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The Best French Brunch in Salt Lake City Is Hiding in a Cottage Near Trolley Square
The Best French Brunch in Salt Lake City Is Hiding in a Cottage Near Trolley Square
There's a moment that happens to most people the first time they sit down at Trolley Cottage Café. You've just ordered something that looked interesting on the menu — maybe the Pain Perdu, maybe the Croque Madame — and when the plate arrives, you take one bite and immediately think: wait, how did I not know about this place?
That's the Trolley Cottage experience in a nutshell. It's tucked into a converted cottage just across from the old Trolley Square building on 600 South, easy to drive past, easy to overlook, and apparently impossible to forget once you've actually eaten there. One reviewer put it simply: "As soon as we took the first bite, everything was devoured. Easily will be on the rotation list for brunch." Another called it "honestly the tastiest brunch I have had" — not just in SLC, but ever.
The secret, as it turns out, is a French-trained chef named Olivier Bouillot. And once you know that, everything on the menu starts to make a lot more sense.
The Unexpected Story Behind Salt Lake City's Quaintest Café
The Trolley Square neighborhood has always had a certain scrappy charm to it. It's one of the few pockets of the East Side that still feels like a real neighborhood rather than a development project — old buildings, local businesses, the kind of place where a converted home can still function as a restaurant without looking out of place. That corner of 600 South has been home to Skewered Thai for years, a longtime local favorite run by Lek Lekbox and her family. What most people didn't know — for a surprisingly long time — was that the family had also quietly opened a French-inspired bistro in the adjacent cottage space.
Trolley Cottage Café didn't arrive with fanfare or a splashy launch. It opened with a small dining room, a garden patio, a thoughtfully decorated interior, and Chef Olivier Bouillot running the kitchen. Bouillot's French training is the backbone of the entire operation. His background shapes not just what's on the menu but how it's made — the Béchamel sauce isn't from a jar, the salmon is smoked in-house, the hollandaise is made properly, the omelets are the work of someone who actually knows what a French omelet is supposed to be.
The result is something Salt Lake City's brunch scene was genuinely missing: a casual French bistro that doesn't require a special occasion or a reservation, where you can sit in the garden under the red chestnut trees with a mimosa and feel like you've stumbled into somewhere much cooler than you expected.
In 2024, Yelp noticed. Trolley Cottage Café landed on Yelp's annual list of the 100 best brunch spots in the United States, ranked No. 65 with a 4.5-star rating across hundreds of reviews. For a small, family-run café with limited indoor seating and no reservations policy, that's a remarkable thing. For regulars, it wasn't surprising at all.
The French Bistro Brunch Experience: What to Order and Why It Matters
Let's be direct about the Pain Perdu: it's not French toast. Or rather, it is French toast in the way that a proper croissant from a Parisian boulangerie is technically a crescent roll. The concept is the same; the execution is something else entirely.
At Trolley Cottage, the Pain Perdu is made with a baguette rather than the standard American sandwich bread most SLC brunches use, and it comes with orange Grand Marnier butter sauce, fresh berries, and mascarpone cream. The mascarpone alone changes the whole calculus of what a brunch dish can be. Reviewers come back for it repeatedly — "Love their pain perdu and eggs Benedict. Definitely coming back for more food." — and it's one of the clearest examples of what Chef Bouillot's training actually does to a menu.
The Croque Madame is another one. This is a dish that gets ordered at cafés all over France every day, and it's also a dish that most American restaurants quietly butcher by cutting corners on the Béchamel or using the wrong cheese. Bouillot's version — ham, Gruyère, hearty toast, proper Béchamel, and a fried egg — has generated one of the more remarkable recurring comments in the café's reviews. Food writer Ted Scheffler, a seasoned traveler who's eaten a lot of croque madames in a lot of countries, called it the best he'd ever had, including in France. That's a sentence worth sitting with for a second.
Beyond the French headliners, the house-smoked salmon tartine is a genuine sleeper hit. The salmon is smoked in-house — not a distinction most cafés can claim — and it's served on an open-faced toast with hard-cooked egg, cream cheese, grape tomato, cucumber, pickled onions, capers, and chives. One recent diner noted: "The tartine had so much salmon on it, it could've been an entrée." The kitchen will also plate it on a bed of greens with gluten-free bread if you ask, a small detail that reveals how genuinely accommodating the service tends to be here.
The Parmesan Brioche Toast with hollandaise rounds out the must-order list. Brioche + real hollandaise is a combination that sounds obvious but is almost never executed correctly. Here, it is. The buttermilk pancakes, served with mascarpone cream and berries, have their own loyal following — Axios SLC called them out specifically when reviewing the café after its Yelp ranking. And the in-house jalapeño chicken sausage and pork sausage patties are the kind of side dish that people specifically mention in reviews, which tells you something.
Weekend waits can stretch up to an hour. There's no way around that. But the café isn't doing anything wrong — it's doing everything right, and the neighborhood knows it. "I love to come here for special occasions," wrote one repeat visitor. "It's a small place but the food is good and it's always a treat."
A Hidden Gem in One of Salt Lake's Most Interesting Neighborhoods
The Trolley Square neighborhood doesn't get enough credit in conversations about Salt Lake City's food scene. It sits in a sweet spot between downtown and Sugar House, close to Liberty Park, adjacent to the 9th and 9th district, and historically home to some of the city's more character-driven independent businesses. The Trolley Square building itself — the old converted trolley barn — has been a Salt Lake landmark for decades. The block that houses Trolley Cottage Café has that same lived-in, pre-development feel that's increasingly rare in the city.
The café leans into that context. The garden patio, surrounded by red chestnut trees and seasonal flowers, is one of the genuinely lovely outdoor dining spots in the East Side — the kind of seating that makes a weekend brunch feel unhurried in a way that's hard to find in a city that increasingly optimizes for turnover. The indoor space is small and deliberately decorated, warm without being fussy. The staff is consistently cited in reviews as a standout — attentive, friendly, and accommodating in the way that family-run restaurants tend to be when the owners actually care about the experience.
"The staff is kind and the environment is gorgeous," wrote one reviewer in early 2025. "The perfect breakfast/brunch vibes come from this place." That's the shorthand version of what a lot of regulars will tell you: it just feels right in a way that's hard to manufacture.
Planning Your Visit to Trolley Cottage Café
Address: 703 E 600 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84102 — directly across from Trolley Square, about a 10-minute drive from downtown.
Hours: Brunch & Lunch: Tuesday–Sunday, 9am–2pm Dinner: Tuesday–Saturday, 5pm–9pm Closed Monday.
No reservations for brunch. Arrive early on weekends — lines can start forming before 9am and waits of 45 minutes to an hour are common on Saturday and Sunday. Weekday mornings are considerably more relaxed.
What to order: Pain Perdu and Croque Madame are the anchors. For something lighter, the house-smoked salmon tartine. If you want something heartier, the house-smoked salmon hash or the classic eggs Benedict. Add a house-made sausage patty as a side — either the pork or the jalapeño chicken version.
For dinner: Don't sleep on the dinner service. The kitchen runs Tuesday through Saturday evenings with a menu that includes salmon piccata, steak frites, and pasta dishes — an entire category of Trolley Cottage that remains underexplored and underwritten about in the city's food coverage.
Parking: Street parking on both sides of 600 South. Small lot in the back with one ADA space.
Instagram: @trolleycottagecafeslc
Why This Place Matters
Salt Lake City's brunch scene has grown considerably in the last decade, and there's genuine quality spread across the city now — from Café Niche to Sweet Lake to places further east. But there's a specific category of French bistro brunch, done with real technique and real ingredients in a setting that feels personal rather than branded, that Trolley Cottage Café owns almost entirely on its own. No one else in SLC is doing a baguette pain perdu with Grand Marnier butter and mascarpone. No one else has a French-trained chef running the eggs Benedict station in a converted cottage with a garden patio on a Tuesday morning.
That's a gap worth knowing about — and one worth driving across town for, even if it means waiting an hour in line. As one regular put it, after a Sunday brunch with friends: "I couldn't have picked a better place." Some places you discover once and never go back. This is not one of those places.
Trolley Cottage Café is located at 703 E 600 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84102. Brunch and lunch Tuesday–Sunday 9am–2pm. Dinner Tuesday–Saturday 5pm–9pm. Follow them on Instagram at @trolleycottagecafeslc.
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