The Best Fine Dining in Salt Lake City Starts With a Mountain Most People Can't Name

Let's get this out of the way first: it's pronounced "Oak-er."

The restaurant even tells you so, right there on the drink menu, spelled out phonetically like a cheat sheet for the uninitiated. And honestly, that little detail says everything you need to know about Oquirrh — a place that is fiercely, unapologetically rooted in Utah, the kind of restaurant that names itself after the mountain range most locals see every single day but couldn't pick out on a map. The Oquirrh Mountains sit on the western edge of the Salt Lake Valley, ever-present but somehow always overlooked, perpetually outshined by the more famous Wasatch Range to the east. Sound familiar? It should. Because for years, Salt Lake City's food scene played exactly that role on the national stage — there but underestimated, real but rarely celebrated.

Oquirrh, the restaurant, was built to change that. And at this point, it's hard to argue it hasn't.

Nestled near the quiet end of downtown Salt Lake City, Oquirrh has quickly become one of the city's most beloved culinary destinations. It opened in February 2019 at 368 E. 100 South, and in the years since, it's earned James Beard semifinalist nominations in 2023, 2025, and again in 2026. It won Salt Lake Magazine's Best Restaurant of 2025. It's the kind of place that first-time visitors stumble into and immediately feel the guilt of not having found sooner. As one TripAdvisor reviewer put it simply: "Don't miss this gem. This restaurant truly embodies the passion of a couple who made their dream come true."

A Love Story That Became a Restaurant

Every great restaurant has an origin story, but very few of them are actually love stories. Oquirrh is one of them.

Andrew and Angie Fuller met at The Copper Onion over ten years ago. They dated for eight years, got married, and both knew from the start they wanted to own a restaurant together. They researched spaces for years until the right one finally became available, began the remodel in October 2018, and opened their doors on February 26, 2019. 

Andrew started cooking young. He got a line cook job at a country club when he was just 16 and has worked in kitchens ever since, eventually becoming Chef de Cuisine at Pago on 9th & 9th before striking out on his own. His career traces a line through some of Salt Lake City's most formative restaurants — Copper Onion, Pago, HSL — the institutions that built the modern SLC food scene. He learned from the best, then went off to be better.

Angie, who runs the front of house, came up the same way. She has managed table service for some of Salt Lake City's most well-known spots, and she believes that working at Oquirrh creates strong bonds very quickly. "In some ways I feel like their mom," she says of her servers, adding that the restaurant is very small — there's no wall dividing the front of house from the kitchen, so there is nowhere to hide. That openness is intentional. It's part of what makes Oquirrh feel less like a transaction and more like being invited into someone's home.

"We want Oquirrh to be Oquirrh," Andrew has said. "The only way to do that is having me in the kitchen almost every night and a service experience that comes from having Angie in the building." 

When COVID hit and the dining room went dark, the Fullers didn't disappear. They made take-home meal kits that customers could pick up directly from their front door. When they reopened, many of their first customers were those who had regularly ordered those pandemic kits. That's the kind of loyalty you don't manufacture. You earn it, one meal at a time.

What It's Actually Like to Eat at Oquirrh

Here's the thing about fine dining in Salt Lake City: there's a fair amount of places that perform ambition without quite delivering on it. Oquirrh is not one of those places.

Chef Fuller strips phenomenal raw ingredients down to their elemental potential, builds them back up in unexpected and whimsical ways, and then sends those spectacular plates out as if it's all no big deal. The menu is seasonal, locally sourced, and changes often enough that regulars come back every few weeks just to see what's new. It's New American cooking at its most thoughtful — familiar enough to feel accessible, inventive enough to make you stop mid-bite and think.

The sourdough bread arrives first, and people lose their minds over it. One TripAdvisor reviewer, in town for a conference and eating their way through the city's best spots, called it "arguably the best sourdough bread I've ever eaten." That's not hyperbole you throw around lightly when you've been eating well for a living.

The confit chicken pot pie is one of those dishes that Andrew and Angie just can't shake from the menu — a delicate puff pastry filled with decadent confit, fennel mirepoix, and mushrooms. It's the dish that reviewers keep mentioning, the one that inspires phrases like "out of this world." The pastry punches upward like the drumstick is trying to escape, which is apparently both visually striking and entirely delicious.

Then there are the milk braised potatoes. Multiple reviews, across multiple platforms, mention them unprompted. "You will not want to miss the milk braised potatoes!" wrote one diner, the kind of emphatic recommendation that doesn't need a lot of elaboration. The pasta dishes — house-made rigatoni, radiatori, foraged mushroom preparations — rotate with the seasons but earn the same devotion. One reviewer captured the whole experience cleanly: "I ordered the duck and the steak au poivre, and both dishes were cooked to perfection — exactly as expected. The flavors were incredibly rich and well-balanced, and the presentation was just as impressive. The setting was comfortable and elevated without being pretentious."

That last part matters. Oquirrh is not a place that makes you feel like you're being tested. The intimate dining room is warm and unhurried. There's not a bad seat in the house, but if you're in a small group, grab a spot at the bar and watch the evening unfold. The cocktail list is thoughtful. The service is attentive without hovering. Andrew will emerge from the kitchen occasionally, flour on his apron, looking genuinely pleased that you're there.

Three James Beard Nominations and a Mountain Range Nobody Could Pronounce

If you care about the culinary world's highest honors, you probably already know the James Beard Foundation doesn't hand out semifinalist nods for effort. The semifinalists list for Best Chef in the Mountain region is incredibly small — just under a dozen nominees — and in 2023, Andrew Fuller was the only nominee from Utah.

He's been back on that list in 2025 and again in 2026, making him one of the most consistently recognized chefs in the region. Three nominations in four years is a statement. It tells you that the James Beard committee — people whose job it is to eat at every serious restaurant in America — keeps coming back to this small room on 100 South and finding something worth celebrating.

Andrew has said he feels "incredibly humbled" by the recognition, that neither he nor Angie were trying for the nomination, and that he just wants to keep cooking. That's the answer of someone who is genuinely in it for the food. Salt Lake Magazine named Oquirrh its Best Restaurant of 2025, writing that Andrew and Angie Fuller have "created a top-notch culinary oasis and imbued it with their whole talented hearts and considerable gustatory chops."

The SLC food scene has produced a remarkable cluster of talent in recent years — Table X, Urban Hill, HSL, Pago — and Oquirrh sits comfortably at the center of that conversation. But what sets it apart isn't a single dish or a design concept. It's the fact that there are two real people behind every plate, people who met across a prep station, spent eight years building toward something, and then staked everything on a mountain range their future guests would struggle to spell.

Community Roots in the Salt Lake Valley

Oquirrh's commitment to local sourcing isn't marketing language. It's operational reality. This farm-to-table restaurant shops local farmers markets weekly, and Andrew builds his menus around what's actually available and good right now in Utah, not what a national food distribution catalog says is in season. The walls of the dining room display rotating local artwork, all of it for sale. The plates your food arrives on are made locally. Even the name — chosen, as Angie has explained, because "Wasatch is always used and Oquirrh not as much, and we watch these amazing sunsets everyday" — is an act of local love, a tribute to the view from their window and the valley they've built their life in.

This is a restaurant genuinely embedded in the community it serves, not one performing the aesthetic of belonging. When the pandemic hit, the Fullers fed their neighborhood. When the dining room fills up with birthday dinners and anniversaries and first dates, Angie remembers people's names. The kitchen knows what they ordered last time.

Planning Your Visit to Oquirrh

Address: 368 E. 100 South, Salt Lake City, Utah 84111 — right in the downtown core, close to the Eccles Theater and easy to reach from virtually anywhere in the city.

Phone: (801) 359-0426

Hours: Monday through Friday dinner from 4:30–10 PM; Saturday and Sunday brunch from 10 AM–2 PM, dinner from 4:30–10 PM.

Reservations: Strongly recommended. Book through Tock online or call the restaurant directly. For parties larger than six, email.

What to order: The sourdough bread to start — don't skip it. The confit chicken pot pie if it's on the menu. The milk braised potatoes. Whatever housemade pasta is running that week. Ask your server what just came in from the farmers market; they'll know.

Best time to visit: Weeknight dinners tend to be slightly quieter if you want a more intimate experience. Weekend brunch has its own devoted following and is worth planning around.

Parking: Street parking on 100 South and nearby streets is generally manageable in the evening.

Why Oquirrh Matters to Salt Lake City's Food Story

There are restaurants that exist to fill a market gap, and then there are restaurants that exist because two people simply had to make them. Oquirrh is the second kind. It came out of a decade-long love story, a shared obsession with good food, and a genuine belief that Salt Lake City deserved a restaurant this good, built by people who actually live here and care about what that means.

The James Beard nominations are meaningful — they confirm what locals already knew. But the real measure of Oquirrh is the regulars who come back every month, the out-of-towners who build their SLC itinerary around a reservation here, and the reviews that keep using words like "gem" and "dream" and "can't believe I didn't find this sooner."

If you're looking for the best fine dining Salt Lake City has to offer — the kind rooted in real place, cooked by real people, with ingredients that actually come from this valley — pronounce it "Oak-er," book your table, and go.