Salt Lake’s New Glimmer of Hip

At Lamb’s Grill Cafe, an institution since 1939, you can get eggs Vienna, a comforting concoction of poached eggs on toast doused with hot milk, served by a waitress in white shoes. Down the street at Bambara, on the ground floor of the chichi Hotel Monaco, breakfast could be a plate of Atlantic salmon hash with chive-chervil creme fraiche begging to get its picture taken by a photographer from Gourmet.

These two breakfasts sum up Salt Lake City as it welcomes the 2002 Winter Olympics and enters the 21st century.

During the Winter Games, which opened Friday and will end Feb. 24, millions of TV viewers will likely be impressed by the city’s breathtaking setting against the massive Wasatch Range, the superlative powdery snow and the Mormon orderliness. But others, who know it as a plain Jane, homogeneous city with arcane drinking laws and a sidewalk that rolls up after dark, will be skeptical. They’ll want to know what it will be like when the camera crews go home. Is there reason to visit the city beyond its usefulness as a gateway to skiing Park City (which hosts some of the downhill and snowboarding events) or rock climbing in the canyon country to the south?

After visiting Salt Lake City two years ago, I would have said no. But when I went back last month, I found it changed in invigorating ways. It’s no L.A. or New York. And peculiarities persist, to be sure. But some of them, like cleanliness, a healthy, smoke-free environment, nice people, low prices, safety and devotion to children, are more welcome than ever.

The city, founded in 1847 by a band of Mormon pioneers, has a singular and fascinating history, recalled at almost every turn in statues and historical markers. As a portal to ski resorts, national parks and the pristine back country, Salt Lake City is hard to top. And then there’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, to my mind still the hottest ticket in town.

The city is the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with its Oz-like bastion at Temple Square, low hemlines, mortuary decor and prohibition against alcohol, caffeine and nicotine. Almost half the population of 181,743 (that’s Salt Lake proper--the greater metro area is 1.6 million) is Mormon.

But it is also a place straining to be more cosmopolitan, driven partly by the 22% of the population that checks “none” when pollsters ask about their religion. (This is the fastest-growing segment of the population, chiefly composed of lapsed Mormons, according to Dan Jones Inc., a Utah survey and research company.)

Another factor in the transformation of Salt Lake City is Mayor Rocky Anderson, a progressive Democrat who once tended bar at the Twilite Lounge, a municipal institution that dates to 1919. The city’s rivalry with Denver as a jumping-off point for lovers of the great Western outdoors has also played a role, spurring hotels and restaurants to smarten up.

In 1995, Salt Lake City aced Denver by getting the Olympics, never mind the bribery scandal. For the Winter Games and the Paralympic Winter Games (in which athletes with disabilities will compete March 7 to 16), the city partly remade itself, building a huge new mall downtown and a 15-mile mass-transit trolley system that is expected to eventually reach the airport. Giant portraits of Olympic athletes decorate the sides of office buildings downtown; a copy of the Declaration of Independence is on display through March 15 in the Capitol; through April 15 the Museum of Fine Arts on the campus of the University of Utah has an exhibition of ancient Greek Olympic art from L.A.’s J. Paul Getty Museum, as part of a “cultural Olympiad” organized to coincide with the Games; and a 10-acre parking lot near Temple Square and the Delta Center (where the Utah Jazz plays basketball) has been turned into an open-air pavilion with a stage and a 30,000-pound retractile arch for the nightly presentation of Olympic medals.

In the same way that Paris benefited from the 1900 Exposition and New York from the 1964 World’s Fair, Salt Lake City will inherit much after the Olympic circus folds. The airport, about 10 miles west of downtown, has been equipped with detectors to check travelers for traces of explosives. (All U.S. airports will have them eventually, but because of the Olympics, Salt Lake got them first.) Highway upgrades have made the trip from the airport to downtown a 10-minute affair, even in snow. TRAX trolleys take visitors from the new Gateway mall west of Temple Square to the University of Utah in 15 minutes or so and cost $1.25.

Meanwhile, a crop of lavish hotels has opened recently. Above all is the eye-popping 775-room Grand America, opened last March on the south side of town. Salt Lake City billionaire Earl Holding, who also owns Sinclair Oil and the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho, supervised construction of his Grand America down to the last detail, even breaking open crates of white granite for the exterior walls that had been quarried in Vermont and shaped in Spain. In a city where the average room rate was $76 last year, prices at the Grand America may seem high. But where else in the country can you get a huge, luxurious chamber with French doors, mountain views and an Italian marble bath for $185 a night during the week and $129 on weekends?

About a year ago the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints completed a modernistic conference center just north of Temple Square, with a smashing 21,000-seat auditorium and roof garden. Salt Lake City even has a hip neighborhood, the warehouse district, where galleries, trendy restaurants, brew pubs, theaters and architectural firms stretch along 300 South Street from West Temple Street to Pioneer Park.

It’s a real city now, with all the good and bad that entails, including homeless people and a hint of urban cynicism. I asked almost everyone I met what they would do during the Olympics. Most rolled their eyes and said they planned to avoid the crowds by staying home and watching the Games on TV.

I got here on a Thursday afternoon. The sky had already turned a vague shade of blue, and the temperature was nudging freezing. The descending plane yielded a view of a city like the kingdom of a snow queen. I stayed three nights at the 225-room Hotel Monaco, which opened in 1999 in an old bank building at Main Street and 200 South and is part of a small chain of boutique hotels headquartered in San Francisco. It serves free wine in the lobby at cocktail hour and has a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” decor, where checks and stripes live together and you’ll find the occasional nutty piece of furniture, like the red canopied settee in the lobby. My ninth-floor room ($129 a night) was the size of a suite. It had a plush king-size bed, robes and Aveda toiletries, contemporary prints on the walls, lots of lamps, sterling sunrise views over the Wasatch mountains and, most important, a coffee maker with a Starbucks brew pack.

I went downstairs to Bambara Restaurant and ordered a Belvedere martini, on the rocks with olives. Alcohol is readily available in Salt Lake City restaurants and private clubs (which are like bars, except that customers must pay a cover charge of about $5 or find a sponsor who already has a membership to get a drink).

Still, teetotaler laws supported by Mormon church members make imbibing in Salt Lake City an odd experience. The martini came in a pretty fluted glass, but was heavy on the vermouth and minuscule besides; by law, Salt Lake City bartenders can’t make drinks with more than one ounce of liquor and must use a dispenser to make sure of it. The waiter brought me a wine list along with the menu. (Technically, restaurants were forbidden to do so unless the customer asks, but a court recently struck down this law.) I ordered a glass of Chardonnay with my seafood stew. When it came, the waiter sheepishly told me I had to finish my cocktail before he could serve the wine, because regulations dictate that each diner have only one drink on the table at a time.

The fish stew was chock-full of lobster, shrimp and calamari, a testament to the landlocked city’s yearning for seafood--and to its gourmet awakening. Known once upon a time for “funeral potatoes” (an easy-to-make, frighteningly rich potluck favorite) and Jell-O (which the Utah legislature last year proclaimed the state’s official snack food), Salt Lake City cooking has started to come of age.

Chic new restaurants serving sophisticated cuisine and modest places specializing in ethnic fare--Vietnamese, Italian, Mexican--compete with old standards like Lamb’s Grill Cafe, where Mormon comfort food tops the menu.

After dinner I walked up West Temple Street to Maurice Abravanel Concert Hall to hear the Utah Symphony perform Vivaldi and Respighi. The numbered streets, laid out in a grid emanating from Temple Square, were virtually empty but didn’t feel threatening. The concert hall is a handsome contemporary building at the north side of Salt Palace Convention Center, decorated with several garishly illuminated glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly (part of a big Chihuly exhibit in the Salt Lake Art Center next door, through March 17). The decor of the wood-lined concert hall is far more low-key, and the symphony, conducted by Keith Lockhart, played beautifully.

I spent most of the next day touring Temple Square, a 35-acre enclave that remains the city’s chief point of interest. Outside the south gate a demonstrator had raised a sign that said, “Utah hookers service International Olympic Committee members but you can’t practice polygamy.” Inside, young Mormon sisters wearing long, dark overcoats, name tags and sensible shoes offered assistance. Almost 200 of them, from 40 countries as far afield as China and Italy, serve two-year missions as Temple Square guides, demonstrating to visitors the global reach of a church with more than 10 million members worldwide. I toured the south visitor center, with displays on Mormon family values and genealogy, and peeked over the wall surrounding the six-spired temple (open to church members only). In the north visitor center there is a model of Jerusalem with buttons that illuminate various scenes from the life of Jesus.

I saw the way the wide, flat Salt Lake Valley yields to the foothills of the Wasatch Range from the observation deck in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, formerly the Hotel Utah, and watched “The Testaments,” an hourlong film that dramatizes Book of Mormon scripture about how Jesus came to the New World shortly after the Resurrection, an eye-opener for an old-fashioned Protestant like me.

At the beginning of the noon organ recital in the domed tabernacle, the organist demonstrated the building’s remarkable acoustics by dropping a pin onstage, which could clearly be heard in the back row of the auditorium. In the nearby Beehive House, where city and temple founder Brigham Young lived with his 20 wives and 57 children, I was shown around by Sister Shibazaki, a sweet 22-year-old from Japan who told me she was drawn to the Mormon faith because of how it nurtures families.

Mormon comfort food is the specialty at the Lion House Pantry, next to the Beehive House. There I lunched on stuffed chicken with mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables, but couldn’t get a cup of hot tea. Church members shun caffeinated beverages, as well as alcohol and cigarettes, which partly explains their robust health. (Mormon death rates from cancer and cardiovascular diseases are 50% lower than those of the rest of the U.S. population, according to a 1997 UCLA study.)

But outside Temple Square, cafes are abundant. Among them is A Cup of Joe, an amiable spot with overstuffed chairs, to which I retired in the late afternoon. It is in the warehouse district, on the west side of downtown, near the Rio Grande train station and Pioneer Park. Street people congregate in this area, and the park has long been home to drug pushers and users. Even so, I felt comfortable walking there after dark, looking into shops, Italian delis and galleries.

In the station’s convivial Rio Grande Cafe, I had a zesty margarita and a burrito, then caught Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” at the historic Capitol Theater nearby, performed without brio by the Utah Opera.

I saw more of the city and surrounding area in the next two days, including the dignified Capitol, which sits on a hill north of town, and the modest collection at the Museum of Fine Arts on the campus of the University of Utah. I rode the “Heber Creeper,” a historic railway that runs from the hamlet of Heber, in the mountains about 60 miles southeast of town, around Deer Creek Lake and into Provo Canyon. I dined sumptuously on antipasto and whitefish with foie gras at Fresco, a stylish little restaurant specializing in elaborate northern Italian fare in the Sugarhouse neighborhood southeast of downtown.

And I spent one night at the Grand America, where a tape of the first few bars of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” plays nonstop by the elevators and the lobby’s tapestries, chandeliers and Oriental vases evoke Vegas grandiosity rather than European grand hotel. I gorged on seafood at the Sunday buffet in the Garden Cafe, sampled the watery martinis in the well-hidden bar, got a lecture from a saleswoman in the hotel shop about the deleterious effects on the young of magazines like Penthouse and Playboy, and cuddled up in a king-size bed, trying to make sense of a city clearly pulled in opposing directions, new and old, sophisticated and parochial.

Such contradictions had not occurred to me that morning, when I attended a “Music and the Spoken Word” program performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Temple Square. The 360-member chorus was arranged on tiers around the tabernacle’s massive organ, sisters in white robes to the left, brothers in black suits to the right.

When they sang, it was with one soul-stirring voice. No sense had to be made of it. I stopped thinking about martinis and Mormon conservatism in the powerful joy of hearing it.

*

Guidebook: Scouting Salt Lake

Getting there: From LAX, nonstop service to Salt Lake City is available on Delta, United and Southwest. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $156.

The Salt Lake City International Airport is about 10 miles west of the city, easily accessible from Interstates 215 and 80. Most major car rental companies are represented. Taxis and a city bus serving downtown are available.

Where to stay: Most hotels are booked for the Olympics, of course, with higher-than-usual rates. Below are post-Olympics prices. Room rates fluctuate depending on availability; check for special promotions.

I tried the Hotel Monaco, 15 W. 200 South, Salt Lake City 84101; (877) 294-9710 or (801) 595-0000, fax (801) 532-8500, www.monaco-saltlakecity.com. This stylish downtown hotel has 225 rooms; doubles about $200.

The Hotel Grand America, 555 S. Main St., Salt Lake City 84111; (800) 621-4505 or (801) 258-6000, fax (801) 258-6911, www.grandamerica.com, has 775 rooms, indoor and outdoor swimming pools and afternoon tea in the lobby. Doubles $185-$235 weekdays, $129-$159 weekends.

I toured and liked the Peery Hotel, 110 W. Broadway, Salt Lake City 84101; (800) 331-0073 or (801) 521-4300, fax (801) 575-5014, www.peeryhotel.com, a vintage warehouse district hotel. Doubles $119-$249.

The Inn at Temple Square, 71 W. South Temple, Salt Lake City 84101; (800) 843-4668 or (801) 531-1000, fax (801) 536-7272, www.theinn.com, is a small, traditional hotel across the street from Temple Square and owned by the Mormon church. Doubles $79 to $89 through March.

Where to eat: I liked: Lamb’s Grill Cafe, 169 S. Main St., (801) 364-7166, downtown, for reasonably priced breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lunch entrees $6-$12, dinner $10-$20.

Bambara Restaurant, in the lobby of the Hotel Monaco (see above), for chic food and setting. Breakfast, lunch and dinner; lunch entrees $8-$12.50; dinner entrees $13-$26.

Fresco Italian Cafe, 1513 S. 1500 East, (801) 486-1300, a pretty little boite in the Sugarhouse neighborhood, serving delicious northern Italian cuisine. Dinner only; entrees $17-$23.

Lion House Pantry, 63 E. South Temple St., (801) 363-5466, for Mormon comfort food in one of the homes of Brigham Young. Lunch, dinner; lunch entrees $7-$9, dinner entrees $9-$11.

Rio Grande Cafe, 270 S. Rio Grande St., (801) 364-3302, a comfy, inexpensive spot for Mexican food and margaritas in the Rio Grande depot. Lunch, dinner; entrees $4-9.

A Cup of Joe, 353 W. 200 South, (801) 363-8322, for high-test latte, cappuccino, espresso and other eye-opening beverages.

For more information: The Salt Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau, 90 S. West Temple,

Salt Lake City 84101; (801) 521-2822, fax (801) 534-4927, www.visitsaltlake.com.

Also, Utah Travel Council, Capitol Hill/Council Hall, 300 N. State St., Salt Lake City, UT 84114; (800) UTAH-FUN (882-4386), (800) 200-1160 or (801) 538-1030, fax (801) 538-1399, www.utah.com.