They found their food philosophies were nearly identical. Both had catered Grand Canyon river trips, where improvising was key. When they met at a Christmas party in Flagstaff, Ariz., Blake was a caterer and back-country chef, and Jen was running a bakery. The two simply friends and business partners, both raised in modest households.

A local food writer once mistakenly presumed Blake and Jen were a wealthy gay couple living on trust funds.

“Downsizing will cause instability.”įew things I learned during my time in Boulder:

“We are in an economic boom directly related to tourism of the monument,” said Blake. The restaurateurs are battling the downsizing, saying it will harm the scenic landscape and hurt their business, which happens to be the town’s largest employer. The most recent, “ This Immeasurable Place: Food and Farming from the Edge of Wilderness” came out two years ago, just as President Donald Trump downsized the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument. A sign at the door of Hell’s Backbone Grill lists fresh items coming from the farm that day.īlake and Jen penned two cookbooks with the restaurant’s recipes. Over the years HBG has been praised by the James Beard Foundation, Bon Appetit, Oprah Magazine, and other national publications. Grass-fed lamb and beef, heritage-breed chickens, fruit trees, and fields of heirloom vegetables are turned into a menu with rustic elegance - Spicy Cowgal Chipotle Meatloaf, Lemony Cluck chicken, blue corn pancakes, and whatever vegetables are in season at the time. It’s not just a matter of ordering food: we plant, tend, weed, water, and pick it.”

“We are an atypical restaurant, because our food costs are lower, but labor costs are higher.

“We set out to prove that a farm to table restaurant could work here, but it was really hard,” said Castle. Jen Castle and Blake Spalding, business partners and owners of Hell’s Backbone Grill. The restaurant is in its 20th season, quite a feat considering the high failure rate of restaurants, that it’s in one of the most remote areas in America, and that most of its ingredients are home-grown. Since the menu is designed around ingredients grown on its six-acre organic farm, you could likely enjoy fresh sweet corn, vine-ripened tomatoes, summer squash and other fall crops ripening now. I think right now - late August, early September - is a great time to visit. Before it was built in 1933, the only way in and out of Boulder was by mule. The restaurant’s name comes from the heart-stopping Hell’s Backbone Bridge. Where the heck is Boulder? A four-hour drive from Salt Lake City in Garfield County, at the edge of Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument, where the Burr Trail meets Utah’s Scenic Byway 12. (Check out my blog post about these here.) While I was in Boulder working on the story, I also discovered the Burr Trail Grill and Magnolia’s Street Food, two other surprisingly delicious options considering this is a remote town of only about 225 people. There was so much more to share! I thought I already had blogged about this adventure, until I realized I hadn’t. My story in the September/October 2018 issue of Utah Life magazine used just a small part of all the interesting tidbits I learned about this farm-to-table restaurant owned by Blake Spalding and Jen Castle. Last year I took a road trip to the world-famous Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah.

Hells backbone grill