Let's be honest about something: Salt Lake's casual food scene is fine. And fine is exactly the problem.
We know, because we ate all of it. We are intimately familiar with the lunch rotation of this city, and at some point the rotation breaks you. There are only so many times you can do Chipotle, Zao, Whole Foods, and [insert whichever other spot in on your rotation] before you start to lose your mind. Or at least your taste buds. We'd stand in line somewhere, get our food, take a bite, and think: yeah, that's pretty good, I guess. And then we'd do it again the next day. And the next.
Nettle exists because we got tired of "pretty good."
We want to be clear: this isn't a knock on anybody specifically. Plenty of places in this town have fresh ingredients. Plenty have salads, sometimes. But too many of them are just kind of... there. Fine. Forgettable. And when you're trying to fuel a life that includes a dawn lap before work and a real workload after it, forgettable doesn't get you very far.
So we made the place we couldn't find.
And here's the part that's bigger than just one bad lunch. Where we live changes what we need from food. We're at altitude. The air is thinner, the climate is dry, and your body is working harder before you've even laced up. The mountain west asks more of you, physically, than most places ask of most people. The folks who live here actually use their bodies - on weekdays, before sunrise, on the trail and in the canyon and on the bike to work. That's not a marketing line. That's just Tuesday around here.
A bowl of sad greens with a sad drizzle of dressing is not going to get you up Millcreek Canyon and through an afternoon of meetings. We wanted food that would. Salads built like actual meals. Ingredients chosen because they taste like something, not because they photograph well. Portions that fill you up instead of sending you back out the door still hungry and slightly annoyed.
That's the whole thing. That's why we're here. No grand mission to disrupt the food industry, no plan to reinvent the salad. We live here, we move here, and we wanted a better lunch. We're betting a lot of you want the same.
If we're wrong, tell us. Go eat the best salad you can find in this city, then come tell us what they're doing right so we can do it better. We mean that. As of now, though, we're still unconvinced anyone's beating us. Come find out.
