Delicious Fall Harvest Pop Up Restaurant

We loved hosting our Pop Up Restaurant at the Tasting Room in Salt Lake City! When planning any event in any season, we strive to feature local seasonal food. Usually, it’s food we can buy a stone’s throw from our commissary! Using our countless vendors, we were able to create this special Pop Up where we only featured Utah artisans! From the first bite to the last, it was full of flavorful Utah’s finest ingredients.

Cocktail hour

To start off the evening, Pop Up guests enjoyed two passed hors d’oeuvres! The first on the list of dishes being passed was our classic butternut squash soup sip topped with Slide Ridge Honey apple cider cream and toasted Utah pepitas. A soup sip is a simple yet delicious way to warm up your appetite as the weather gets colder.

Drake’s Family Farms goat cheese and Red Rock pistachios on a smoked Utah peach was the star of cocktail hour. We love to smoke fruit! It is an unusual addition to some of our fruit dishes that is always a pleasant surprise!

With our late winter last year, we still had fresh watermelon come fall. This lent to making a beautiful signature cocktail for the evening. We made the Green River Mule that’s made from Green River watermelon which we froze into a granita, Jackson Hole ginger beer, fresh Utah mint, and Sugar House vodka.

The Harvest

We started our 10-course dinner with an amuse-bouche. Amuse-bouche translates to “entertained or amused mouth” so this amuse-bouche for the evening was a brown butter and Utah acorn squash mousse on a dried Mountainland apple and sage crisp certainly was a delight to the pallet! What makes our Pop-Up Restaurants different from our standard events we cater? So many things but one of our favorites is that our pop up restaurants is a show where the food is the star! While enjoying a spectacular 10-course meal you get to watch our chefs prepare it all right in front of you.

Every step will dazzle you. So this simple Snuck Farm greens with roasted Utah butternut squash, wild mushrooms and shallot duxelles with Slide Ridge honey vinaigrette became one of the favorite courses of the guests. Our chefs come out with large mezzaluna knives and chop huge bunches of greens at speeds that would astound you. The squash is toasted with torches table side. The mushrooms and shallots were then flambeed and sauteed to perfection.

It was all plated with finesse and grace. A simple salad became enthralling.

No Culinary Crafts event is complete without our house-made artisan bread! Guests enjoyed our black pepper brioche paired with our Utah sea salt butter and our Utah pumpkin cornmeal roll paired with our house-made Cox honey cranberry compound butter. We love sharing our love for fresh artisan bread!

We have loved the resurgence of fondue! We as a society have fallen in love with fondue again! Dipping things in cheese is a passion of ours- and why not it is fabulous!! For our next course, we served individual fondues to each guest which featured local tomatoes and Drake’s Farm goat cheese. This flavorful dish had guests licking their plates!

As we love to keep things local, we love to serve trout as often as we can. We are always delighted to show off another local vendor, Riverence. They are raising our favorite trout in these here parts! Many local Utahan’s are used to the usual river trout often caught in Utah, but their Ruby Red Trout is a trout unlike you have ever eaten.

Our guests enjoyed delicious mesquite-grilled trout with Mountainland granny smith apple chutney grilled fresh minutes before plating. No fall meal would be complete without squash. Our trout was served with squash sauteed in pine nut butter and torches tableside! It was a perfect complement to the trout.

For our first entree course, we wanted to keep things warm and very fall so we served a Chicken Honfleur soup! Serving the soup in a miniature sugar pumpkin added an extra holiday flair! Check out the November recipe of the month on our blog for the Chicken Honfleur recipe. Every single Culinary Crafts recipe we share is something you can serve to your friends and family!

The second entree of the evening was our sous vide ribeye from Double Ranch served with cowboy caviar, sweet Daley’s bacon and torched shishito peppers. Sous vide is one of our favorite ways to cook during the fall and winter. It lends to the perfectly cooked piece of meat every time and cooked perfectly all the way through.

This ribeye we sous vide for 5 hours and then, using handheld torches, we added that idyllic crust and grill marks to the outside. This method lets us serve all our guests the best and freshest product all year round!

At the end of every meal, we host we like to end with a tasting. We love to feature and educate about our local artisans. The iconic cheese and chocolate pairing was a perfect way to end this fall evening.

The cheese menu of the evening included Deer Valley Truffle Double Cream, Beehive High West Whiskey Cheddar, Heber Valley Orange Rosemary, and San Luca Parmesan Reggiano. Each cheese has its own unique flavor profile all of which are made right here in the Beehive state!

Did you know that one of the top chocolate companies in the world is right here in Utah? Amano’s use of Italian and French confectionery techniques brings out the natural flavors of quality cocoa beans which showed in their Morobe, Madagascar, Dos Rios and Ocumare chocolates we served during the Harvest Pop Up.

Decadent dessert to end the evening

No dinner is complete without dessert! To end the wonderful evening, we served our flambeed Utah apple and plum crostata with vanilla pastry cream and our signature zabaglione gelato. It was a decadent end to this beautiful meal.

As you read through this menu, it may have surprised you that the food kept coming. Dish after dish. How could guests have enjoyed this delectable dessert? At Culinary Crafts we believe in slowing down the eating experience. Meals are meant to be enjoyed and a leisurely affair. Our pop up dinners usually last 4-5 hours. Our biggest recommendation when planning your next event- from a wedding to your next family meal is to slow down, enjoy the moment and relish every bite. It isn’t something to check off your list. It is the highlight of the day. This fall season slow down and enjoy your company and every bite.

In addition to all the local creations we got to create for this event, and the joy of hospitality we got to share with our guests, one of the most rewarding parts of our pop up restaurants is that each time we get to partner with one of our favorite local charities and donate the profits to them! At this specific pop up we partnered with The Green Urban Lunchbox! Check out their vision! They are doing amazing things: https://www.thegreenurbanlunchbox.com/. We loved hosting this incredible Harvest Pop Up at the Tasting Room in Salt Lake City and hope you join us at our next Pop Up Restaurant!

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