Several months ago my brother and I went to Emigration Market. It is a neighborhood grocery store in Salt Lake City on the corner of 1700 S and 1300 S. It has obviously been there for quite awhile. It is a pretty typical market, but you can tell they have started to take up the trend of local and artisan made products. Along with all their typical grocery items they feature a lot of Utah produced products. And their bakery seemed to be a step above a typical grocery bakery. The thing that piqued my interest was some signs they had up advertising a restaurant that they were building in front of the store. It had claims of wood-fired pizza and other things. And then I kind of forgot about it.
Wood-fired pizza by itself is almost always enough to get me to eat at a place. Unfortunately Emigration Market very strongly made the argument that just because you have a wood-fired pizza doesn't mean you can produce good pizza.
Last week sometime I saw an ad that reminded me about the restaurant that Emigration Market was building. So my two brothers and I decided to give it a try.
The restaurant itself is essentially a large covered porch on the front the store, which makes it a really nice place to go on warm sunny spring day in Utah. There wasn't too much of a crowd there at lunch time in the middle of the week. We had a nice table right next to the outside of the restaurant taking full advantage of the spring weather.
The first warning sign came when we picked up the menu. As hoped, the wood-fired pizza was there. So was sandwiches, hamburgers, appetizers, soup and calzones. It is hard enough to produce good food when you focus on a few things. It gets even harder when your menu is spread across so many kinds of food. I believe you should pick few things and do them well, not many things and not so well.
As we almost always do when trying a new pizza place, we ordered our with half cheese and half pepperoni. In addition we also ordered their bruschetta appetizer. And it was only downhill from this point on.
The pizza came out first. To quote one of my brothers "this just proves that cooking method doesn't guarantee a good pizza."
To quote my other brother, "this is like a frozen pizza from the grocery store."
And then the bruschetta reinforced the quality of pizza. The bread was soft, hardly any crunch, the cheese they put on it wasn't still cold, even though they'd made some attempt to melt it. And there was ham. Ham. Ham on bruschetta. It may happen somewhere, but never when I've had bruschetta before.
Emigration Market I would recommend as a local grocery store that has an emphasis on Utah produced foods. Their restaurant on the front end, is not worth the visit for pizza. I would pick Papa John's for pizza over theirs. That doesn't speak to everyone thing else on their menu so there is still a glimmer of hope.
Emigration Market
1706 E 1300 S
Salt Lake City, UT 84108
map
Comments (1)
Emigration Market has its charm, but I'd no idea they were contructing a restaurant. I would suggest instead going just down the street (1300 South at 1100 East) to Liberty Heights Fresh and buying cheese from their EXCELLENT selection and some great bread and having a picnic.
Oh - I prefer Papa John's over all the other chain delivery pizza, but if you are going to have pizza in Salt Lake City, you MUST go to The Pie!!! They even have an outlet place around the corner that does take-out. Oh - and Wasatch Pizza (there are a number of locations in the valley) does some great "gourmet/designer" pizzas. And Litza's Pizza, run by the "Hires Big H" people is quite good, too.
For fire-grilled, I think a lot of the pubs do a good job.
Posted by: Kate | June 7, 2007 4:14 PM
Posted on: June 7, 2007 16:14