Once delayed by fire, a new location of a Park City eatery opens in Sugar House

A new “upscale-casual” but decidedly family-friendly restaurant has officially opened in Sugar House.

Hearth and Hill, at 2188 S. Highland Drive in Salt Lake City, was delayed in opening by two years due to a devastating fire. But now — after a ribbon-cutting Friday — Hearth and Hill is ready to welcome the Sugar House neighborhood through its doors.

“We’re excited to be a gathering spot for the community to come to and celebrate,” said Brooks Kirchheimer, co-founder of Hill Top Hospitality, which includes Hearth and Hill among its restaurants.

This is Hearth and Hill’s second location. The first opened in Park City’s Kimball Junction in December 2018. A Hill’s Kitchen cafe and catering opened near that location in 2022; a Hill’s Kitchen is scheduled to open next door to Hearth and Hill’s Sugar House location in mid-April, with a covered patio connecting the two establishments.

Fans of Urban Hill, Hill Top Hospitality group’s restaurant in the Post District at 500 South and 300 West, will find the look of Hearth and Hill familiar, since the same interior architects designed both spaces.

And the contemporary American menu will include some Hearth and Hill favorites as well as dishes that Kirchheimer said will challenge the palate.

“We believe that American cuisine these days is more robust than it ever has been,” Kirchheimer said. “It includes so many different types of items that it didn’t include 10, 20, 30 years ago.”

‘The building’s on fire’

On Oct. 25, 2022, Kirchheimer secured the building permit and the liquor license for the as-yet constructed Hearth and Hill. Later that night, he said he was lying in bed after working on his computer and was about to fall asleep when he got a text. “The building’s on fire,” said a representative for the landlord.

Kirchheimer stayed up all that night, listening to the fire department and police radios and trying to find updates online.

The Residences at Sugar Alley, still under construction and unoccupied, burned that night, in a massive blaze that continued to smolder and flare up for six days before it was finally extinguished.

Luckily, no one was injured in the fire, and construction crews were able to salvage the bottom three floors of the development, which were made of concrete. The top five floors, made from wood, had to be demolished and rebuilt, an effort that took 16 months, said David Kirchheimer, co-founder of HIll Top Hospitality and Brooks Kirchheimer’s father.

Even after the fire, though, the Kirchheimers didn’t hesitate to tell their landlord that they still wanted to build Hearth and Hill on the ground floor of The Residences at Sugar Alley.

“We wanted to be in this building, great location, be a part of the Sugar House community,” Brooks Kirchheimer said. “And so it was an easy answer for us.”

A ‘modern city feel’

The Hearth and Hill in Sugar House has 6,300 square feet of interior space, and almost 2,500 square feet of outdoor space.

Inside, tall windows spill natural light into the restaurant, which was designed by Semple Brown Design, the same firm that designed Hill Top Hospitality’s other restaurants except for Hearth and Hill in Park City.

“We really wanted to bring the dining scene here in Salt Lake, in Park City, in overall Utah, something different and a little bit more modern city feel to it as well,” Brooks Kirchheimer said.

Two things that the Sugar House and Park City locations have in common is that both have roughly 18-foot ceilings, and both have open kitchens.

Having a kitchen that’s visible to the guests is “one of our signatures, because we’re big on transparency,” especially since the pandemic, Kirchheimer said.

If the restaurant’s glow leaves you gobsmacked, it should — all the lighting is custom. According to Lauren Lanzotti from Focus Lighting, there are 26 different kinds of decorative and architectural lights used across Hearth and Hill, not counting the lights in the back-of-house spaces and the kitchen.

From sconces to lanterns to lamps, Hearth and Hill’s designers made sure the restaurant’s illumination was warm and welcoming.

Hearth and Hill seats 190 people inside and 60 outside. The indoor furniture is in a variety of shapes, heights and configurations that “breaks the space into sort of neighborhoods — or it’s sort of like at home, where your dining room is going to be unique to you,” David Kirchheimer said.

“We could have saved money by just ordering 150, 160 of the exact same chairs, or same table, same everything, but that would defeat the purpose,” Kirchheimer continued. “Then you’d feel like you’re in any other chain restaurant. And that is the antithesis of what we want to create here.”

Other features of the restaurant’s interior include a horseshoe-shaped bar; a chef’s counter at the end of the kitchen that seats eight close to the cooking action; and a private dining room that can seat 40 guests and has its own patio.

A family-friendly spot

David Kirchheimer said his son’s original vision for Hearth and Hill in Park City was to be a place for the locals to gather, away from the more expensive restaurants that tourists flock to in Old Town.

The Kirchheimers’ brokers told them that Sugar House was like Kimball Junction in many ways, with a lot of families and retirees, David Kirchheimer said.

So, from the opening of Hearth and Hill in Park City, they knew “Sugar House was ideally suited for that family-friendly concept of Hearth and Hill,” Kirchheimer said.

The kids’ menu, for example, is elevated. There are mainstays like chicken tenders and mac & cheese, of course, but there’s also a kid-friendly steak and a fish dish, served with steamed or buttered carrots and broccoli. Children under age 2 receive complimentary buttered noodles. And there are even two desserts for the kids: a root beer float and a dirt cup, made with chocolate pudding, Oreos and gummy worms.

The amenities are family-friendly, too. In addition to the men’s and women’s restrooms, there’s also a family restroom, complete with a changing table.

The Kirchheimers have plans to use the plaza patio between Hill’s Kitchen and Hearth and Hill in a family-friendly way, like bringing in a storyteller to read books to the kids. There will also be a TV playing kids’ shows, so parents can find some peace to enjoy breakfast and coffee.

Eating at Hearth and Hill

Salt Lake City’s growth is a major influence on Hearth and Hill’s menu. “People have just moved here from big cities, so they’re used to high-end, high-caliber, hard-hitting menu items that really challenge them, and I think also invite them to new palates and new understandings of what food can offer,” Brooks Kirchheimer said.

People who have dined at Hill Top Hospitality’s other restaurants will recognize some items, like the cheddar biscuits, the Refuel Salad, the poke bowl and the gyoza that Kirchheimer said they make at all their locations by hand.

A new item on the Sugar House Hearth and Hill menu is a laksa, which is a fragrant, spicy noodle soup found across southeast Asia. Culinary director Eric Hill, who works with chef de cuisine Josh Bernabe, said they make a Singaporean/Thai laksa, which features a coconut milk base with lots of galangal root. “It’s almost like a Thai curry, but it has Singaporean flavors with the galangal and some of the other aromatics,” Hill said.

(By the way, Bernabe worked as a sous chef at Urban Hill under executive chef Nick Zocco, who has been nominated for a James Beard Award multiple times.)

More of Hill’s favorite dishes on the menu include the whole branzino, which is a European sea bass served with fragrant rice on the bottom and a salad/relish on top. “It’s definitely a showstopper,” Hill said.

He said he’s also a fan of the pork chop, which features a brine made with sweet tea, as influenced by Hill’s time spent in Nashville. The pork chop is paired with a panzanella salad, which is traditionally a bread salad, but Hill and Bernabe put a twist on it by adding delicata squash, as well as roasted tomatoes and a little chimichurri.

Brooks Kirchheimer said they wanted to give diners a lot of options on the menu, so there’s also a lamb dish, a burger, a pasta dish, a vegetarian option, a salmon sandwich and a chicken option.