One of our favorite places to eat in Salt Lake City was a diner — Ruth’s Diner, which lists its address as SLC but the landscape is so much different from the city that it feels like it’s much further out. And I’m not even really into diners, though Waffle House does have a certain je ne sais quoi. But back to Ruth’s — so many good things.
The inside is a converted trolley car — which seems perfectly brunchy, but it was such a pretty day that we chose to eat outside
Here, we have a Mile High biscuit.
It had just the right density and fluff-ity and…yeah. It was fab. I need this biscuit in my repertoire (see bottom of this post…)
And here, country fried steak with gravy and hashbrowns
and who cares about carbs at a moment like this? Hiiiiiii cinnamon roll french toast:
It’s described on the menu as cinnamon roll dipped in vanilla egg batter, grilled and served with orange cream cheese and warm maple syrup
I mean every single thing we had was just beyond. Beyonnnnnddddddd.
Well, I didn’t see that the restaurant has ever published a cookbook, so I googled if they’d put any of their recipes online. Last night for supper, I made their macaroni & cheese (they gave the recipe to Food Network) minus the breadcrumb topping and using rotini for the pasta, and their mile high biscuits — apparently Ruth’s was featured on a FN show and did a video on how to make them.
For the biscuits, I found this site, whose owner posts what she says is the recipe for them with some little tweaks. Anyway, Shugie and I followed her recipe last night, except we scooped them into nice mounds rather than cutting them into squares, and we found that our cook time was closer to thirty minutes. In any case, they were truly fantastic, so much so that the leftover biscuits were requested again at breakfast this morning. I mean, they are great. Next time we have company, I’m making a pan no matter what.
In SLC we also liked Crown Burger, the pastrami-topped hamburgers and their fry sauce.
And we l o v e d Red Iguana.
And maybe someone is thinking Mexican food in SLC? Naw. But yah.
Mole Colorodito
several different moles to try
Carnitas with pico, beans, and guac
The Red Iguana recipe for their salsa de una is here at Salt Lake Magazine.
Mango Margarita. BTW, there was a part of me that wondered if I should be having an alcoholic drink in SLC (when in Rome…): will people think I’m LDS and sneaking a drink? which I know is absolutely crazy plus it was bolstered with my built-in prob very unhealthy guilt of having anything to drink in a restaurant since I grew up in a dry county however once a week and that means probably Friday night it usually magically evaporates with a glass of merlot and that’s partly because I read studies including ones about how a little alcohol is actually beneficial for one’s health but also partly because wheeeee I can. But you see which side of me won out, ha.
Anyway, sidenote on being perceived to be in one-or-another group, in my fam we sometimes jokingly call the ability to recognize other Jewish people in the wild as “Jewdar” — there are other -dars that other groups kid around about having. In the LDS community, it’s called “Modar” and a study by University of Toronto and Tufts University researchers entitled On the Perception of Religious Group Membership from Faces seemed to suggest it may actually be a thing. When RNS did a story about it, they pulled these highlights:
- Mormons and non-Mormons who passively observed the faces of both ingroup and outgroup members showed significantly better recognition memory for individuals belonging to their ingroup than they did for individuals belonging to their outgroup, similar to ingroup memory advantage effects commonly found for age, race and gender.
- Images of Mormon and non-Mormon men and women were obtained from online personal advertisements posted in various major cities across the United States. Search criteria were restricted to individuals 18–30 years of age who specifically indicated either active membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or membership in another non-Mormon religious organization.
- Special attention was paid to variation in the faces so that no obvious markers of Mormon or non-Mormon identity were present.
Interesting, right? Circling back to Jewdar, one day several years ago, Leslie and I were out shopping and we ran into a really old lady she knew. Here, I’m talking about the kind of really old where people sometimes completely lose their filter and say anything they think. I knew this lady just very vaguely from our synagogue, but didn’t know her name or anything. When Leslie introduced me to her, she mentioned who I was married to so the lady would make the connection. The lady said, “oh you’re married to HIM? You look like such a shiksa! I had no idea!” We laughed and laughed. Apparently I wasn’t even a blip on her Jewdar. 🙂