My hubby and I went on a last minute, spontaneous trip to Salt Lake City!  We’ve never been and got pretty good deal.  We booked our trip on Thursday night and left Saturday afternoon!!

Before I tell you all about it, I have to say this first:

We all know that Salt Lake City is the land of LDS.  While I did enjoy the tours of the various LDS buildings around the city, I am not now nor have I ever been religious or interested in adopting a religion.  This post is to tell you about our travels and the good food we enjoyed in SLC.  I will try my best not to inject my personal beliefs into this post.  Please don’t try to convert me.  Thanks.

Okay, so let’s get on with it.

We arrived Saturday evening in SLC and stayed at the Marriott downtown, which is right across from the Temple.  Before I go on, I have to say that I really liked our hotel. It was a great location– walking distance to a lot of the things we wanted to check out– and the downtown was a ghost town on the weekends.  The area around our hotel was very clean (even with all the construction that’s going on around it).  If I were to go back to SLC, I would stay there again.

Anyway, we were starving and headed over to the Red Iguana for dinner, which was probably about a 1.5-2 mile walk from our hotel.  The wait at the Red Iguana was about 40 minutes, but it’s supposed to be awesome and it probably would have taken at least that long to find another restaurant.

First order of business:

Margaritas!!!

Despite what you might think, every restaurant we went to served alcohol.  We also didn’t have any trouble finding coffee or coffee shops (i.e. Starbucks).

I must have been so hungry at dinner that I forgot to take a picture of my meal.  While the Red Iguana didn’t have many vegetarian items on their menu, they were very accommodating.  Matt had the veggie fajitas, which were good, but drowned in oil.  I had a veggie burrito enchilada style which was good, but drowned in enchilada sauce.  Their margaritas and salsa was the best I’ve ever had, though.

On Sunday morning, we grabbed breakfast at our hotel.  They had a buffet set up that had fruit, dry cereals, oatmeal, hash browns, scrambled eggs and an omelet station.  I opted for the oatmeal and some fruit.  I also made a stop at the omelet station for a veggie omelet without the eggs… essentially, mushrooms, tomatoes, bell peppers and onions all sauteed together.  Since I visited the omelet station, though I technically did not get an omelet, my breakfast cost $16.  Matt’s breakfast was only $9.  HUGE RIP-OFF!

With full bellies, we walked all over downtown and started our day off with a tour of the Beehive House.  The Beehive House (built in 1854) was the home of Brigham Young, who (among many other things) led the Mormon’s to Salt Lake City.  All LDS tours focused on history, rather than on religion, which I appreciated.

After the Beehive House, we walked over to the capitol building.  We even got to go inside to look around.  It was a nice building.  Across the street was Council Hall, which had a little kiosk in it for looking up tourist information on Utah.  You can tell that Utah has really invested a lot of money into tourism and we were thankful to have come across this free kiosk because we were able to look up vegetarian-friendly restaurants in the downtown area.  We could even print out the information for free.

After spending some time at the capitol, we walked over to the area where the first settlers built their homes (as in the LDS settlers– the Indians were already there, but I don’t suppose they count as settlers).  While there were no historic homes over that way, all of the houses were super cute with really great landscaping.  I was really impressed with how nicely landscaped the downtown area was.  It was also really safe and clean (hardly any graffiti).

By this point, we were parched and stopped in at the gas station convenience store for some water.  Compared to Bay Area prices, everything was super cheap.  We continued on over to the downtown outdoor mall.  My feet were killing me, so I bought a better pair of walking shoes (non-leather).

We headed back to our hotel to freshen up before heading to dinner.  While at Council Hall, I had printed out information on a bunch of veg-friendly restaurants.  My hubby was kind enough to leave it up to me to pick the restaurants.  Anyway, we went to Sage’s Cafe for dinner on Sunday night.  While they call themselves “vegetarian,” they are in fact vegan and organic.  There are even a few Raw dishes on their menu.  It was a pretty good hike from our hotel, but well worth it!

I started my meal off with one of their specials that night– a chilled watermelon soup with chunks of mango, toasted pistachos and mint.  DELICIOUS!

We also ordered an appetizer, lettuce wraps.

Matt ordered the vegetarian tacos with tempeh.  I’m not a huge tempeh fan, but these were pretty darn tasty!

I had the Magical Wok– a coconut curry sauce with seared vegetables (green beans and squash mostly), toasted cashews, tofu and soba noodles.  Also DELICIOUS!  But I could only eat about half of it.

We ended our meal with a cup of tea and some tiramisu.  Even though I was pretty stuffed from all that food, I can’t go to a vegan restaurant and not have dessert.  It’s not often that I can order anything off the menu and I took full advantage of that at Sage’s.  The tiramisu was fantastic!  I know we sound like a bunch of pigs after showing all the food that we consumed, but keep in mind that with the exception of a few smalls snacks, we hadn’t eaten since breakfast and had been walking all day long.

Monday started with breakfast at the hotel-  more oatmeal and fruit.  We had decided that Monday would be our day to get our Mormon on, so we headed over to Temple Square.  As luck would have it, a tour was just starting as we walked in.

First up on the tour was the Assembly Hall, which was constructed in 1877.  The inside was nice, like what you might expect a church to look like.  Our tour took us over to the Seagull Monument, which has an interesting story that you can read here.

Following the tour, we were able to see a (free) organ performance in the Tabernacle.  It lasted about 30 minutes and was pretty impressive.  The building itself was pretty spectacular.

This is a photo of the inside of the tabernacle following the performance.  The lights behind the pipes change colors.

I was impressed that all of the buildings were open to the public.  The only one that wasn’t was the Temple, which I can understand.  From what was described to us, there are over 100 rooms, not one big open space like how you might imagine a church to be.  The Salt Lake Temple took 40 years to build!

The figure at the top of the Temple (gold) is the Angel Moroni, who directed Joseph Smith to the golden plates.  After Joseph had translated them from reformed Egyptian, the angel took them back.

After the organ performance, Matt and I found ourselves back in the South Visitors Center where we were able to ask some of the tour guides from questions.  When I say “ask some questions” I should probably clarify that we interrogated those poor girls, but they were very nice and answered all of our questions.  They didn’t seem too annoyed with us.

For dinner, we went to another place that I got to choose.  It ended up being not what I expected…

One World Cafe.  The philosophy behind One World Cafe is that everyone deserves the opportunity to have a plate of food.  When you enter, you pay what you think is fair for a plate of food and the portion sizes are given accordingly.  If you can’t afford to pay, you can eat for free.  Or you can help wash dishes or clean.

Everything they serve is organic and many of the fruits and vegetables come from their own gardens.  The meat that they serve is from a local butcher where the animals are free range and whenever they have fish, it is line caught in the wild.

Since we have never been unfortunate enough to go without having a meal (or at least easy access to a meal), Matt gave a very generous $15 for each of our meals ($30 total).

Here’s what they had for us vegans:  salad greens (from their garden), fruit– apples, mango and grapes, swiss chard and leeks, sauteed veggies, brown rice and beans with kale and squash.  It wasn’t bad, but we ended up needing  a second dinner. 

While I completely support the idea of ending world hunger (and I would much rather overpay for a meal at One World Cafe where someone who can’t pay has access to hot food than hand out money to panhandlers), I would take them more seriously if they only served vegan food and educated people about a vegan diet.  Raising animals for food is the most inefficient use of resources.  If everyone on the planet adopted a vegan diet, world hunger would not exist.

Anyway, following our soup kitchen dining experience, we stopped in at 7 Eleven for some water (and a snack for me).  Lately, I’ve been pretty addicted to rice crackers.  I love how they’re crispy crunchy.  While in SLC, I was really craving something crispy like a rice cracker, but spicy.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that pretty much all of the snacks at convenience shops are pure crap.  Most of the packages I picked up had hydrogenated oils, MSG or something else that I didn’t want to eat.

These chips, though, weren’t that bad and satisfied my crispy spicy craving. These were pretty intense.

For second dinner, we went to the Blue Iguana, a Mexican restaurant not affiliated with the Red Iguana from Saturday night.  It happened to be right down the street from our hotel, which was convenient.

Surprise!  We each had a margarita… and shared the vegetarian taco plate.  It was good, but nothing to write home about.

And today (Tuesday), it was time for us to head home.  I hate to admit it, but the closest we got to the lake was when we flew over it in the airplane.  On my next trip to SLC (I do hope to return sometime), I want to go to the lake and I want to check out the one restaurant we didn’t have time to hit:

Vertical Diner is a vegan diner!!!  Among the dishes they offer are (vegan) biscuits and gravy.  Oh how I’ve been craving biscuits and gravy ever since reading that on their menu.  Someday…

Back home.