Tag: food drink

One of Utah’s most acclaimed restaurants is on the verge of collapse, under a half-million dollars in debt, according to its owners — who are asking their fans and friends for help through a crowd-funding campaign.

In the first hours of the campaign, those fans responded generously.

Blake Spalding and Jen Castle, co-chefs and co-founders of Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm in Boulder, went public with their restaurant’s problems in a letter accompanying a GoFundMe campaign that went online Monday.

Spalding and Castle wrote that 2022 was the hardest year they have endured at the restaurant, at 20 N. Highway 12 in Boulder — one of the nation’s most remote towns, near the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

“Throughout our 23 years as restaurateurs, we’ve always identified as deeply self-reliant,” they wrote. “Even during three difficult and stressful pandemic years — and even when we received threats for advocating for the monuments — we declined offers from friends to help us fundraise for our survival. We’ve finally accepted that we need help.”

The duo wrote that “spiraling costs and a shockingly reduced summer visitation to the whole southern Utah region have turned things upside down, and we now recognize that we can’t move forward alone.”

Spalding told The Tribune that she and Castle had “made the decision that we couldn’t continue to slide into untenable debt, and were planning to let it go. And then a number of people reached out, even guests from the restaurant whose names I don’t recognize, … people who aren’t necessarily friends, or close, but were saying to us, over and over, the same thing: ‘Please don’t make this choice without us. Give us the opportunity to help.’ It took a whole month for us to wrap our heads around that, because it felt really vulnerable to put it out there.”

Winning awards, weathering COVID

Hell’s Backbone has always had challenges, with its remote location making sourcing and delivery have always been tricky. The business is also seasonal, and rises and dips according to tourist traffic.

The restaurant is known for its farm-to-table menu. Most of the produce is grown on their own farm, with a crew of four or five people, plus volunteers and interns. Most of the meat is raised, cleanly and humanely, by ranchers nearby in Garfield County.

In March, Hell’s Backbone Grill was named a semifinalist for the James Beard Awards in the “outstanding restaurant” category, the first Utah restaurant to receive the prestigious national honor.

The restaurant weathered the COVID-19 pandemic by offering takeout meals, and by receiving federal PPP loans totaling $689,587, according to a ProPublica database; all of those loans were forgiven.

The GoFundMe campaign aims to raise money to help cut the $500,000 debt the restaurant has accumulated, allow them to buy a building to be a permanent home instead of renting, and to upgrade the infrastructure at the restaurant and the farm. (In their letter, Spalding and Castle say they have been using the same refrigerators, and pots and pans, since they opened.)

As of Tuesday evening, a day and a half after the campaign was first posted, more than 1,300 people have pledged to donate $180,453.

In a follow-up to their first letter on GoFundMe, Spalding and Castle wrote that “we are positively overwhelmed by the outpouring of support — from near and far — and the love that we feel from each of you.”

Spalding and Castle set a starting goal of $324,000. “The number isn’t arbitrary — it’s 3 x $108,000. In Buddhism, 108 is an auspicious and sacred number, the completion of a cycle of mantras on a mala of beads,” they wrote. (Spalding is a practicing Buddhist.) “This is also an amount we believe will secure our short-term survival.”

Spalding said that people need to know that “we are not the only restaurant that’s in this sort of peril. … I think most smaller, independent restaurants are having a really, really hard time right now.”

She cited her friend, Salt Lake City baker Romina Rasmussen, who announced in mid-November that she would close Les Madeleines, the beloved French bakery she has owned and operated for 19 years, at the end of December. That news, Spalding said, “is a real heartbreaker, because her place is extraordinary.”

Right now, Spalding said, the online store at Hell’s Backbone Grill has slowed down, because of employees out sick with COVID-19. “We’re about to see a huge new wave of [restaurant closures],” she said, “because we all took the economic impact disaster relief loans, thinking it would give us some resilience. But I don’t think anyone expected the impact to go on so long.”

Shows of support

Fans of Hell’s Backbone Grill have been expressing their love of the restaurant, and of Spalding and Castle.

Amelia Luttmer,

NORTH CANTON, Ohio — A North Canton restaurant is turning a longtime tradition into a way to help victims of Hurricane Ian. With customer approval, Eadies Fish House plans to donate the dollar bills it’s accumulated on its walls over 14 years.

“People have been putting dollars on our walls and creating little artworks, their names, little sayings on their dollars and hanging them on the walls,” said owner Rudy Diotale, explaining the tradition began with a customer who saw similar decor at bars and restaurants in Florida.

The bills’ homage to vacations in the Sunshine State fit the restaurant’s existing theme. Eadies is known to its customer base for its cod and walleye.

“There’s no other seafood places like this here,” gushed customer Nelda Hardie. “If you come here and don’t eat, it’s a shame.”

Diotale also curated eclectic decorations, like tiki carvings, license plates and cheeky signs, from his many trips to Pine Island and Matlacha off the coast of Cape Coral, Florida. He plans to retire to the waterfront home he purchased there with his wife.

“A lot of the aesthetics in the restaurant were inspired by Pine Island and Matlacha,” he said. “It’s an old fishing village. You don’t see hotels or condos – it’s kind of old world Florida.”

Diotale’s most recent trip to southwest Florida was several weeks after Hurricane Ian barreled across the region, destroying homes, businesses and entire communities.

RELATED: Hurricane Ian barrels across Florida, leaving destruction, flooding and power outages

“It’s unbelievable. I think my mouth was hanging open when I saw the destruction. There were roads that were gone and businesses that were blown off their pilings that were built over the water,” he recalled.

He felt compelled to help. And his restaurant had already been collecting the funds on its walls.

“I didn’t feel that the dollars were mine, I felt they were the customers’ that put them up there,” he said. “So we did a little poll and asked everyone what they thought of it. It was overwhelmingly positive, so we went from there.”

The process of collecting, organizing and donating the money has proved more challenging than originally thought. Diotale said it took his staff days to meticulously remove around 5,000 bills and organize them in neat piles of $100. The bank was unable to accept some of the more artistic dollars where markings have obscured serial numbers.

“They haven’t counted all of them yet, but about 10-15% of the bills are unreadable,” he explained. “So we’re trying to figure out some way to clean them so we can use them.”

The restaurant has been researching and crowdsourcing methods to clean the dollars.

“It just absorbs the ink. So it’s hard to get out without scraping the serial numbers off with it,” Diotale said. “We’ve tried chemicals with no luck. And we’re trying a few other different things. We have some other ideas that people threw out there that we’re going to try.”

He’s looking for a solution so he can maximize the donation to his home away from home.

“We spent a lot of time on the island, we know a lot of people on the island. It’s just kind of a hit home to us,” he said.

Eadies Fish House is still collecting funds for victims of Hurricane Ian. Donations can be dropped off in person at the restaurant at 6616 Wise Ave. NW in North Canton. You can also donate through a GoFundMe page by clicking on this link.

Diotale plans to continue the tradition of pinning the dollar bills to the walls and ceilings and says they may be used for another worthy cause down the line.

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