When we first talked about this Utah trip, we knew that we were coming here mainly to see the national parks and enjoy nature. Food would not be a priority at all, much to my great disappointment. After doing some cursory research on foods that Utah is known for, particularly around the southern portion of the state where we’d spend the majority of our time, we decided that this would probably be the only trip we will have ever taken where we weren’t going to get excited about the food at all.

I looked up Utah’s “famous foods,” and these were some of the items that came up on the list: “funeral potatoes,” or creamy potato, canned soup, cheese, and crushed corn flake casserole, which Mormon wives typically serve during post-funeral grieving (yum!), Jell-O, particularly the green colored kind (what the hell kind of state gets excited about eating Jell-O, especially the GREEN COLORED ONE?!), pastrami burgers (Chris’s response: “I can sh*t out better food than that”), and “Utah scones,” which are not your typical British scones… they are simply huge fried pieces of dough covered in honey and sugar. This list was enough to make me decide that we were pretty much going to eat cheap fast food and eat just to live, not eat to enjoy.

Our first meal in Kanab where we’d be spending two nights, we ate at the worst “Mexican” restaurant I’d ever been to. We had generic enchiladas and a burrito that had no flavor; in fact, they both tasted pretty much the same – bland, boring, and probably mostly of canned and non-fresh ingredients. The wait staff moved at the rate of snails, and their enthusiasm was nonexistent. The only redeeming quality was that the food came out extremely hot. That’s a sad redeeming quality.

For dinner our first night after hiking Zion the first day, we ate… McDonald’s. Chris had chicken McNuggets while I had my guilty pleasure sausage egg McMuffin with a hash brown (one interesting tidbit is that in the evenings, McDonald’s, at least at this location, makes all the breakfast items to order. I actually had to wait about 15 minutes for my sausage egg McMuffin and my hash brown, which has never, ever happened before). At Bryce, we had a decent turkey burger and salmon burger at their lodge. The place was reasonably priced and of decent quality. I’m sure the patties were pre-formed, but it’s not like we were expecting gourmet food. That evening, we had generic pizza from a random spot a block away from our hotel. It was sausage and mushroom, so it couldn’t have been that bad – at least there were no surprises. Finally, our last full day, we ate at a reasonable Mexican spot in Springdale just outside of Zion and had dinner at the Copper Onion, an up and coming restaurant in downtown Salt Lake City. The Copper Onion meal was the most notable, with house-made tortellini and fettuccine and a wagyu beef bone marrow. One funny thing was that the menu noted every item that used Maldon salt, the famous and high quality British salt I often read about. Maldon salt came with the bone marrow, which was a pretty and tasty touch, but there was no jam or gelee to cut the richness of the marrow, which was a bit of a fail. The food at both places was not the best and was pretty good, but we’ve certainly had better quality food in many other cities. We ended the trip with a last lunch at In’N’Out – probably our favorite meal of the entire trip. Too bad there wasn’t an In’N’Out in the town of Kanab.