Thursday Travel Tales: A Unique Food Trip

So there’s this fancy restaurant in Salt Lake City that Zach and I have been obsessed with since we found out about it. It’s called Forage and it’s so fancy that they don’t even have a menu. The chef prepares a 13 course meal each night and he just makes what he wants and you, as the customer, are supposed to deal with it because he knows better than you what’s good. Also, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, the restaurant is very expensive (about $300 for two people with the wine pairing and tip). For months Zach and I have been making little bets about what would have to happen for us to go to Forage. A friend of mine from college asked me to recommend her for a job at our company out of the blue. If she got the job I would have received a $1000 referral bonus, so we said if that happened we’d go to Forage, since that would be unexpected money. Zach also bet that if we both won our company’s wellness competition (which has a reward of $7000 and is very unlikely because there are a lot of other competitors), we’d go to Forage. And our bets went on like this for about a year. Then finally one of our bets came through and we earned some unexpected money, so we went to Forage to celebrate!

This restaurant was incredible. The food was amazing and was definitely the prettiest food I’ve ever eaten. I’m including this meal in my “travel tales” section because Zach and I both agree that eating there felt like taking a special food journey rather than just going out to eat. Here are some shoddy iPhone pictures of each course (minus one dessert course which I ate before taking a picture of it).

Pumpkin soda with cilantro salt on the rim. I know that some people have soda makers at home, but I'm not friends with any of those people so this is the first time I had homemade soda and it was great.

Quail eggs on a buckwheat patty. I had never had quail eggs before and these were nice - they have a more delicate flavor than normal eggs and these particular ones were cooked perfectly.

Those black strings are walnuts and the white things are pieces of cheese. 

Roasted beets with a stem sticking out of them to make them look earthy (the stem wasn't edible).

This was a fermented summer bean from last summer served with an egg yolk sauce.

The first part of our main course was smoked trout. It was simple but really yummy.

Really yummy salad with frothy mozzarella on top and a fancy cracker that you can see in the background.

This is a very sophisticated version of shells and cheese. There was also hen there, which tasted like really tender chicken.

Lamb tartar with carrots and beans. The lamb was ground and raw (hence the tartar part). It was a little crazy eating raw lamb, not my favorite thing in the world, but not so bad.

This was the best dish of the night. On the side there were potato dumplings served on old book pages. And the bowl had a yummy potato puree topped with roe and some trout broth.

Sturgeon and leeks, very fresh.

Perfectly cooked elk.

Time for dessert! We started with iced beet on top of a cream sauce. The earthy beets actually mixed well with the sweet cream.

This is acorns topped with a frothy cream. The acorns were surprisingly amazing - now I know what the squirrels are flipping out about.

(Like I said earlier, I missed one of the desserts because I ate it so quickly. It had rhubarb and ricotta meringue).

They brought these edible rocks out with the check (only the top two brown ones were actually edible).

 So dining at Forage was an awesome, memorable experience. I definitely want to go back, but I want to wait awhile so that going there remains a special treat that feels just as unique as traveling and exploring a new place.