The story of Heber City’s new Puerto Rican food truck, Sabor Rico, begins with a Category 5 hurricane. 

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017. Veronica Barragan was caught in the storm. Barragan evacuated and was holed up in her grandmother’s house as she anxiously waited to see if her home had been destroyed. 

“We were looking from inside the house, and we were seeing houses flying,” Barragan said. “We were like, ‘Our house is not going to make it,’ because it was cement and wood. And after everything was done, we had to go see.”

Barragan and her family walked home through the rubble, unable to use their cars, and found that their house was, thankfully, still intact. A tree had fallen, hit one of the corners of the building and created a water leak. But otherwise, it was in perfect shape.

Still, Hurricane Maria left a devastating impact, making it difficult for Barragan to rebuild her life after the storm.

The hurricane killed over 3,000 people and had a $43 billion economic impact on Puerto Rico. An island-wide electric power outage lasted for 11 months, and there were few jobs, even for Barragan’s father, Juan Muñoz, a welder.

About a month after the hurricane, Barragan and her family decided to move to the mainland. Her mother’s former boss helped the family get jobs at The St. Regis Deer Valley, and they moved to Heber City.

There were many things Barragan missed about Puerto Rico when she moved to Utah, from the beaches to the birdlike chirping of coquí frogs at night.

But what she missed most of all was the food. 

Barragan would drive to Papito Moe’s in West Jordan every weekend for a taste of home because there were no options in the Wasatch Back. Plus, Heber City’s Puerto Rican community is small, she said. After nearly nine years of living there, she’s met about 20 other Puerto Ricans.

Barragan didn’t expect she’d be the trailblazer to bring her island’s food to Wasatch County, despite every member of her family’s love of cooking. Well, everyone except for Muñoz, who much prefers eating the dishes his daughter makes.

Muñoz was ultimately Barragan’s biggest supporter in launching Sabor Rico, which means the “flavor of (Puerto) Rico.” 

Barragan began baking Puerto Rican pastries — like cream cheese-filled quesitos and pastelillos de guayaba, a concoction of powdered sugar, puff pastry and guava — in 2019. 

“I like for people to try them to see what Puerto Rican food tastes like so far away from there, because we are almost on the other coast,” she said.

But Barragan didn’t start selling her desserts until her father suggested it. 

“I had my baby in December 2023. She was in the NICU for almost two months,” Barragan said. “I was, after that, depressed, bored. And he’s like, ‘We should just do something.’”

As she delivered pastries around Utah, Barragan was bombarded with questions about when she would finally open a restaurant or food truck. That question was especially constant at Walmart, where Muñoz would sing his daughter’s praises to coworkers. 

“He’s good at making friends with customers,” Barragan said. “He knows everyone. … Everyone knows him.”

Muñoz bought a food truck for his daughter last October and has been there for her throughout the process, installing a fire suppression system and water heater and driving it around for her. 

“Like we say in Puerto Rico, ‘I’m like a dog with two tails (wagging),'” Muñoz said. “I’m really happy. It’s her dream, and she’s going to succeed.”

Barragan launched Sabor Rico last month.

She serves some pastries and an array of other Puerto Rican delights, including empanadillas, piña coladas and mofongo, green plantains mashed with a mortar and pestle and served with garlic, shrimp or chicarrón, or fried pork belly. 

One of Barragan’s favorite dishes is the pernil plate, pork slow-roasted for four to five hours and served with rice and pigeon peas.

“It’s crunchy on the top, and then super soft inside, juicy,” she described.

Barragan said what sets Puerto Rican food apart is its wide array of flavors and seasonings that add “color.” These range from annatto, a peppery, red condiment coming from the seeds of the achiote tree, and culantro, an herb that tastes like a stronger version of cilantro. 

Barragan’s quest to bring Puerto Rican food to Heber City has already been well-received. 

“Every time we go around with this, people (in other cars) are like, ‘We love Puerto Rican food!’ I’m like, ‘You’re making me think we’re going to crash,’” she said with a laugh.

Barragan plans to drive Sabor Rico around Utah, but Heber City will be her home base. She’ll be at Heber City Hall at 75 N. Main St. from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. every Thursday through Sunday.

The post Sabor Rico brings a taste of Puerto Rico to Heber City appeared first on Park Record.

When Tyler Sycamore first tried Thai food, he hated it. Making matters worse, he had just accepted a marketing internship in Thailand.

“I remember eating that curry and being like, ‘I’m not going to eat for however long I’m in Thailand,’” Tyler said. That ended up being eight years.

As soon as he touched ground in Thailand in 2006, Tyler realized it was the subpar restaurant he’d tried in Provo that had been the problem. He fell in love, first with Thai food, and later with his wife, Nat, whom he met while working in Bangkok.

Last month, the couple opened Heber City’s only Thai restaurant: Nom Nom Thai, located at 1095 S. Main St.

Tyler handles administrative tasks, while Nat is the head cook. Nat has worked various jobs at restaurants in Thailand and the United States, but it was only when she immigrated to the latter country with her husband 12 years ago that she really dove into cooking. 

“She wanted Thai food because that’s what she’s used to,” Tyler said. “We live down in Orem. I took her to every restaurant I could find. Then, we started expanding our horizons to Salt Lake. We went to pretty much any restaurant that we could think of, and she didn’t like any of them.”

So, Nat learned how to cook her native country’s cuisine herself, using YouTube videos and cooking classes as a guide.

The couple started attending farmers markets in Orem and Provo in 2022. They sold only two items: mango sticky rice and curry wraps. 

The latter is an original dish by Nat, inspired by the curry puffs of southern Thailand. Instead of stuffing chicken, potatoes, onions and curry sauce into a pastry, as is done when making a curry puff, the ingredients are wrapped in a fried egg roll. 

The curry wraps were more than a little popular at farmers markets.

“I knew most of our customers by name, because they just kept coming back every week, and they’re like, ‘I need more curry wraps,’” Tyler said.

The owners are constantly asked about when they’re going to start offering them at Nom Nom Thai. They’ll come soon, Tyler promised — as soon as the restaurant is fully staffed.

After making $1,000 during a four-hour farmers market in 2023, Tyler and Nat realized they could pull off opening a restaurant. They looked for a space in Orem for nearly a year, but no location felt right, in part because every one was “within spitting distance” of another Thai restaurant, Tyler said.

The couple started exploring an untapped market in Heber City after Nat posted to a local Facebook page asking if anyone would be interested in a Thai restaurant. The response was overwhelming.

“Four hundred people responded, like, ‘Please, please! We need something in Heber that’s not burgers or Mexican,’” Tyler said.

The Sycamores introduced themselves to Heber City in 2024 by hosting a booth at the summer Market on Main while they worked to secure a space. 

“The support up here was probably the best we had anywhere. We did probably 30 or 40% better, in terms of sales, up here than we did down in Orem or Provo,” Tyler said.

The building the Sycamores now rent was constructed from scratch, which took longer than anticipated. But after opening Nom Nom Thai last month, the rush has been constant, with lines out the door and waits sometimes as long as 40 minutes.

The most popular dish is undoubtedly the pad Thai because it’s the most familiar dish to patrons who haven’t eaten much of the cuisine, Tyler explained. He hopes that, as diners repeatedly return to the restaurant, they become more comfortable trying new items on the menu. 

Nom Nom Thai offers street food dishes like pad si ew, drunken noodles, curry and fried rice; appetizers like chicken gyoza and shrimp tempura; and drinks like milk teas and matcha lattes. 

Tyler encourages customers to splurge on a drink or appetizer using money they would have left as a tip. Nom Nom Thai pays employees a living wage with a bonus sales incentive instead of relying on customers’ generosity.

Nat hopes to expand the menu with her experimental fusion dishes, which combine the cuisines of the various regions of Thailand. 

There are currently options for people with dietary restrictions, but Nat plans to launch a full vegan and gluten-free menu for good measure. She’ll use plant-based meat rather than only tofu and hopes that diners won’t be able to tell the difference between a vegan and non-vegan dish.

“(Vegan food often) sounds like a boring taste. I don’t want that. I want to make Thai food that’s flavorful, but vegan,” she said.

The hardest part of opening the restaurant has been importing sauces from Thailand. Nat is very particular about which sauces should go with which dish, so some brands can be hard to find.

“She’s worked at Thai restaurants where they just have a big, 5-gallon bucket of sauce, and they put it in everything. It does not matter what you get. It’s the same thing,” Tyler said. 

The trade-off for the trials and tribulations of securing ingredients from across the world is a more culturally authentic taste.

“We had a customer in here last week who said, ‘We just got back from Thailand two months ago, and this tastes exactly like I am in Bangkok.’ I was like, ‘That is exactly what we’re going for,’” Tyler said. 

For the Sycamores, Nom Nom Thai is not just about sharing delicious food. It’s about other aspects of Thai culture. The couple hopes to host events like cultural nights and language and cooking lessons.

They hope Nom Nom Thai not only creates a sense of belonging for local Thai Americans but also fosters a broader appreciation for Thai culture. 

The Sycamores’ mission is seen in their logo, a bear, representing Utah, wearing a traditional Thai chada headdress. 

As for the name?

It’s inspired by the ravenous munching of Cookie Monster, Nat explained. Tyler initially made that the restaurant’s ringtone, but it was too quiet to hear amid the hustle and bustle of the dinner rush.

The post Come ‘Nom Nom’ at Heber City’s only Thai restaurant appeared first on Park Record.

Some romances start with a lucky match on a dating app or an office crush, but Whitney and Anne B. Carothers Woodward’s began eight years ago in the restaurants of Park City Main Street. 

Anne was working at Vinto’s Pizzeria. Whitney at The Mustang. 

“I think I went over to borrow an onion or something,” Anne reminisced as she kneaded dough at the couple’s Midway eatery, Annie B’s Pizzeria.

From the fryer, Whitney chimed in, “All I see is the little top of her head (over the counter) because she’s so short. I’m like, ‘Who the hell was that?’ And the rest is history.”

Both had worked in the food industry their entire careers but hadn’t considered opening their own restaurant until they realized they couldn’t find the thin crust, East Coast-style pizza they were both raised on anywhere in Utah. Anne is from Massachusetts, and Whitney is from New Jersey.

“We drove to Salt Lake, to Provo, to Ogden. During COVID, we drove to Vegas to get pizza. We couldn’t find good, reliable pizza anywhere,” Whitney said.

So the couple decided to open their own pizzeria: Annie B’s. They opened in Coalville in 2021 and moved to Midway in May. 

The move was inspired by a number of factors. The couple lives in Heber City and were not fans of the daily commute, which was often made even longer by weather and traffic.

“When you’re getting your butt kicked, making pizzas all day, the last thing you want is a two-hour commute,” Whitney said.

The most important factor, however, was a desire to operate out of a larger space. The couple’s restaurant in Coalville was less than 1,000 square feet. The only upside of that was the omnipresent smell of pizza cooking in the kitchen.

“It smelled like pizza as soon as you walked through the door. It gives me goosebumps, still,” Whitney said.

The couple is much more content in their 8,000-square-foot building at 380 E. Main St. in Midway, which used to house Mexican restaurant Tarahumara. 

The Woodwards spent a little over a year renovating the space, from re-tiling the floors to cutting out sections of the wall to serve as windows into the kitchen.

“You’ll see some of the remnants of our unprofessional construction,” Whitney joked.

“Don’t look down at the floor,” Annie said, pointing out imperfections. “I should stick to making the pizzas, not pouring concrete.”

The walls are lined with jerseys signed by athletes like Karl Malone and Pete Rose. Whitney likes to think of his expensive hobby as an investment, but at the same time, he’s not sure if he’ll ever sell any of his over 50 treasures.

The restaurant includes a small coffee shop the couple will open as soon as they hire baristas, and a room with a foosball table and Skee-Ball machine that will eventually be built out as a full arcade.

The Woodwards have also purchased the 3,500-square-foot building next door to develop into a second restaurant. The cuisine is to be determined, but the couple hopes to open it by Christmas.

For now, patrons can enjoy Annie B’s current offerings: sub sandwiches, fish and chips, wings, salads, calzones and plenty of pizzas.

Each pizza was born from experimentation. For example, a friend recently begged the Woodwards to make a chicken parmesan pizza.

“We actually made the cutlet, deep-fried it, melted the cheese on it and put it on top of this really rich, cheesy pizza. He said it was amazing,” Anne said.

But only the best make it on the menu.

Two crowd-pleasers are the Meatballer pizza, topped with homemade meatballs, and Buffalo chicken pizza, which is slathered in the authentic Buffalo sauce of western New York, where Whitney once lived.

The funniest story behind a pizza comes from the Layla, Annie B’s cheesiest pizza, topped with feta cheese, roasted tomatoes, balsamic reduction, arugula salad and lemon vinaigrette.

“We were doing a catering event, and this little 9-year-old girl named Layla would not stop eating all my cheese,” Anne said. “I had it all grated and cut, and it was all ready to go, and she’s just sitting there (eating it). And finally, I had to be like, ‘I’m not going to have enough for the pizza, sweetie.’”

The Woodwards’ secret ingredients are garlic butter on every pizza crust and herb ricotta on every calzone. When Annie B’s started out, it took three months and over 300 batches for the couple to perfect the dough.

“We were so sick of pizza, if you can ever be. Try 10 different batches a day for weeks,” Whitney said. “Towards the end there, I thought, ‘We’ve just eaten too much pizza, and we’re pissed off.’”

That dough-making experience reflects the couple’s philosophy when it comes to food: serve only the best.

“What we can’t make by hand, we buy the top quality, best ingredients we could possibly find.” Whitney said. “Even the fish, we went through 12 different fish companies to try and find the perfect piece of battered cod that wasn’t too light, wasn’t too heavy. And they’re expensive, but that’s just the way we are with food.”

Part of the reason for that is Whitney’s background working at fine dining restaurants. It’s been difficult to realize he doesn’t need tweezers to ensure every little piece of oregano is perfectly placed.

Anne’s culinary background began with enrolling in the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont her mid-20s, when she was a ski bum in Park City trying to figure out what to do with her life. Ever since, she’s been fascinated with the business side of the industry and has always wanted more responsibility than what was in a cook’s job description.

For Whitney and Anne, blending their backgrounds as co-owners was difficult at first.

“We met so late in life that we both had our set ways. First couple of years, we didn’t know who was boss,” Anne said. “But we found our things that we’re great at.”

Whitney’s greatest strength, Anne said, is his people skills, which counterbalance her shyness. Anne’s greatest strength is that she’s “a little prep monster,” as her husband put it, always preparing trays of dough balls to prepare the restaurant for the week.

Plus, Anne chimed in, she’s “the fastest pizza-slinger out there.” She won’t, however, toss pizzas after she got caked in flour the first time she tried it.

The Woodwards are well aware that Midway has a more competitive pizza market than Coalville did, but they think their style of pizza can coexist with local favorites like The Pizza Yard and Café Galleria.

“We’re not looking to compete, (but) be successful with everybody else. We’re surrounded by other great restaurants, which is another reason we picked Midway,” Whitney said. 

Anne added, “There’s higher expectations here. And that makes us feel happy when people love our food, and they have high expectations. It’s almost like the new Park City out here.”

The post Annie B’s Pizzeria moves from Coalville to Midway with a bigger slice of aspirations appeared first on Park Record.

The self-described crepe king was among the 34 retail shops, 20 food vendors and 14 food trucks set up to sell wares at Heber Market on Main at Main Street Park on Thursday.

Despite being royalty, Kent King of Crepe Factory displayed a humble demeanor and an almost aggressive friendliness with a smile permanently plastered on his face as he waved down friends or asked teenage patrons about how the school year had gone. 

A Southwest Airlines pilot and aviation science professor with Utah State University, King got into the crepe-slinging business 14 years ago as a way to connect with people. The Heber City local has been participating in the annual Market on Main farmer’s market and concert series all that time, making crepes for many of the local kids as they’ve grown up.

King and his litany of employees, many his children or grandchildren, are most often found at Brigham Young University, where the Crepe Factory sets up for games and events. King’s record is 871 crepes sold over a three-day women’s conference.

Other than his friendliness, King’s key to success is his custom-built kiosk. It has a window display so customers can watch their crepe being made — a tactic King picked up from vendors in Paris — and lights installed to attract patrons like hungry moths.

Crepe Factory sells anywhere from 100 to 150 crepes each Thursday during Market on Main, which runs from the beginning of June to mid-August this year. Inevitably, King ends up giving out many of those crepes for free — but don’t tell his paying customers, he joked.

Market on Main has existed in some shape or form since 1998. Local Paul Askins was tired of driving to Park City for outdoor summer concerts and started a concert series of his own in Main Street Park, printing posters with his dot matrix printer and gathering about 25 attendees. 

The event, combined with a Midway farmer’s market in the early 2000s, created the fusion of live music, shopping and dining patrons enjoy today.

The tradition became popular a little over a decade ago, bringing 300 to 400 attendees per night, according to Rachel Kahler, executive director of nonprofit Community Alliance for Main Street. These days the event brings between 600 and 1,000 attendees every Thursday.

This year’s Market on Main is the first organized by Community Alliance for Main Street. It was previously organized by city staff, who took over the responsibility from Askins about six years ago.

Before the event, Kahler was “holding (her) breath and hoping it all works out.” She’d spent weeks making arrangements and putting out fires to ensure permitting, business licenses and the event layout were all in place.

But the attendees wandering through the sea of vendors’ tents, lazing on the lawn or dancing like no one was watching on Thursday were none the wiser to the blood, sweat and tears that had gone into its organization.

Askins, too, is familiar with the headaches that can come from organizing the event.

“When we were first starting out, we didn’t really coordinate well with the parks people, and we had a couple where the sprinklers came on right in the middle of the concert. It was in the summer, so some people appreciated it,” Askins laughed.

There was one summer when bands played in the Heber Valley Rotary Club’s bandstand — which was constructed for the concert series — before it had a roof. Supported by a land donation from the city and financial backing from the Rotary Club, the bandstand was completed around 2003.

Before the bandstand was constructed, Askins found it impossible to convince Parkites and other out-of-towners to make the trek to the Heber Valley for concerts. But “once people got to know that this was a viable venue, I had musicians calling me all year long, wanting to be involved,” he said.

Now, Market on Main’s live acts perform in the much larger, $3.5 million bandshell the city constructed last June, with programming coordinated by Park City’s Mountain Town Music.

“It’s beyond our wildest dreams that the city would put this much effort behind it and build something like this. I mean, this stage can handle big bands,” Askins said.

Although he was a DJ for KPCW for two decades, Askins doesn’t describe himself as a musician. The instruments he plays are the stereo and the radio, he joked.

He is, however, an appreciator of all genres of music, which showed in the types of concerts he put on.

“We’d have a jazz night. We’d have a country night. We’d have a rock night. We’d have a folk night. Everyone of them did really well, except for the jazz night,” he said. “Nobody liked jazz in the valley. Those ones were dead every time. But I think now they could do jazz, and it would be different.”

That’s because of Heber City’s growth in population from about 11,000 in 2010 to nearly 20,000 in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. With that, population growth has increased diversity in many forms, including in music taste, Askins said.

Another symptom of that increased diversity can be found in Market on Main’s beer garden, where Askins spends his Thursday evenings checking IDs.

“There’s no way that I ever thought we’d have a beer garden outside in the Heber Valley,” Askins joked, though he greatly appreciates the addition.

When Askins started his concert series, he had only lived in Heber City for about a year. He didn’t take credit for making Market on Main what it is today, but he did offer advice about how to contribute positively to one’s community: “You get out of it what you put into it.”

The post Historic Market on Main kicks off summer in Heber City appeared first on Park Record.

Primo — an adjective describing something of the highest quality and the Spanish word for cousin — serves as fitting inspiration for the name of Preemo’s Restaurant & Bar, a modern American restaurant that cousins Miguel Carapia and Armando Huerta opened in Old Town Heber City earlier this month.

Huerta is the executive chef, a position he humbly downplays despite his three decades of experience. He started as a dishwasher at Snake Creek Grill in Heber City, working his way up to line cook. He’s also worked as a chef at The Blue Boar Inn & Restaurant and the Homestead Resort in Midway, as well as Squatters Pubs’ locations in Park City and the Salt Lake City International Airport.

Miguel has wanted to open a restaurant since childhood, but he’d “probably burn water if (he) cook(ed),” he joked. So, he sticks to administrative tasks with his wife, Guadalupe.

Miguel got his restaurateur aspirations as a 12-year-old boy bussing tables for his mother, who in 2002 opened La Reyna Mexican Restaurant on Park City Main Street.

La Reyna lasted only a year, serving as an example of the thin profit margins and cutthroat nature inherent to the industry. Despite that, starry-eyed Miguel walked away from the experience with a dream to open a restaurant of his own.

“I didn’t know it was so hard to own and manage a restaurant. I tell (my mother), ‘Maybe I should have done construction. Maybe I would have had my big company right now in construction, making a lot of money,’” he joked.

Miguel financed his dream by opening a local food delivery company, Wasatch Food Rush, in 2020, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic. Americans’ spending on third-party food delivery more than tripled between the periods of December 2019 to February 2020 and October to December 2022, according to a 2024 study published by the United States Department of Agriculture. The rush at Wasatch Food Rush was constant in the company’s first two years.

As Miguel delivered food from restaurants, he began to get a sense of what menu he would want to develop: one that offered a sample platter of cuisines to appeal to all palettes. 

That’s what he and Huerta have done with Preemo’s. A group of friends could walk in hungry for shrimp tacos, steak and teriyaki bowls and satisfy each craving.

Miguel’s favorite dish is the chipotle-braised hammer pork shank. He was inspired to put it on the menu after seeing a video about pork shanks on social media.

“I’m always looking at food on my phone,” he explained. “If there’s something I like, I will tell the chef, ‘Hey, I saw this. Can we see if we can do it?’ And he’ll put it together, and if we like it, we’ll put it on the menu.”

Miguel and Huerta plan to create fluctuating seasonal menus to keep locals coming back. That’s the model Miguel has used for Route 32 Bistro in Kamas, which he opened last May. 

“We have people up there that dine with us three, four times a week,” Miguel said. “I want to make it creative for them so they don’t get bored of the same old menu.”

Route 32 Bistro was formerly a sister location of Vintage Restaurant, Bar & Grill, which Miguel co-owned. He said the rebrand and his taking sole ownership more than doubled the restaurant’s gross sales in one year.

He also co-owned Buon Appetito Italian Bistro, his first restaurant, which he opened in 2022 and shuttered last month to reopen as Preemo’s. 

Miguel much prefers flying solo. He said he often deferred to his co-owners in decision making, even if he disagreed with them, because he had the least experience in the restaurant industry. Now, he’s calling the shots. 

“The food was good, but it wasn’t great. I always thought we could do better,” he said about Buon Appetito. “We were losing money month after month.”

Miguel is hopeful that his new restaurant can offer a truly primo experience. 

One way he plans to do that is by focusing on the locals — for example, by sourcing ingredients from local vendors, like meats from The Stock Exchange in Kamas and bread from Red Bicycle Breadworks in Park City, offering daily lunch specials and creating a grab-and-go menu for students once the nearby Deer Creek High School opens in August.

Miguel acknowledged he’s still learning how to run a restaurant and that he’s very open to feedback. He hopes that Preemo’s can overcome one of the challenges that killed Buon Appetito — its location further from the center of town.

“People say this building is cursed. I’ve heard that on social media, that business after business (has closed),” he said. “The curse is away. Come on in.”

The post New Heber City restaurant aims to offer a truly primo experience appeared first on Park Record.

The reviews are in for R & K Brunch House, a Utah restaurant that opened its second location in Heber City last month.

Lisa Christopher tried the Mexican hot chocolate and banana and Nutella crepes. “I won’t be going anywhere else for both items,” was her online appraisal.

“Best huevos rancheros I have had,” Ellen Novelli wrote on Facebook.

The menu boasts further accomplishments, from “Fryzadillas” (fried quesadillas) to a burger stacked with a beef patty, carne asada, chorizo and bacon. The menu features Mexican breakfast dishes as well as American classics like New York steak and biscuits and gravy.

For owner Rene Pulido, the star of the show is chilaquiles, a Mexican breakfast dish of tortilla chips smothered in salsa, often served with eggs. The man is obsessed with them. 

Ask him for a recommendation, and he’ll likely point to the chilaquiles divorciados, which offers the best of both worlds in its red and green salsas. Pulido’s salsa recipes have been passed down through generations, but he’s tight-lipped about the secret ingredient.

The chilaquiles are a family recipe, too. When Pulido was growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, his mother cooked and sold the dish out of her home. It was in observing his mother that Pulido tingled with the cooking itch. 

That trait wasn’t passed down to most of Pulido’s family members, but they still came out in droves to support him when he opened R & K Brunch House’s first location in Roy in April 2024. Many visited from Mexico, spending two-week vacations helping out in the kitchen.

Before opening the Weber County brunch spot, Pulido’s only restaurant experience was working in an administrative role at Sanborns, a Mexican chain. Since moving to Utah in 2000, Pulido has mostly worked warehouse jobs, all the while setting money aside to make his dream of owning a restaurant possible. 

After a warm reception in Roy, Pulido began eyeing expansion in the Wasatch Back. The closure of Betty’s Cafe on Daniels Road last February offered the perfect location. 

Pulido, who lives in Ogden, has been making the daily commute to Heber City to bring his new location to life. The bubbly cook can be found bustling around in the kitchen most days. Patrons might even make the acquaintance of his children, Rene and Kenia — the namesakes for “R” and “K” in the restaurant’s name. 

Kenia is a technician operator in American Fork during the work week, but on the weekends, she’s everything from a server to a cook to a dishwasher at her father’s restaurants.

Kenia said her father’s breakfast obsession goes back to when she was growing up. Every Saturday or Sunday morning, Pulido would wake his dozing kids by chiming, “Eat. Eat. Eat” in the monotonous tone of an alarm clock. The breakfast was, of course, chilaquiles, and his children’s positive feedback is what planted the seed in Pulido’s mind to open a restaurant.

“It was rare for there not to be at least one day out of the week to sit there together and have breakfast,” Kenia said. “It’s when everybody’s getting up, so that’s the time where everybody can be together. … He wanted to always have a family united.”

Now that Pulido’s kids are grown, helping out at one of the restaurant locations each weekend has become their time to connect with their father.

That family-oriented feeling is what Pulido hopes to share with R & K Brunch House. That’s also why the establishment doesn’t serve alcohol, even though countless have begged. 

Staff said the biggest challenge in opening the new location has been getting consistent customers. The restaurant is open until 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 5 p.m. on the weekend. Pulido said at the Roy location, customers have asked for the restaurant to be open even later for “brinner.” But the Heber City location hasn’t had that same turnout in the late afternoons.

Assuming the Heber City location is a success, Pulido hopes to open a third location in Provo or American Fork.

The post Mexican brunch spot expands to Heber City appeared first on Park Record.

Being business partners with one’s mother is many people’s worst nightmare. But for Carla Cruz-Calderón, it’s a dream come true. 

Carla and her mother, Lupita, own and operate Lupita’s Valley Mexican Restaurant, which reopened in Heber City this month following the closure of the Midway location in February.

Carla handles the behind-the-scenes, administrative tasks, while her mother handles much of the cooking.

The biggest challenge for the pair has been learning how to communicate as business partners instead of relatives.

“I’ve told her at moments, ‘Mom, I’m not your daughter right now,’” Carla said. “We’re both very strong-headed. Our emotions are both loud.” 

It’s often Carla delivering customer feedback to her mother, looking for opportunities to improve every aspect of service, from dishes to decor. Both mother and daughter strive for constant betterment, but Lupita leans towards the traditional and unpretentious, which can cause the two to butt heads.

For example, when it comes to the presentation of dishes, Lupita thinks the flavor speaks for itself, while Carla constantly argues the value of visual aesthetic.

But no matter the squabble, the pair always get over it quickly. And the mother and daughter do agree about the fact that their relationship is “more beautiful than ugly,” as Lupita put it.

“My social group isn’t huge, so family’s really important to me,” Carla said. “I used to be a really quiet kid growing up. But working in the food industry and working with people and small talk, small interactions — it builds on itself.”

Carla began her journey in the food industry at 13, taking orders over the phone for Park City’s Speedy Fernandez Restaurant Delivery Services, which was founded by her uncle, José Cruz. Four years later, she was picking up an order at Sammy’s Bistro when she stumbled across the owner, Sam Harris.

“I remember seeing him take people’s names down for a wait, and they were so busy. And I just remember asking him, ‘Do you want me to help you write the names down?’” Carla recalled. 

Harris politely refused. But the next time Carla came in to pick up an order, he offered her a job.

She spent the next three years as a busser, taking mental notes about how Harris ran his ever-busy bistro and learning how to interact with guests by watching servers from the sidelines.

Carla was 20 when her uncle sold Tarahumara, a Mexican restaurant in Midway, to Lupita, who jumped on the opportunity. 

Ever since she grew up in Río de Parras, a small town in Michoacán, Mexico, Lupita had been fascinated by the world of the kitchen. Whenever she went out to eat, she would analyze the makeup of each dish. By 15, she was constantly cooking for her family. 

Lupita had gotten into the habit of sharing homemade tamales and other dishes with co-workers by the time she immigrated to the United States in 2003. Being told that her food was delicious enough to make a living off of filled her with ambition. 

Tarahumara was her chance to become a restaurateur, but it came with baggage: a pre-existing menu and about five changes in ownership that had left some locals bemoaning the loss of the glory days of its original incarnation.

Deciding it was better to start fresh, the Cruz-Calderóns closed Tarahumara and reopened as Lupita’s Valley in 2021.

With the rebranding came a new menu, featuring dishes like mole micha-poblano — which balances the spiciness of Michoacán mole with the sweetness of Puebla’s — and Enchiladas Catalinas, sautéed in guajillo sauce and named after a woman from Lupita’s hometown, who was beloved for her homemade enchiladas.

Lupita explained that Michoacán cuisine is known for its fresh ingredients because of the amount of agriculture in the state.

That freshness is something Lupita has tried to accomplish in the Heber Valley, ordering ingredients from suppliers based in Mexico and California and stuffing her chiles rellenos with queso fresco verde from Heber Valley Artisan Cheese.

After four years of operation in Midway, Lupita’s Valley closed in February after the Cruz-Calderóns’ landlords chose not to renew their lease. But Carla said it was a blessing in disguise; their former location was about double the size of their current one, making staffing difficult.

Now located in historic old town Heber, the new restaurant blends the area’s Wild West atmosphere with the charm of a Mexican cantina. 

One hurdle in the 10-month process of reopening came in recreating the menu and recipes, which was complicated when Carla’s old laptop gave up the ghost — and she hadn’t saved any of her work on the cloud.

What followed were many nights of Lupita cooking meals from the restaurant’s menu for family dinners as Carla dutifully took notes. 

Carla said that process allowed her plenty of time to connect with her mother, while also making the menu “a lot more homestyle.” She hopes the flavor of familial love can be tasted in Lupita Valley’s every dish.

The post Lupita’s Valley reinvents itself once again appeared first on Park Record.

The Park City Food & Wine Classic’s Toast of Park City gave guests an opportunity to sample a variety of fine wines and gourmet foods Saturday afternoon, July 8, 2017. The event was hosted at the Dejoria Center. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Toast-of-Park-City/

The post PHOTOS: Toast of Park City appeared first on Park Record.

The annual Food and Wine Classic in Park City is starting up this week and will be hosting events all over town. On Thursday, attendees of the Wine on the Mountain event were treated to a selection of gourmet foods and a variety of fine wines. Proceeds from the event will help benefit the People’s Health Clinic. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Wine-On-The-Mountain/

The post PHOTOS: Wine on the Mountain appeared first on Park Record.

The Summit Arts Council hosted the annual Summit Arts Showcase at the Red Barn in Oakley Friday and Saturday. The event featured live music, food, art demos and more. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Summit-Arts-Showcase/

The post PHOTOS: Summit Arts Showcase appeared first on Park Record.