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.

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.

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Park City’s annual Savor The Summit event brought hundreds of locals to Main Street to wine and dine together and enjoy live music, fine cuisine and more. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Savor-The-Summit-2017/

The post PHOTOS: Savor The Summit appeared first on Park Record.

Several lawmakers in recent weeks have indicated their support for doing away with the Zion Curtain, a slang term for the partition many restaurants are required by law to use to hide the preparation of alcoholic beverages from the sight of customers. Gov. Gary Herbert, too, has put his weight behind the effort, recently mentioning it in his annual “State of the State” address.

As of Friday, no bill that would do away with the Zion Curtain had been released, but Hans Fuegi, owner of Park City’s Grub Steak Restaurant and the head of the Utah Restaurant Association’s liquor task force, said he’s more hopeful than ever that the partitions are on their way out.

“I was very encouraged to see that the governor seems to be in favor of eliminating it, which wasn’t the case before,” he said. “… It seems like there’s a really good effort from some legislators who seem to be convinced that it’s time for the Zion Curtain to go.”

Bill Malone, president and CEO of the Park City Chamber/Bureau, said he’s also optimistic legislators will pass a bill to strike down the Zion curtain law. However, he is concerned the bill may include additional elements that could make it less of a triumph for restaurants or alcohol drinkers in Utah.

Salt Lake City media outlets have reported, for instance, that the legislation might be accompanied by an increase the price of products at state liquor stores by a percentage point or two to pay for more training for restaurant staff about the liquor laws.

“I think, like everyone, you have to look at that and go, ‘It’s progress,’” he said. “We’re making progress. It’s unfortunate that we feel sometimes like we can’t make progress for progress’s sake and you have to give up something to get the progress. That’s frustrating.”

Fuegi added that he and many others in the restaurant industry will remain somewhat skeptical until they see a draft of the bill.

“The devil is always in the details,” he said. “There’s always a trade for any time the liquor laws get changed. But I think we just need to find out exactly what the industry will have to give to make the curtain go away. That’s where the rubber meets the road.”

Regardless, tearing down the Zion Curtain would be cause for celebration for restaurants and Park City’s tourism industry, Malone said. He compared the impact to when Utah did away in 2009 with the law requiring patrons possess private club memberships to enter bars, which made it much more difficult for visitors to find a cocktail on Main Street.

“This may not have as much of a personal impact on someone because it’s not somebody out front asking you for your driver’s license and asking if you’re a member, but it’s going to change the look and the feel of a lot of places,” he said. “You can see somebody making a drink for you, and you’re not going, ‘Where did that person go? Why are they behind that wall?’”

Malone added that confusion about Utah’s liquor laws remains one of the things the Chamber/Bureau hears most often in focus groups with prospective visitors to Park City.

“The sad part about it is it’s more prevalent in conversations with people who have never been here than people who have been here,” he said. “People who haven’t been here can kind of cite to you by verse the bad things about the uncomfortable, awkward moments in terms of serving alcohol in Utah.”

Eliminating the Zion Curtain — and the confusion among out-of-state guests when they see their server retreating behind a barrier to pour their Moscow Mules — could go a long way toward changing the state’s reputation, Fuegi said.

“I think it has quite a big impact on that reputation,” he said. “It’s so unusual to go to something that looks like a bar, where you can display liquor and do everything but make the actual drink or pour the actual glass of wine at that bar. That’s the kind of thing that leads to articles making fun of the state, and none of us want to see that.”

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