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.

The invention of carbonated soft serve by two Heber City brothers is shrouded in myth. When asked about it, JC and David Olsen, owners of the recently opened Fizwip, point to their mascot — a four-pronged, winking fluffball. Apparently, the creature is a genie from another planet.

The story goes that one night in 2024, the brothers were visited by the genie. It used its prongs to spin soft serve, infusing carbon dioxide during the freezing process. The result, soda cream, is a “soda-flavored soft serve with a subtle carbonation bite,” JC said.

At Fizwip, the brothers serve their genie juice as three products, called “Fizz-ee,” “Fiz-aa” and “Fiz-oo.” These are best described as a soda, shake and soft serve, respectively. But soda cream’s texture is closer to a creamy ICEE or the ice cream at the bottom of a root beer float than anything you’d find among the frozen desserts at a grocery store. 

The genie story is, of course, just a fun explanation the Olsens use to avoid revealing the secret process behind making soda cream. The real origin story began about two decades ago, when the brothers stumbled across the idea of carbonating frozen yogurt. 

“It was interesting, and it worked, but it was not scalable,” JC said.

The brothers forgot about the idea until three years ago, when they were quitting their “corporate tortures” and were looking for something else to do. They started their messy experiments right away.

“To carbonate anything, you’ve got to put it under pressure,” David said. “We’ve had to clean the ceiling a few times.”

After about four months of experimentation, the Olsens developed a “disgusting” prototype, as JC called it, using off-the-shelf ice cream mix.

“Carbonating a milk product just didn’t taste right,” David said. “So then, the next step was, ‘Let’s go talk to some people who understand the science behind the mix itself and have them work with us on designing a base mix that will accept the carbonation and still feel good in your mouth.’”

The brothers created a lactose-free mix, and thus, soda cream was born. 

“We’re not going for a heavy ice cream,” David said. “It’s a light, refreshing kind of texture to it.”

They then went to work developing flavors: dragonfruit, black cherry cola, blue raspberry, piña colada, root beer, orange cream and many more. They even have some seasonal flavors they’re planning, like ginger beer and eggnog.

The Olsens pitched their idea last summer to the management of Pacific Park on the Santa Monica Pier in California. Fizwip was such a hit that the brothers decided to take the concept back to their hometown. They moved into the Main Street building that formerly housed the OG Cafe, opening earlier this month. 

“We like this because we can really build the brand. Down there (at Pacific Park), they’re buying our product to resell, but they employ all the people. They do all the operations,” David said.

The space the Olsens have cultivated brings the theme park vibe to Heber City. The walls are vibrantly painted and feature prism windows that transform sunshine into rainbows dancing on the walls. There’s a mirror room that reflects trippy projections of fish and, near the entrance, a QR code customers can scan to print off any photo to add to a photo wall. 

And not all remnants of the OG Cafe have disappeared. Local artist Jacob Fernandez’s mural outside the restaurant, which depicts the cafe’s iconic, sunglasses-clad goats driving a Volkswagen van, now features the Fizwip genie riding in the backseat.

“We decided earlier we want our DNA on this thing. It’s quirky. It’s weird. But we love it because it’s us,” David said about the interior decoration. He would have added a mini golf course and a roller skate rink if he could have pulled it off.

Fizwip also hosts community events ranging from World Cup watch parties to disco nights.

The point of the space, JC said, is to “walk in, feel happy, escape life for 20 minutes.”

That ethos of invoking childhood nostalgia bleeds into the menu, too. Beyond soda cream products, Fizwip also sells walking tacos — a staple of JC’s Boy Scout camping trips — and fries and churros fried in tallow.

The churros come in flavors just as wacky and colorful as the soda cream flavors. There’s even blue raspberry and green apple churros for those accustomed to puckering up. And if your churro isn’t sweet enough, you can order a “Chur-aa” topped with whipped cream and your choice of other toppings, ranging from Pop Rocks to boba.

“One of the things we said is we want everything to be familiar. Churros are familiar. Fries are familiar. Soft serve is familiar. But it’s got to have a little, fun twist that you’ve never thought of before,” JC said.

The Olsens plan on bringing Fizwip to more theme parks. But for now, their focus is bringing their brand of whimsy to their hometown — with the help of their genie business partner.

“We’re living in that world of reality, but we’re always throwing a little twist at it,” David said.

The post Two brothers and a genie whip up carbonated soft serve at Fizwip in 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.

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.