1886 Grill | Smokehouse at Homestead Resort: Sixteen-Hour Texas Brisket Between the 8th and 9th Fairways

There's a moment, somewhere around 11 a.m. on a Friday in late spring, when the smoke off the 1886 Grill smoker starts working its way across the Homestead Resort golf course in Midway. The smell catches you somewhere between the seventh green and the clubhouse turn. By the time you get to the eighth fairway you've already made the decision. You're not finishing the round before lunch. You're stopping at 1886, ordering the brisket, and figuring out the back nine afterward.

That's the location: the smokehouse sits tucked between the eighth and ninth holes at Homestead, which is itself one of the more peculiar resorts in Utah — a 200-acre property in the Heber Valley that's been operating since the year in the restaurant's name, built around a natural hot-spring crater you can swim inside. The dining options have been re-thought multiple times over the last decade. 1886 Grill, the casual-barbecue counterpart to the resort's fine-dining Simon's Restaurant, is the one that's quietly become a regional pull on its own.

The pit master is Casey Savage, and his backstory is the kind of detail that explains why the food at 1886 hits the way it does. Savage has been smoking meat for more than fifteen years, but the formative moment in his career was a crash course in Dallas, Texas, that a BBQ-chain employer sent him through about a decade ago. He came back to Utah with the Texas-school orthodoxy baked in — dry rub, low and slow, beef-forward, sauce on the side — and 1886's menu reflects it. The brisket runs sixteen hours in the smoker and rests for five before it touches a slicing block. That's the technique that produces the meat one regular described after a visit: "tender, flavorful, and had just the right amount of smokiness." Another reviewer's experience was the more cited one — they showed up after 8 p.m. and were told the ribs and brisket were both gone. "That just tells you how good it must be."

What Sixteen Hours in the Smoker Actually Produces

The brisket is the lead and the bestseller, but the menu reads broader than that. Savage and Executive Chef Ezequiel Rivera — who joined Homestead with a fine-dining résumé that includes Michelin-level kitchens — built out the rest of the lineup with the same long-game logic. The St. Louis ribs come out glazed with a sugar finish that gives them a glossy, caramelized crust without going saccharine. The pulled pork gets a honey-habanero treatment that runs sweet-then-hot the way a good West Texas sauce does. The Santa Maria tri-tip — the California-coast contribution to the smoked-meat lineup — comes out medium-rare, sliced thin across the grain, dressed with the kind of garlic-pepper-salt rub that lets the beef carry the dish.

The sides do the work that sides should do at a smokehouse. The cornbread comes warm with honey butter, the way every cornbread at every barbecue should and never quite does. The cowboy baked beans run heavier on smoke and lighter on sugar than the supermarket version. The smoked potato salad is the deep cut — most Wasatch barbecue ops settle for a standard mayo-mustard-vinegar potato salad, and 1886 puts the potatoes through enough smoke to register on the palate without overpowering the brisket on the plate.

What surprises first-timers is the pizza program. 1886 runs wood-fired thin-crust pizzas in parallel with the smoker, and the smoked-meat pizzas are the move. The Smoked Hawaiian is the one to argue about — pulled pork plus smoked pineapple plus a thin red sauce, and it works in a way the original pineapple-on-pizza debate would not have predicted. The Smoked Chicken Bacon Ranch is the safer order. The Margherita is the order for someone in the party who didn't sign up for barbecue.

For non-smoke options the burger lineup runs through the Bogey Burger (the house standard), the Texan Cheese Steak (smoked brisket on the sandwich roll, melted cheese, peppers — a regional cross-pollination that probably has a Texas purist somewhere quietly furious), and the Smoked Turkey Club. Hand-cut fries on the side.

The Heber Valley Setting, the Crater, and Why 1886 Reads the Way It Does

Midway sits at about 5,500 feet of elevation in the Heber Valley, a high alpine basin between Park City and Provo that's been marketed for the better part of a century as Utah's "little Switzerland." The Homestead Resort is one of the older anchors in the valley — the property was founded by Swiss immigrants in 1886, the year the restaurant's name commemorates, and the resort's signature feature is the Homestead Crater, a 65-foot-deep natural mineral hot spring you can scuba dive in. The 1886 Grill sits on resort grounds, with the smoke clearing the golf course and the dining space looking out across the valley toward the Wasatch peaks.

That setting is doing work that's hard to replicate. The Tripadvisor reviews are split between people who came for a meal and got a meal — and people who came for the view, the patio, the proximity to the golf course, the post-crater appetite — and got a regional-Texas smokehouse they weren't expecting. The 4.2 Google rating across 86 reviews captures the average accurately. The Tripadvisor 3.9 across a more travel-oriented review pool reflects the higher expectations a destination resort attracts (and the occasional service complaint that comes with running a busy seasonal kitchen at altitude). The reviews that praise the food are emphatic. The reviews that flag service drift mostly point to summer-peak nights when the kitchen is buried.

Casey Savage's pitch — a Texas-trained pitmaster running a Heber Valley smokehouse at a historic Swiss-immigrant resort, smoking sixteen-hour brisket between two fairways — is more interesting than the average resort-restaurant slot deserves. The fact that it sells out of ribs and brisket on busy nights is the tell.

The Seasonal Schedule, the Glass Enclosure, and the Re-Opening

This is the part to know if you're planning a trip. 1886 Grill runs as a seasonal operation, traditionally late April through September. Homestead announced in fall 2025 that the dining space was getting an upgrade — a new glass enclosure designed to roll down during the chillier shoulder months and open up for breezy summer service — and that 1886 would return for spring 2026 with the upgrade in place. The reopening landed this season. The patio is broader, the enclosure handles the unpredictable Heber spring weather, and the smoker schedule extends further on both ends of the calendar than the prior setup allowed.

That timing matters for two reasons. First, it's worth calling ahead during shoulder season to confirm hours — 1886 still calibrates around the resort's seasonal traffic, and the schedule shifts with weather. Second, the ribs still sell out on busy weekend nights. The pattern is consistent enough that local regulars know to call ahead or roll in for an early dinner. Multiple reviewers across multiple platforms have described showing up at 8 p.m. and being told brisket and ribs are gone. The pulled pork holds up later in the night. The pizzas run all evening.

Planning Your Visit to 1886 Grill Smokehouse

1886 Grill | Smokehouse is at 700 North Homestead Drive, Midway, UT 84049. The phone is (435) 227-5385. Reservations run through OpenTable, and the resort's website: https://homesteadmidwayutah.com/dining/1886-grill/ has the seasonal hours and the current menu. @homesteadmidwayutah

Listed hours are Sunday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Outdoor seating is available, and the new glass enclosure makes the patio usable through more of the season than before. Dine-in, takeaway, and delivery are all on the table. The restaurant accepts reservations, which matters in summer.

What to order on a first visit: the brisket plate is the obligation — sixteen hours of smoke and a five-hour rest is the whole point of the place, and you don't want to order around it. Pair it with the cornbread and honey butter and either the cowboy beans or the smoked potato salad. Add the St. Louis ribs if you're getting there before the rush. The pulled pork is the better order for late-arrival nights when the rest of the smoke is gone. Save the Smoked Hawaiian pizza for a second visit — it's an argument the table will enjoy having.

This is why we live here. Utah's barbecue map has historically thinned out east of I-15, and the Heber Valley in particular has been a hole on the smoked-meat coverage. Casey Savage's sixteen-hour brisket, Ezequiel Rivera's fine-dining instincts running the kitchen, the historic resort grounds, the smoke clearing the golf course — 1886 Grill turns into one of the better Wasatch-back BBQ stops once you're past the assumption that resort restaurants are coast. Plan a weekend around the Crater and the smokehouse. Bring an appetite. Get there before the ribs sell out.