New Roots program of the International Rescue Committee. The program helps refugees, many of whom come from farming backgrounds, transition to life in the US by giving them the chance to grow their own local food and food-based businesses. With two farms in the Salt Lake valley, their clients produce fresh fruit and vegetables for sale at local farmer’s markets and through a CSA program. The tomatoes they brought to Eat Drink SLC were perfect pops of pleasure, and paired eloquently with a lentil and rice dish that they prepared with the help of Mazza cafe. Eating delicious food produced by the newest Americans was a pleasure for both the palate and the soul. 

All told, Eat Drink SLC has become a must-do for Utah foodies, a delicious way to enjoy the last gasp of summer and kick off the harvest season. Don’t skip on it next year.

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In the 1980s, I spent many of my childhood summers up in the small farm towns of the Wasatch Back: Heber, Midway and Kamas. I recently returned to Utah. The growth up on the other side of the mountain has been one of the most startling changes I’ve seen. Amid all this growth, Dendric Estate is a startup cider-making operation set amidst acres of their own apple orchards—no juice boxes here, but high-quality European-style fermented cider. 

I have a hard time imagining a place like Dendric Estate in my misty memories of the Kamas valley, but it fits right into the community as it is today. Owners Brendan and Carly Coyle certainly understand what the future holds in Summit County. Brendan spent years at Park City’s groundbreaking High West Distillery, helping to grow Utah’s burgeoning culture of spirit makers. Brendan and Carly wanted the challenge of building something new from the ground up, or in this case, from the dirt. In 2019, they bought a 20-acre dirt plot just north of town on the long alluvial slope dropping down from the flank of the Uintahs to the Weber River far below. At 6,440 feet, they decided to make wine from apples.

Apple trees have grown in Utah since the pioneer era. Many of those historical varieties were crabapples—small, tart, and hardy survivors that thrived in the short growing season at altitude. Unlike the big, watery, sweet varieties common to American grocery stores, crabapples make a great base for baking, cooking and distilling into cider. It’s easy enough to add sugar, but starting with a tart, firm, complex flavor profile is a must to make the kind of crisp, dry, in-your-nose cider that you usually find in the spiritual home of cider-making, Normandy. 

That’s exactly what Dendric Estate has created with their first product, which they have appropriately named Dry Cut. This bubbly, punchy drink has more in common with a good champagne than with the sweet alcoholic apple juice that InBev will sell you in a can. 

It took five years of hard work to get to this stage. The first thing the Coyles did during the pandemic was plant trees—36 different apple varieties, to test how they grew in the Kamas soil and climate. Then they built a production facility, one piece of machinery at a time. They use the Charmat method, the same secondary fermentation process that’s used for sparkling wine, and their spotless building is filled with a giant, bright and shiny fermentation tank for the secondary fermentation that they use to give their cider that champagne life.

Of course, apple trees take years to grow, so Dry Cut is sourced from apples further up the Great Basin, mostly in Idaho. The Coyles will be harvesting their own fruit for their 2026 product, as well as sourcing from other Utah farms, to bring their cider even closer to home. More importantly, they have narrowed in on successful varieties that they want to grow in bulk, and 3,200 new trees have been ordered for planting, including Redfield, a variety whose flesh is red as well as its skin. It will make a cider with the color of rosé.

As far as making cider in the conservative Kamas Valley goes, the Coyle’s have had a positive response from their neighbors. 

“There are some multi-generational Mormon families that aren’t fans of alcohol,” Brendan admits. “But here’s what we come to connect—the Kamas Valley historically has been a land of ranching and agriculture. But we’re only 20 minutes from Park City—We’re so close that we’re experiencing land prices that are equivalent to certain areas in Park City. What we all agree on, and where we get a pat on the back from the locals that grew up here, is that we’re doing agriculture differently. It might not be the way that they would do it historically, but we’re promoting and protecting and growing agriculture, and we’re doing it in a way that can compete with Park City land prices. It’s tough for traditional agriculture to compete with that. What we wanted to do was bring a new type of agriculture to the valley that can compete, but can also preserve the heritage. We’ve committed to 75% of our 20-acre estate to be pure agriculture.” 

The Coyles are also committed to building a sustainable business—they’ve applied for the permitting that will allow them to recycle their wastewater for reuse. Using organic farming methods, they’re avoiding the pesticide-heavy practices of much fruit farming. 

You may not be able to taste all this toil and labor in the glass, but what you do taste—a clean, fresh, bubbly, delicious cider wine—is proof of their concept. The Wasatch Back could be America’s next great cider country, and if it is, a generation from now, the Coyle’s will be remembered as pioneers, breaking the tough soil and making a new way of life in the high mountains.

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There are two different stories about the origin of the pambazo. Here’s the romantic one: When Empress Carlota arrived in Mexico with her Habsburg husband, Maximilian I, they brought along their Hungarian chef, Josef Tüdös. He created a new dish for the Empress by adding Hungarian-style paprika and potatoes to traditional Mexican ingredients, including three elements meant to invoke the Mexican flag: white queso fresco, green lettuce, and a bright red sandwich roll made from dipping bread into guajillo pepper mole (the key ingredient in traditional enchilada sauce) and frying it. He named it the Empress’s Caprice.

The second origin story is the opposite of this froufrou royal romanticism. During the hardest days of Spanish rule, Mexican bakers would take the low-quality flour left over after making fine white bread and bake it into rolls called pan basso, or low bread, that were sold in separate bakeries for the poor called panbassaria. The cheap flour made for mighty chewy loaves, and thus the tradition of soaking and frying this particular bread to make it more palatable. 

This sounds the more likely origin, since it’s the common story for some of the world’s best dishes – humble food made from low-quality ingredients but elevated with innovative techniques and seasoning. Pambazo has its regional variations—you can put just about anything in it as long as you are dipping and frying the bread in that bright red sauce. The most popular variation uses chorizo with potatoes and is associated with Mexico City. 

As a native Californian and admirer of Mexican cuisine, I was surprised to realize that I’d never heard of the pambazo until I saw it mentioned by the journalist Talia Lavin in her weird, lovely side project The Sword and the Sandwich, an essay collection (soon to be a book) in which she is working her way through the Wikipedia list of notable sandwiches. I immediately went to Google Maps and typed in ‘pambazo’. The nearest hit was on 200 S, six blocks from my office. 

This turned out to be at a recently opened restaurant called House of Corn that had a previous, and apparently well-loved, iteration in Sandy. It sounds better in Spanish, Casa de Maíz. I won’t say I broke any traffic laws, but I got there in pretty good time and sat down to order my first pambazo with the traditional chorizo and potato mix. A few minutes later, a toasted red sandwich appeared, dripping melted queso down its sides. 

Another food origin story that may not be entirely true is the one about the French dip sandwich. Supposedly, a customer walked into Philippe’s, a sandwich shop in Los Angeles, in 1908. They ordered a roast beef sandwich, but the cook accidentally dropped the bread into a pan of beef drippings. The customer told him to just go ahead and serve it, and then declared the resulting sandwich to be delicious, starting a trend that continues to this day—Philippe’s is a deep memory from my childhood that I refresh whenever I’m back in LA. 

That’s what the pambazo reminded me of—that crisp toasty texture you get when you dip cheap bread in an oily liquid and then fry it. With the pambazo, the guajillo sauce also provides spice and heat to an otherwise tasteless roll, and the firming up of the bread by frying it makes it an excellent platform for the fillings to come.

House of Corn nailed those fillings, with a yummy potato-laced chorizo, fresh lettuce and salsa, and all that glorious melted cheese. But the star of the show is that delicious, crusty, brightly colored bread, the Mexican equivalent of the buttery garlic slice they give you to sop up your plate at an old-school red sauce Italian place. House of Corn is a restaurant that prides itself on its house-made tortillas, but they’ve also perfected another delivery device for those goodies you might otherwise find in a street taco—a piece of lowly bread, elevated by dipping it and frying it into a sandwich fit for an empress.

If You Go

House of Corn
414 E 200 South, SLC
houseofcornusa.com

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I love brunch. It’s Sunday morning service for belly-worshipers, a celebration that you survived Saturday night. I especially loved brunch in Santa Fe, where I’ve been living for the last four years until this summer, which tells you where my palate is at. New Mexico brunch is a whole different animal–not the limp parade of tired Benedicts and boring mimosas that you find in many places. So I was excited to try the summer brunch at Dos Olas, the upscale Mexican spot at the Pendry Hotel in Park City. Their new brunch service promised to hit my craving for spicy, yummy southwestern comfort food. 

Instead of a mimosa, I started with a Palomita, a refreshing mix of El Jimador Reposado tequila, grapefruit juice, and soda. It’s the hair of a lighter dog, the kind of drink that you can sip before noon without feeling like an incurable booze hound. I’m not a big bloody mary drinker, but Dos Olas offered something I haven’t yet seen in Utah–a full-service build-your-own-mary bar complete with every possible garnish I could imagine. 

You start with chips, salsa and guac, right? Dos Olas brought out two salsas, a blended pico de gallo and a smoked chipotle. Both were yummy, with a good hit of acid and spicy but not burning–for that, you can request their ghost pepper salsa. The guac was smooth, fresh and lemony, without too much tomato, a pet peeve of mine. I also sampled the queso fundido, which comes topped with crumbled chorizo and accompanied by fresh corn and flour tortillas. Rolled-up little melted cheese taquitos are a good way to settle a hungover stomach. 

My breakfast sweet tooth got hit by the Tostada de Caprirotada. It’s made with cornbread, which provides a crunchy texture to sop up the fresh fruit, whipped cream and syrup. My craving for sweetness is modest by Utah standards, so it was a good thing that this version of French toast had that rich cornbread flavor that stood up well to the syrup. 

For my chile quotient, I ordered up a plate of Huevos Divorciados, or divorced eggs. The two eggs come floating on a sea of Christmas-style chile–red on one side and green on the other, just like I order my plates in Santa Fe. Tasty rice and beans support the chile sauce, and mine came with a Denver steak, cooked to a nicely charred morning-appropriate medium and sliced to show off plenty of tasty red meat. It cut through the middle of the plate, separating the two eggs like a restraining order.

Though I was reaching my “wafer-thin mint” point, I did have to try the street tacos. The barbacoa was exactly what you want, deeply tender beef simmered to a near-marshmallow softness in a pair of tasty corn tortillas. Then, to wrap things up, there was fresh fruit sprinkled with Tajín salt or a plate of cinnamon-crusted mini-churros served up with melted chocolate dipping sauce. 

Dos Olas’ southwestern-style brunch is a nice n’ spicy alternative to the brunch rut that can make what should be a decadent weekend-after-payday treat an otherwise mid affair. It hit my chile craving while still offering up some fun alternatives to the classics. Sunday brunch runs 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., followed by a beer garden aimed at the mountain biking crowd and held in the plaza in front of the restaurant. That will carry you through until 7 p.m. You could spend much of the day up on the mountain just eating and drinking in the warm summer sun. Close your eyes and you’ll swear you’re in Santa Fe.

When you go…

Dos Olas
2417 W High Mountain Rd, Park City (Located in the Pendry Plaza)
dosolasparkcity.com

See more stories like this and all of our Food and Drink coverage. And while you’re here, why not subscribe and get six annual issues of Salt Lake magazine’s curated guide to the best life in Utah?

There are two different stories about the origin of the pambazo. Here’s the romantic one: When Empress Carlota arrived in Mexico with her Hapsburg husband Maximilian I, they brought along their Hungarian chef, Josef Tüdös. He created a new dish for the Empress by adding Hungarian-style paprika and potatoes to traditional Mexican ingredients, including three elements meant to invoke the Mexican flag: white queso fresco, green lettuce, and a bright red sandwich roll made from dipping bread into guajillo pepper mole (the key ingredient in traditional enchilada sauce) and frying it. He named it the Empress’s Caprice.

The second origin story is the opposite of this froufrou royal romanticism. During the hardest days of Spanish rule, Mexican bakers would take the low-quality flour left over after making fine white bread and bake it into rolls called pan basso, or low bread, that were sold in separate bakeries for the poor called panbassaria. The cheap flour made for mighty chewy loaves, and thus the tradition of soaking and frying this particular bread to make it more palatable. 

This sounds the more likely origin, since it’s the common story for some of the world’s best dishes – humble food made from low-quality ingredients but elevated with innovative techniques and seasoning. Pambazo has its regional variations—you can put just about anything in it as long as you are dipping and frying the bread in that bright red sauce. The most popular variation uses chorizo with potatoes and is associated with Mexico City. 

As a native Californian and admirer of Mexican cuisine, I was surprised to realize that I’d never heard of the pambazo until I saw it mentioned by the journalist Talia Lavin in her weird, lovely side project The Sword and the Sandwich, an essay collection (soon to be a book) in which she is working her way through the Wikipedia list of notable sandwiches. I went immediately to Google Maps and typed in pambazo. The nearest hit was on 200 S, six blocks from my office. 

This turned out to be at a recently opened restaurant called House of Corn that had a previous, and apparently well-loved, iteration in Sandy. It sounds better in Spanish, Casa de Maíz. I won’t say I broke any traffic laws, but I got there in pretty good time and sat down to order my first pambazo with the traditional chorizo and potato mix. A few minutes later, a toasted red sandwich appeared, dripping melted queso down its sides. 

Another food origin story that may not be true is about the french dip sandwich. Supposedly, a customer walked into Philippe’s, a sandwich shop in Los Angeles, in 1908. They ordered a roast beef sandwich, but the cook accidentally dropped the bread into a pan of beef drippings. The customer told him to just go ahead and serve it, and then declared the resulting sandwich to be delicious, starting a trend that continues to this day—Philippe’s is a deep memory from my childhood that I refresh whenever I’m back in LA. 

That’s what the pambazo reminded me of—that crisp toasty texture you get when you dip cheap bread in an oily liquid and then fry it. With the pambazo, the guajillo sauce also provides spice and heat to an otherwise tasteless roll, and the firming up of the bread by frying it makes it an excellent platform for the fillings to come.

House of Corn nailed those fillings, with a yummy potato-laced chorizo, fresh lettuce and salsa, and all that glorious melted cheese. But the star of the show is that delicious, crusty, brightly colored bread, the Mexican equivalent of the buttery garlic slice they give you to sop up your plate at an old-school red sauce Italian place. House of Corn is a restaurant that prides itself on its house-made tortillas, but they’ve also perfected another delivery device for those goodies you might otherwise find in a street taco—a piece of lowly bread, elevated by dipping it and frying it into a sandwich fit for an empress.

If You Go

House of Corn
414 E 200 South, SLC
houseofcornusa.com

See more stories like this and all of our Food and Drink coverage. And while you’re here, why not subscribe and get six annual issues of Salt Lake magazine’s curated guide to the best life in Utah?