Traveling Locavore: Tin Angel Cafe, Salt Lake City

Our family traveled through Salt Lake City, UT, during our National Parks Extravaganza this summer on our way between Grand Teton National Park and Grand Canyon National Park. As always when we travel, we try to find local independent restaurants that source locally. Generally this is easy to do by looking for foodie blogs in a target area and either searching their posts or asking them directly for recommendations. I found the very helpful Gourmand Syndrome, who suggested Tin Angel Cafe.

The Tin Angel Cafe is right across from Pioneer Park at 365 West 400 South. (Addresses in Salt Lake City and in much of the rest of Utah, after some initial confusion, are incredibly helpful -- an address actually provides directions to the location.) The funky ambiance manages to avoid both kitsch and preciousness, not a mean feat. The outdoor patio is a fun space overlooking the park across the street, but temperatures were in the 90s at 8:30 on a mid-June evening, and we opted to sit inside.

Traveling Locavore: Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel Dining Room, Yellowstone National Park

When my family was planning this summer’s National Parks Extravaganza, I did a little research on local eating in the cities through which we were traveling as we moved from park to park – Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle. As expected, I was able to find multiple restaurants and often a farmers’ market open the day of our travel through each city. However, I figured the National Parks food service offerings themselves wouldn’t even be part of my search – of course there’d be nothing local there! It was food service food. Even worse, government food service food. Something to be avoided when possible and put up with when unavoidable. Certainly nothing promising for a fan of local foods, or any foodie for that matter.

Our very first stop forced me to rethink that assumption. Boy, did I underestimate the potential of the National Parks food service. The food was often very good, and several stops were a traveling locavore’s dream. Yellowstone was a standout.

Our first three nights in Yellowstone, we stayed at Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel. We arrived very late on a Friday evening and were up at 5:30 am – an hour before any dining room opened – for a wildlife safari with SafariYellowstone. After a long, blustery early June day viewing wolves and grizzlies, we arrived back at our cabin pleasantly exhausted and decided instead of driving back into Gardiner, Montana, for dinner we’d eat in the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel dining room with its view of grazing elk, some with calves, in the field across the parking lot.

The first thing on the menu to catch my eye was the farm-raised, house-smoked trout appetizer, which appeared again as an entrée. I did a second take. Farm-raised bison brats and bison top sirloin. Montana Ranch Brand natural beef burgers. Rod-and-reel-caught Montana whitefish.

Turns out Yellowstone (and Xanterra, who runs Yellowstone food service) pays more than lip service to sustainable dining. They use Montana Ranch Brand lamb, Montana Legend beef, Miller Farm pork, Timeless Farms legumes, Amaltheia Dairy goat cheese, and local farm-raised game and trout. According to notes on the Mammoth Hot Springs dining room menu, “Our efforts are supported by the Corporation for the Northern Rockies, the Nature Conservancy, the Marine Stewardship Council, and the Animal Welfare Institute and helps support over 350 family farmers and ranchers in nine states.”

Lunch and dinner at both Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel dining room and Old Faithful Inn dining room offered several local selections. The menus at Mammoth Hot Springs, which attracts a more upscale crowd than Old Faithful, were particularly impressive. Breakfast was a little more food-servicey in both dining rooms, but at Mammoth Hot Springs there was at least one local offering for breakfast.

And the beer! My locaquaffer husband, who was resigned to yet another beer list starting with Bud and ending with Coors Light, was beside himself. No fewer than 9 locally micro-brewed ales and lagers appeared on the menu (Bayern Pilsner Lager, Snake River Lager, Fat Tire Amber Ale, Snake River Pale Ale, Teton Ale, Moose Drool, Bitch Creek ESB, and Black Butte Porter), plus another four draught selections (Bozone Hefeweizen, Old Faithful Pale Golden Ale, Lewis Lake Lager, and Headstrong Pale Ale) that were also local micro-brews. Under the heading “Mainstream” (which made us giggle a bit in its disdain for those who would drink such swill) were exactly FIVE beers, and even one of those was a regional lager (Rainier) which as my husband pointed out at least gets them half a point.

They even offered a few local wines. Who knew? Our barmaid – who seemed as impressed as we were with the selection – pointed out that nothing on their wine list was from out of the country, and while California predominated, there was an offering from Montana (Mission Mountain Chardonnay), one from Idaho (Sawtooth Riesling), and several from Washington and Oregon.

And you can't beat that view from the window.

This post was originally published at Eat.Drink.Better.

Next week: Tin Angel Cafe, Salt Lake City

Resources for the travelling locavore

In planning for an upcoming vacation I wanted to find food bloggers in the places we'll be travelling and staying. I was surprised to find that not every town's bloggers are as likely as Cincinnati's to link to one another in blogrolls so that when you've found one, you can find dozens. But I did find a couple of resources to help.

Placeblogger is a search engine that allows bloggers who focus on certain locations to register their blogs. Then when travellers (or just anyone interested in that place) want information about that location, they can easily find blogs about it. I was searching for bloggers in Chicago, Salt Lake City and San Francisco recently and found a few food bloggers in each place who were happy to respond to questions in their comments sections about their areas' local farmers' markets and restaurants that source locally.

As an aside, if you have a placeblog -- a blog that's primarily about a single place -- it's a great way to allow folks from out of town to easily find your blog when they visit to learn what's going on, access restaurant reviews, etc. I've registered CincinnatiLocavore there, and I see that Building Cincinnati (Kevin LeMaster has even been profiled on the site), Cincinnati Beacon, Cincinnati Blog, Make Cincinnati Weird!, and View from Cincinnati are also registered.

Plus, I like their description of their mission:

[Placeblogs] are about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn't news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.

Placeblogs spring from a fiercely non-generic America that's not about big-box retailers or the type of polarizing discussion about politics, culture, and the economy that's the product of journalism that happens at the 30,000 foot level. Often, they are a delightful and vivid look at cities, towns, and neighborhoods from an insider's point of view.

I also found Outside.in, to which bloggers not only must submit their blogs but also must follow certain rules in tagging their posts to get the posts picked up. Of the two, Placeblogger is more focussed on blogs and Outside.in also includes other information. Both worth checking out if you're travelling and want to get your local on.