Eat & Drink

I heard a lot about the vision for Stanza, but I missed both “soft” opening nights, a kind of dress rehearsal when press and locals try the food free of charge while the restaurant works to get the kinks out of the kitchen line and the service staff.

I heard—from guests and restaurant staff—that there were, indeed, a lot of kinks on those nights.

But last night, when I dined there, the bumps were gone.

Yes, they spotted me, so service was over-the-top gracious, undoubtedly friendlier and more solicitous than received by other diners.

But restaurant critics are seldom successfully anonymous these days and most of them (Jonathon Gold of the LATimes, Leslie Brenner of the Dallas Morning News, John Mariani of everywhere) no longer even try to be. That’s the result of a combination of factors: The Internet that has made celebrities of ordinary people, shrinking budgets at publications that prohibit paying dedicated restaurant critics, and, maybe, the ultimate silliness of it all. All those wigs and hats.

At any rate, after 35 years of reviewing, I’ve learned a few things: Chefs either can or cannot produce superior food. If they can, they try to do it for every customer, not just the celebs and writers. It’s surprising even to me how often I am served cold pasta or even rancid food when the restaurant knows I am a food writer. Yes, it actually happens.

Stanza was built around its bar—by leaving the bar at Faustina nearly intact, the structure qualified as a remodel instead of new construction—and anyone who was familiar with that bar will feel at home here, although the menu has been utterly changed by beverage manager Jim Santangelo and cocktail designer Amy Eldredge. The wine list is friendly, with lots of by the glass and flight options and a broad range of prices. Naturally, it focuses on Italian wines and varietals. Prosecco and negronis for all!

At the table, we ate house-made burrata with a beautiful fava bean relish, mussels cooked with prosecco and calabrese sausage with grilled lemons, a round loaf of house-made bread (to be used for sandwiches when Stanza opens for lunch)

and a version of Caesar salad. I’ve almost given up on the anchovy battle, but it does seem odd to me when they are listed as “optional” on a Caesar salad—I feel they’re definitive. Then again, so are eggs, and the dressing on this putative Caesar was called a mustard vinaigrette. In other words, this wasn’t a Caesar salad at all. But it is a good salad of romaine hearts when you order it with anchovies; even garnished with a few whole fish so the umami was loud and clear.

Carrot torchio (torch-shaped pasta) with shaved purple carrot and rabbit braised in milk and shredded in a light sauce. Of course, there’s a tongue in cheek joke here about bunny rabbits and carrots (what’s up, doc?) but there’s sound culinary sense too—the gentleness of the milk braise and the sweetness of the carrot puree in the pasta dough melded to make this a soothing dish, just barely spiked with pickled fennel.

If you order it, note that the stew-like rabbit is at the bottom, so be sure to stir it up. When chef Phelix Gardner was at Pago, he served a lamb and pasta dish I will never forget—mint leaves encased in pasta served with a lamb ragu. To my delight, he has revamped this dish for Stanza. Instead of whole leaves, he makes pappardelle with a mint puree and tops the broad noodles with lamb sugo—and if there’s a definitive difference between ragu and sugo, someone please enlighten me. Castelvetrano olives provided tart contrast and grated pecorino underscored the sheepy (sheepish?) sweetness. The sauce, unfortunately, verged on too salty.

Our third dish was agnolotti, the little pillows stuffed with pea puree and ricotta and served with Gulf shrimp and asparagus tips. The whole flavor was a bright spring green.

All the pastas are made in-house, and Gardner takes creative advantage of that, meaning that the pasta dishes are totally Italian in spirit but not classically Italian. You can tell there’s a real palate in the kitchen.

In fact, there are two—to my surprise, David Bible, whose cooking I have always admired, is Gardner’s chef de cuisine.

Gardner delivered one dish that’s on the menu but is still being tweaked. (This is where a food writer has an advantage over a lay diner.) Big elbows of seaweed pasta nested clams bathed in a white wine broth with tiny dice of pancetta and pickled fresno chilies. The three of us drank the broth with our spoons when the clams and pasta were gone. On the printed menu, this dish is listed as being made with bucatini, but the hollow curves of the elbows served as little cups for the savory broth—much better.

We didn’t eat a classical Italian meal, either. We stopped with pasta as our main course moscato and grappa for dessert. We’ll have to go back to see if Stanza’s bistecca fiorentina ($85) is as good as the one we had in Florence.

The question was, why start completely over? Why not just remodel with tony shades of paint? Faustina was hardly a fail—the restaurant and its staff had won numerous awards. But when the principals of newly-named Main Course Management restaurant group turned their attention to this little downtown bistro, they opted to tear it down (all except, mysteriously, the bar) and start over. Before the restaurant was open, I sat down to find out the reason for such a radical approach.

Joel LaSalle and Mikel Trapp

“We learned a lot from opening Current and we want to build on that success,” says co-owner Joel LaSalle. He and his partner Mikel Trapp joined their separate restaurant companies to open Current Seafood & Oyster two years ago and the place has exceeded expectations and projections.

LaSalle and Trapp think they know why and are using that knowledge to approach their future projects in their new company, Main Course Management. There will be many projects to come, but the first thing they tackled was a remake of Faustina, their little cafe that almost could.

Faustina was a mild mainstay on the downtown dining scene for years. A modern bistro with a regular clientele who loved the patio, the people and the mid-priced modern American food, it was rarely disappointing. But it seldom made news. Applying the lessons they’d learned from Current, LaSalle and Trapp started over at Faustina, beginning by renaming it Stanza.

Wow Factor

“Current is a whole experience,” says LaSalle. “The minute people step in the door, they look up at that vaulted ceiling and the whole room and they say, ‘Wow.’” For most guests, a dinner at Current is the evening’s entertainment—they come in, have a drink and some oysters, chat and leisurely eat their way through dinner and dessert.

Extra attractions like the shooters paired to the oysters and the dramatic presentations make each course its own floor show. “We’re trying to change the landscape of the Salt Lake City dining scene,” says LaSalle.

Flexibility

Key to Stanza’s concept is flexibility—the space holds 140 seats downstairs and 100 seats upstairs, meaning two separate dining rooms with two different atmospheres. There’s a patio, upstairs and down, and a bar area. The

goal is to balance a large area with intimate spaces, a dining room with plenty of buzz but amenable to conversation as well. “Diners today don’t like to be locked into a format,” says Chef Logen Crew. They might want drinks and some small plates, or they might want a whole dinner, soup to nuts. They might be looking for a tete a tete or they might be celebrating with the whole family. A restaurant needs to be usable in several ways at once.

Authenticity

Authenticity is the most powerful buzzword in today’s restaurants. But it is applied on a sliding scale. “First we looked at the culinary landscape in Salt Lake and saw a void where the most popular cuisine in U.S. should be—Italian food,” says La Salle.

So how do you square the public’s taste for Italian cuisine with its current zeal for authenticity? “It’s all in the sourcing,” says Executive Chef Crew, who is working with Stanza chef Phelix Gardner (formerly with Pago.) All dry and fresh pasta is made in-house;  A Priori and Nicholas & Co. help to procure imported goods and to source best possible local ingredients. Authenticity, in this case, doesn’t extend to regionality. “We cherry-picked the menu items from regions all over Italy,” Crew says.

Likewise, the beverage menu, designed by Jimmy Santangelo, focuses on the feel of Italian food, which he calls “the world’s comfort food.” Basically, he says, the wine list at Stanza is designed to be approachable, affordable, and easy to explore with little to no risk. There are approximately 48 wines on the list, most are served by the glass, and most are Italian.

The Stakeholders

In the restaurant business, there’s a never-ending tension between the quality of a chef-run restaurant and the economic feasibility of a chain. Chef-run restaurants generally rank higher in terms of inventiveness and quality because they’re fueled by passion. But margins can be razor-thin, making the business precarious. Chains, or even restaurant groups, lose some soul because they are usually run more like assembly lines and have less personal attention invested in them.

Main Course, LaSalle and Trapp’s restaurant group, is trying to find the balance via an unusual business model: “We hire on chefs with the intent for them to own a piece,” says LaSalle. “We want our restaurants to be totally chef-driven, so we’re looking for chef-partners, putting our money where your mouth is.”

Stanza, 454 E. 300 South, SLC, 801-746-4441

In different scenarios, the reason for both closures was the same. It’s not because their names both start with “F.”

It’s a matter of size.

Both Forage and Fresco are very small and small restaurants have to make money by doing a high-volume business or serving higher-priced, chef-driven food. The balance is precarious, the margins are slim and the amount of money to be made is limited.

Fresco is and has been the most charming restaurant in the city because of its eccentric location behind a bookstore. But it didn’t get by on its good looks alone. Surprisingly, the restaurant has had a roster of stellar chefs who have made the name of other restaurants—Billy Sotelo, Logen Crews, etc.—starting of course, with chef-owner Mikel Trapp, who bought Fresco from David Harries.

“I thought I wanted to have my own little restaurant where I would be chef and have my hands in everything,” said Trapp in a recent phone conversation. “Ha! That lasted about seven months.”

Trapp, who also started both Cafe Trios and Luna Blanca Taqueria, is now partners with Joel LaSalle in Main Course Management which owns the spectacularly successful Current and the soon-to-open Stanza, considered a bankable proposition.

Letting go of Fresco wasn’t a sudden decision: Trapp has had the restaurant up for sale for the past six months or so, even though, he says, the restaurant is still successful and has a lot of regular patrons.

But “Current makes more money than all my other restaurants combined,” said Trapp, and Stanza is likely to be a repeat performance.

Main Course Management is growing a chef-ownership model for its future restaurants; seeking chefs who want to partner with them in chef’s food-driven places. Fresco’s size may be too small for this model to work. If by “work” you mean make money that’s worth the time.

A small restaurant requires as much oversight as a large one.

We’ll see. Trapp says a sale of Fresco is imminent. What the new owner will decide to do with Salt Lake’s most charming restaurant space remains to be seen. It may even be a new version of Fresco.

A few blocks away, Forage, the best restaurant in Salt Lake City, is also closing.

It too, is still successful, but its seven year lease is almost up and chef-owner Bowman Brown is feeling cramped.

At Forage, he’s still in a moribund partnership with Viet Pham who left the kitchen years ago to pursue culinary stardom. And the kitchen at Forage is almost unbelievably tiny for the kind of complicated, highbrow food Brown has become famous for.

In spite of its size, award-winning Forage is one of the most famous restaurants in Utah—its extraordinary brand of madly inventive, neo-molecular cuisine has been recognized by national magazines as well as by the James Beard Foundation.

But Brown can’t wait to stretch a little on his own. “I’ll be doing food much like I do here, only in a larger space. Mainly, a larger kitchen.” He has a vision of a small lounge area, besides the dining room, where he can offer some a la carte options and a shorter tasting menu on week nights.

So Fresco and Forage are closing. But Salt Lake diners don’t really have to say good-bye. Just au revoir.

Okay—Except for the brackets, I totally copied this from Panic Button Media’s website. (Thanks, Katie!)

“After years of award-winning success with Handle restaurant in Park City, Chef Briar Handly and his team are excited to open a new concept in Salt Lake City called HSL. <They’re thinking HSL will open in April and I believe them because I’ve been invited to a tasting.>

 “We want our customers to know that HSL will embrace the same level of service and creativity of Handle, but HSL will be an entirely new experience,” says Chef Briar Handly. “We are thrilled and humbled to be a part of Salt Lake’s thriving culinary atmosphere.”

HSL’s commitment to fresh sourcing, <Remember how he used to keep a garden on top of the building next to Talisker?> frequent foraging, and local loyalty will be a sustained theme at the Salt Lake City location, which will seat nearly 100 patrons.

Chef Handly has been leaving his mark in the restaurant industry for 15 years. Most recently he opened Handle in Park City along with his partners Meagan Nash & Melissa Gray. Handle was named one of Salt Lake Magazine’s Best Restaurants, and has also received mentions in The New York Times, Forbes, Food & Wine, The James Beard Foundation and City Weekly’s Reader’s Choice for top Park City dining.

Joining Handly at HSL will be Craig Gerome as the chef de cuisine, Tim Smith as executive sous chef, and Alexa Nolin as pastry chef. The cocktail program is being developed by Scott Gardner and Ryan Wenger serves as HSL’s wine director.

To further elevate the dining experience at HSL, great attention has been paid to the interior design. The concept is the result of a collaboration between HSL co-owner Melissa Gray and Cody Derrick of City Home Collective <Really? Another CHC restaurant? But I heard Briar and Melissa got lots of equipment from the now-closed Talisker on Main where Briar was chef. Wonder if he used it.> The thoughtful, creative approach has brought unexpected combinations and textures together for a refreshing, whimsical and animated vibe.

Look for HSL to open at 200 South 418 East in Salt Lake City in early April. HSL will be open 7 days a week for dinner only, with weekend brunch beginning later in the summer.”

Can. Not Wait.

Main Course has lots of other plans—read the upcoming May/June issue of Salt Lake magazine to learn about what partners Joel LaSalle and Mikel Trapp have in mind for the Salt Lake dining scene.

In happier news, Amour Spreads will soon be opening a cafe to showcase their hand-crafted jams and marmalades and the star of the show will be Amber Billingsley, one of the most talented pastry chefs in town. When you add Amber’s way with sweets to her pleasant personality and the utter niceness of Amour owners John and Casee Francis, this new place may be too sweet to bear. Go to amourspreads.com for more information.

Other good stuff is brewing: Proper Burger and Proper Brewing just opened on Main Street, Alamexo is introducing a new menu and some other things soon; new doughnuts are coming to town; on Friday, April 1, Utah Brewers Coop (Squatters and Wasatch) will introduce the next in its UT-X series, Squasatch Hoppy Pils.