Restaurant Forte at UVU: How to Eat Chef Todd's Student-Run Lunch in the UCCU Center for $25

Restaurant Forte is the only fine-dining room in Utah County that operates on a one-hour-a-day, two-days-a-week schedule, gets booked out the moment reservations open, and is run by students who graduate before you can develop a regular table. It sits on the first floor of the UCCU Center on UVU's main campus in Orem, a few minutes off University Parkway, and it's the kind of restaurant that the rest of the Utah food scene has been quietly relying on for thirty-five years to produce the next generation of working chefs. The price is $25 a guest for lunch. The food regularly outpaces $60-a-plate downtown SLC tasting rooms. And the reservation list, when it opens each Monday for the following week, fills in hours.

If you live in Utah County and you've never been, this is the easiest assignment Salt & Seek has ever given you.

Who Greg Forte Was and Why the Restaurant Carries His Name

The story of Restaurant Forte starts with Greg Forte, who in 1990 cobbled together UVU's Culinary Arts program out of a converted Pioneer House at the center of what was then a much smaller campus. Forte didn't come from a fly-in faculty hire. He was a working chef who'd done time at the highest end of the industry — eventually becoming Director of Education at Le Cordon Bleu, which is roughly the institutional version of being knighted in the culinary world. From there, he came back to Orem and built the UVU culinary curriculum into what is now, by most counts, one of the most respected community-college-tier culinary programs in the Western United States.

The graduates fan out across Utah County and the Wasatch Front. If you've eaten at a Park City resort restaurant or a serious downtown Salt Lake kitchen in the last ten years, there's a non-trivial chance the person who made your dinner trained at UVU under chefs trained by Greg Forte. The restaurant on UVU's campus is named for him not as a gesture but as a working tribute. Walk in and you're sitting inside the actual room that produced your favorite Park City line cook.

When Forte stepped back from the day-to-day, the program kept going. The current operating note on the restaurant's official page is signed Chef Todd & Jenna — Chef Todd running the kitchen-instructor role, Jenna Hall handling reservations and the dining-room operations. That two-person leadership is what holds the room together while the student roster turns over every semester.

How the Kitchen Actually Works

Here's the structural detail that most diners don't realize until they're a course or two in: the students do everything. The menu is planned by Culinary Arts students. The mise en place is done by Culinary Arts students. The sauces, the proteins, the bread, the desserts, the plating, and — crucially — the service in the dining room are all student-run, with Chef Todd shadowing the line and Jenna running the front. The students rotate through every station of the operation across the semester. By the time a student graduates, they've cooked the menu, taught the menu, run the pass, expedited, served, and managed a reservation book.

"You can taste 5-star food at 3-star prices," reads one Yelp review that's been circulating in Utah County food groups for years, "and the weekly specials are always changing and everything is delicious." That's the framing that most regulars use. The menu shifts every couple of weeks — sometimes more often — because the students are working through a curriculum that drags them through international and American regional cuisine. One week the kitchen is doing French classical. The next week it's a Southern regional menu with biscuits and a low-country boil. The week after that it's a New Zealand–lamb pivot or a Pacific Rim run that leans into uni and yuzu.

Notable dishes that have come out of recent semesters: prosciutto courses that the students cure themselves; sea scallops seared on the plancha and dressed with whatever the produce delivery brought in that morning; and a rotating cast of desserts that the pastry track students treat as a final exam in front of paying customers. The reviews consistently flag the same thing — perfect 5s on food, service, and atmosphere. "Unbeatable prices and fantastic food cooked by UVU culinary students," one review reads, "with an amazing atmosphere and quality that surpasses many off-campus fine dining places."

What the Room Is Actually Like

The dining room itself is in the UCCU Center on UVU's main campus — a real, properly lit fine-dining setting with cloth napkins, real glassware, and the kind of pacing you'd get at a working restaurant rather than a school cafeteria. It seats small. Parties larger than six are not accommodated. Reservations are made online and open on the Monday prior to each week's seating; cancellations and changes need 48 hours' notice so the team can fill the table.

The pacing is intentional. The students are practicing real service — wine pours, table touches, course timing — and the room is sized so they can actually pay attention to each guest. If you've been to a fine-dining restaurant on the Wasatch Front, the experience is structurally familiar. If you've been to a culinary-school dining room before, the only thing that might surprise you is how confident the front-of-house feels. UVU's students are well past the awkward stage by the time they're working the Forte room.

Price point: $25 a guest, starting, for the regular lunch service. Some special menus push higher — the chef's-tasting and themed-cuisine seatings can run into the $40 range — but the standard lunch is squarely at the price point where it stops competing with chain restaurants and starts feeling like a steal.

The Calendar — and the Schedule You Have to Plan Around

Restaurant Forte operates on the academic calendar, which means the room is closed for most of the year and only open for the parts of the semester when students are doing their service rotation. The published hours on the CSV — Wednesdays and Thursdays, 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. — track with the standard fall and spring teaching schedule. Summer is closed. Winter break and exam weeks are closed. The official site's current note reads simply: "Forte will reopen Fall semester."

That one-hour window is the operative constraint. If you want to eat at Restaurant Forte, you need to be in Orem on a Wednesday or Thursday for lunch, with a reservation booked the Monday prior. Show up at 11:15. Be done by 12:15. The room turns once.

For Utah County professionals, this is actually a perfect lunch slot — UVU sits between Provo and Orem on University Parkway, and the surrounding business parks generate a steady weekday lunch crowd. For Salt Lake County diners, it's a 45-minute drive that you commit to once a semester, and it's worth the drive.

Why This Restaurant Matters to Utah's Food Scene

The Wasatch Front has been adding fine-dining capacity at a steady pace for a decade — Stoneground, Mar | Muntanya, Urban Hill, Hearth & Hill, the new Park City Michelin-curious crop — and every one of those kitchens needs a steady supply of chefs who came up through a serious culinary program. Utah's restaurant industry, in other words, runs on UVU's Culinary Arts program in a way that's not visible to diners until you start asking servers and line cooks where they trained. UVU comes up over and over.

Greg Forte built that pipeline. Chef Todd and the rest of the current faculty are keeping it running. And the students who graduate through Restaurant Forte are the people who'll be cooking your Park City anniversary dinner three years from now. Eating at Forte is, more than at any other Utah restaurant, eating at the source.

Planning Your Visit to Restaurant Forte

Restaurant Forte is on the first floor of the UCCU Center, Utah Valley University, 800 West University Parkway, Orem, UT 84058, mailstop 154. Phone for reservations is (801) 863-6925 (ask for Jenna Hall) or use the online reservations system at uvu.edu/culinary/services/forte.html.

Hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays, 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., fall and spring semesters only. Closed summer and academic breaks. Maximum party size of six. Cashless — credit or debit only. Lunch starts at $25 per guest.

What to order: whatever's on the menu that week. The students plan it; the chef-instructors test it; the rotation is the point. If you have any flexibility on the date, check the published menu when it goes up the prior week — if you see scallops, sweetbreads, or a charcuterie-forward course, that's the week to book.

This is why we live here. Utah County has been quietly developing a real food scene for two decades, and the engine that makes most of it work sits in a one-hour-a-day dining room on the UVU campus. Book a Wednesday or Thursday, bring three friends, and have the most underpriced fine-dining lunch in the state. Tip well — the students remember.