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