True to its name, Nomad Eatery has wandered throughout Salt Lake County since first opening almost 10 years ago, but it seems like the American restaurant has finally found a permanent home.

Nomad Eatery is now open at its new location in South Jordan, but it started on North Temple near the airport, then branched off as Nomad East in the Yalecrest neighborhood, and later became the restaurant at Uinta Brewing Co.

Today, there’s still Nomad East, plus the new Nomad Eatery, located just steps from the Ballpark at America First Square in Downtown Daybreak.

The spot “aligns so much with what we wanted,” said chef and owner Holly Cloyd.

She said she and her collaborators were drawn to the neighborhood setting and sense of community that Larry H. Miller Real Estate is aiming to create in Downtown Daybreak by bringing in all local restaurants, like Nomad Eatery, Red Iguana, Hires Big H and Rockwell Ice Cream Co.

“They’re trying to build what you would have to drive to downtown Salt Lake for, but out here on the west side,” Cloyd said.

‘I had found my path’

Cloyd became a chef relatively later in life, after being a stay-at-home mom for 30 years and after most of her five children had left home.

Needing something to “fill my hours,” and knowing she loved food, cooking and travel, Cloyd decided she wanted to go to culinary school.

She talked about her dream with a chef at a favorite restaurant, Justin Soelberg, and he invited her to work for him to see if working in a commercial kitchen was something she wanted to do.

So Cloyd ended up working at Pizzeria 712 in Orem, then Communal in Provo.

“I found out that I absolutely loved it,” she said. “I think one of the things I loved most was working in a kitchen all day long with like-minded people, and we could talk about everything food-related, and nobody got sick of us talking about it.”

“I felt like I had found my path,” she continued.

After honing her skills in commercial kitchens, she was accepted at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. She put her house in Utah up for rent and moved to the East Coast with her 15-year-old son to go to school.

After culinary school, Cloyd returned to Utah and teamed up with her son Eli Foutz to start the Cluck Truck, a food truck that focused on fried chicken. She sold the business in 2017.

That year, Cloyd opened Nomad Eatery on North Temple with the help of Soelberg and her family. She said the restaurant concept was inspired by her childhood spent abroad, when she “fell in love with all the flavors of the world,” especially Middle Eastern food.

Going with a name like Nomad Eatery, “we can have five different countries on the menu at one time if we want,” she said.

Cooking for ‘friends and family’

So far, the new Nomad Eatery has been getting diners who previously came to the Uinta location, Cloyd said, as well as Daybreak dwellers who would drive across the valley to visit Nomad East but can now visit Nomad Eatery practically in their backyard.

Now, fans of Nomad can get all of the restaurant’s food in one place for the first time since the restaurant was located on North Temple. The new Nomad Eatery offers all of the pizza that was available only at Nomad East, as well as the salads, sandwiches, burgers and main dishes that were served at Uinta.

Nomad Eatery focuses on fresh and seasonal ingredients, many of them sourced locally. The menu changes depending on the time of year, Cloyd said, and they make as much as possible themselves.

For example, making Nomad Eatery’s smoked turkey is a three-day process, she said. Instead of buying turkey already smoked, the cooks take whole turkeys, butcher them, brine them, rub them with a seasoning mixture, and then let them sit.

Then they smoke the turkey, sous vide it, and slice it, Cloyd said. The finished product is served on Nomad Eatery’s smoked turkey club, which comes with bacon, jack cheese and housemade zucchini pickles.

“People that try our food, they may not know that’s why it’s so good,” Cloyd said. “It’s because we’re using high-quality ingredients, and we’re making everything from scratch.”

The current menu is a collaboration between Cloyd and chefs Vance Lott, Diego Najarro and Jonah Foutz, another of her sons.

It has a nomadic, worldly feel, with eclectic dishes like falafel, hummus, pork tacos and Korean wings next to American classics like burgers, loaded fries and cheese curds.

And the pizza options seem like the result of chefs just having fun in the kitchen, with flavors like the Thai-tanic ($22, with coconut cream sauce, broccolini and braised pork shoulder) and the seasonal customer favorite pizza Children of the Corn ($22), which features chorizo, buttermilk ranch, serrano peppers and fresh summer Utah corn.

I loved the Children of the Corn pizza, and thought the combination of the sweet corn with the peppers was perfect.

Many of the dishes on the menu are meant to be shared, a dining format that Cloyd said she grew to love when she worked at Communal.

The smashed potatoes ($13) are a shareable dish of crispy Yukon Gold potatoes, garlic confit butter, parmesan, chives and creme fraiche, with an unexpected addition of lemon that brightens ingredients that could otherwise be too rich.

The roasted and pickled beets ($15) are another winning shareable, where the zippy beets and arugula conceal a welcome secret: a generous portion of ricotta with herbs. I would’ve liked more beets, though.

At the end of the meal, don’t forget dessert. Cloyd worked as a pastry chef for a stint after culinary school, and said, “I love baking, I love sweets.”

If it’s on the menu, order the cornbread peach blueberry cobbler, a dessert special made with local peaches. It comes with a local honey butter drizzle, made with Utah honey.

“We take a lot of pride in cooking and making things that we would serve to our friends and family,” Cloyd said, “because they are hopefully going to become our friends and family, like they have at [Nomad] East.”

Address • Nomad Eatery, 5446 Center Field Drive, Suite 120, South Jordan. Nomad East is at 1675 E. 1300 South in Salt Lake City.

Hours • Sunday-Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Price • Prices for main dishes range from $17 for the fish and chips and the pork tacos to $32 for the Mary’s half roasted chicken.

Vegetarian options • Yes, quite a few.

Vegan options • Yes, but minimal.

Gluten-free options • Yes, quite a few.

Off-street parking • Available at the South Jordan Downtown TRAX station and in the dirt lot south of Red Iguana.

Patio • Year-round covered patio with slide-up doors.

Noise level • Medium to high.