The Best New American Restaurant in Salt Lake City: How Ryan Lowder Brought the World Home to The Copper Onion

There's a moment that happens to almost everyone who sits down at The Copper Onion for the first time. You're scanning the room — the warm buzz of a packed dining room, the smell of brown butter drifting out of an open exhibition kitchen, a cocktail arriving that you didn't know you needed — and somewhere between the first bite and the second glass of wine, you stop thinking about where else you could have gone tonight. You're exactly where you're supposed to be.

Since its inception in 2010, The Copper Onion has delivered a welcoming and approachable dining experience at 111 East Broadway in downtown Salt Lake City. It is, without much argument, the restaurant that changed what SLC diners thought was possible. One Foursquare visitor put it plainly: "A must-experience if you are into eating delicious food and ever in the Salt Lake area." That's not hyperbole. That's fifteen years of consistent excellence talking.

From Jean-Georges to the Wasatch: The Story Behind Ryan Lowder's Return Home

Ryan Lowder grew up in Sandy, Utah — not exactly the address you'd expect on the résumé of a chef who would go on to reshape an entire city's food culture. But the path from a Salt Lake suburb to one of the most Michelin-recognized kitchens in the Mountain West runs through some of the most formidable culinary institutions in the world, and it's a path Lowder walked with intention.

Inspired by an apprenticeship under Portland's Lisa Schroeder, Lowder formally trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, which led to an externship at Restaurant Jean-Georges and ultimately a full-time position at the three-Michelin-star restaurant. From there, adventures in South America and Europe beckoned before his return to New York, where he spent time with the Mario Batali restaurant group. His final New York chapter was as executive chef at Mercat, a Catalonian-focused restaurant that put his Spanish technique in sharp relief.

Then, in January 2010, he and his wife Colleen came home.

The name of their new restaurant wasn't an accident. The Copper Onion was named to honor Utah — copper for the state mineral, onion for the state vegetable — a signal that they wanted people to recognize that they were vegetable-friendly and deeply rooted in place. What Lowder built, though, was something that transcended any single identity. He wanted the world-class technique he'd spent years earning, without the world-class pretension that usually comes with it.

"Our mantra with Copper Onion was we just want to serve a bowl of pasta," Lowder has said. That's the deceptive genius of the place. The cooking is serious. The atmosphere is not.

When it was time to open a place of his own in his hometown, Lowder went in a different direction from fine dining. He wanted something more accessible — an American brasserie with simple, down-home dishes that are expertly executed with impeccable ingredients. That approach has made The Copper Onion arguably the most important restaurant in Salt Lake City's modern food history. "Opening Copper Onion was a challenge in itself," Lowder admits. "It wasn't easy to introduce Utahns to bone marrow and sweetbreads 10 years ago." He introduced them anyway. And Utah's food scene has never looked back.

The New American Experience: What You're Actually Getting at The Copper Onion

Let's talk about the food, because it deserves more than a menu listing.

The ricotta dumplings ($12) have been on the menu since the day the doors opened in 2010, and they're the single dish that separates people who've been to The Copper Onion from everyone who hasn't. Made with house-made ricotta crafted from whole milk, buttermilk, and heavy cream, then blended with flour, fresh lemon juice, eggs, parmesan, nutmeg, and thyme, sautéed in butter, and finished with a generous shower of Parmigiano-Reggiano — these are not the gummy, forgettable dumplings you've had anywhere else. They're light. They melt. They make you want to order a second round before you've finished the first. SLUG Magazine called them "strictly three-par golf" — meaning they're nearly perfect, and you could spend a lifetime trying to find the flaw.

The Wagyu beef stroganoff is the dish that keeps coming up in recent reviews, and for good reason. It's the kind of elevated comfort food that makes the brasserie concept click into place — a familiar shape wrapped around an ingredient that demands your attention. One visitor called it flat-out "HEAVEN," and that's the kind of over-the-top response that a genuinely great stroganoff earns.

Then there's the bone marrow, which Lowder has been serving since people in Utah didn't know what it was. Roasted and served with baguette, it's the appetizer that most first-timers approach cautiously and nearly all of them finish completely. One guest wrote of discovering it for the first time: "I had never had it and delighted in trying it and finding it so delicious!" That discovery moment — the one where a new ingredient stops being unfamiliar and starts being essential — is exactly what Lowder built this restaurant to create.

The house-made pastas rotate with the season, but the kitchen's commitment to scratch cooking doesn't. Everything from the pasta to the ice cream to the charcuterie board gets made in-house daily. Each dish is made in-house daily with a commitment to sourcing ingredients locally. That farm-to-table philosophy isn't marketing language here — it's the reason the shaved Brussels sprouts taste like they were pulled from the ground this morning, and why the seasonal menu in fall doesn't feel like a gimmick.

The cocktail program is serious without being insufferable, and the wine list is tight and well-curated. If you're coming for dinner and a show at the Broadway Centre Cinemas literally next door, a Honey Drop cocktail before your movie is among the better life decisions you'll make this week.

The Corner of Broadway and Everything: The Copper Onion's Place in SLC's Food Landscape

It's hard to overstate what The Copper Onion meant — and still means — to Salt Lake City's dining identity. When it opened in 2010, downtown SLC was a different place. The idea that a Utah-born chef would come home from Jean-Georges, from Barcelona, from the Batali empire, and open something both technically ambitious and genuinely unpretentious — it wasn't obvious. It turned out to be transformative.

As one longtime SLC food writer put it: "The Copper Onion's food flies against the wind of contemporary dining — it is simple, serious, and from scratch." That simplicity is the point. The menu doesn't perform for you. It feeds you.

Lowder went on to build a small empire of connected concepts — Copper Common, The Daily, Copper Kitchen — but The Copper Onion remains the flagship. It holds Michelin recognition. It was Salt Lake City Weekly's pick for best new restaurant the year it opened and has continued to appear in best-of lists every year since. The Infatuation named it a must-visit, singling out the ricotta dumplings specifically. None of that feels accidental.

The Broadway district neighborhood has grown up around this restaurant, and The Copper Onion has grown with it. Whether you're a local who's been coming since the beginning or a visitor who just landed at SLC International and asked your Airbnb host where to eat — this is where the recommendation leads.

Planning Your Visit to The Copper Onion

Address: 111 E. Broadway, Suite 170, Salt Lake City, UT 84111 — steps from Broadway Centre Cinemas and a short walk from Temple Square and the Gallivan Center. TRAX-accessible from the nearby City Center station.

Hours: Monday through Friday, lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, brunch from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and dinner from 5 to 10 p.m.

What to order first: The ricotta dumplings — non-negotiable. Follow with the Wagyu beef stroganoff for dinner, or any of the seasonal house-made pastas. The bone marrow appetizer is essential for first-timers. Weekend brunch with cocktails is one of downtown SLC's best-kept secrets.

Best times to visit: Weeknights are lively but manageable. Weekend evenings fill up fast — reservations are strongly recommended. If you're doing a pre-theater dinner before a show at Broadway Centre, give yourself at least 90 minutes.

Phone: (801) 355-3282

Find them: @thecopperonion on Instagram.

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There's a SLUG Magazine writer who, years ago, said that if he had to eat out every day and could only pick one place in Salt Lake City, it would be The Copper Onion. No doubt. That feeling — of choosing this place over and over again, not because you have to but because nothing else quite lands the same way — is what Ryan Lowder came home from New York to build. Fifteen years in, he's still building it, one house-made bowl of pasta at a time. If you haven't been, the only question worth asking is why you waited this long. If you have been — you already know exactly what we mean.