Brendan Kawakami and Sam Starr picked a gorgeous locale in which to open their first restaurant together, complete with a patio that offered picturesque views of the southern Utah desert. And they were in a prime spot to welcome tourists, being close to two national parks and a national monument.

But what the couple got was a war starting a week before their opening day, rising gas prices and natural disasters that kept diners away.

And now, their restaurant, North Creek Grill, is closing on Halloween.

“We picked a notoriously bad year,” Kawakami said.

North Creek Grill, at 3680 W. Highway 12, was in business for only one tourism season, but it’s not for a lack of trying on the part of Kawakami, its chef, and his wife and co-owner, Starr. The couple put the last of their savings into the restaurant and even cashed out Kawakami’s retirement account.

They say they don’t have any regrets, though.

“We ran the experiment, and the experiment didn’t work because of the economic petri dish we were performing the experiment in,” Kawakami told The Salt Lake Tribune on Friday, the day after they announced the closure on Instagram.

In their post, Kawakami and Starr said, “This year has been anything but normal. War broke out, gas prices jumped 30% to 40%, and tourism to our area hit its lowest point in years.”

“Our hope was to hire from our community, pay fair wages, and serve the best food we possibly could,” the post continued. “And we did. But good intentions can’t outrun bad timing.”

In the end, Kawakami and Starr said they didn’t want to take out more loans or turn to crowdfunding, and that made the decision “not easy, but very clear,” Starr said.

“It wasn’t about just keeping this thing alive,” Kawakami said. “It was seeing if it could live, and it couldn’t.”

‘Incredibly awful’ numbers

Escalante is a tiny ranching town in Garfield County, located along Scenic Byway 12, and is close to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Capitol Reef and Bryce Canyon national parks.

Kawakami and Starr were counting on lots of tourists to come to the restaurant in the spring to make it through a slow summer, and then a busy fall that would fund the winter.

But they said business started slowing down too early.

“We should have been seeing triple the numbers we were seeing even in April, May,” Starr said.

On Memorial Day weekend, which should usually be busy, Kawakami said, they had 12 diners total.

And then on a Friday in mid-September, they had four people in the restaurant. “That is incredibly awful,” Starr said with a laugh.

The couple blames several factors for a slump in southern Utah tourism this season, including flooding and fires that scared potential visitors away and impacted access.

They own an off-grid home that they built a mile outside of Kodachrome Basin State Park and typically rent out on Airbnb, and Starr said they have had to be in “constant communication” with all of their guests because people would see flood warnings pop up on their phones and then worry whether they should cancel.

And the Cottonwood Fire by Beaver, which burned roughly 150 structures and scorched over 97,000 acres, “smoked out the whole area,” she said.

Gas prices, which have risen 50% since the war in Iran began in February, made it pricier for North Creek Grill to receive products and supplies in rural Escalante, the couple said, and made it more expensive for people to visit.

“I think it would be foolish to say that [gas prices] did not have an effect on people’s travel this year, which had a direct effect on us and all of the people in this community,” Kawakami said.

Increased fees for international travelers at national parks have likely kept people away too, they said.

One family came to North Creek Grill in May from England, on a trip to the United States to see Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks, Starr said.

They had driven through Zion, the family told her, but they weren’t able to see Bryce Canyon because of the new $100-per-person fee that all international visitors over 16 must pay, she said.

The family couldn’t afford to pay $600 for the six of them to enter Bryce Canyon, so they couldn’t go in, she said.

“I was blown away,” said Starr, who added she had no idea that President Donald Trump had put the fee in place for international tourists in January. “We desperately need their tourism money,” she said.

“Stuff like that definitely was a big hindrance to the amount of traffic that we saw,” Kawakami said.

‘How could we possibly turn this down?’

In their Instagram post, Starr and Kawakami said they intend to keep serving their food, “whether at events, pop-ups, farm dinners or for private chef work. It just won’t be under the North Creek name.”

But Kawakami told The Tribune that that’s all “up in the air at this point,” and that until Oct. 31, they plan to put all their focus into their last month of service.

They’re proud to say that 100% of the meat on the North Creek Grill menu is pasture-raised, which Kawakami accomplished over the summer, Starr said.

Kawakami takes those proteins and creates his “meat and potatoes”-coded dishes, which incorporate worldwide influences that range from Vietnamese to Middle Eastern.

He’s cooked professionally since 2000, he said, primarily in Salt Lake City.

Along the way, he helped open Avenues Proper and Beer Bar, and for seven years he was the executive chef at Post Office Place, which earned two James Beard nominations in the Outstanding Bar category under his leadership.

The setting for Kawakami’s food is a dining room filled with local art, and a patio that he calls “the most beautiful patio in at least southern Utah, if not the entire state.”

With North Creek Grill nestled at the base of Boulder Mountain, the patio looks out over Escalante River Canyon and a landscape where sagebrush and rabbitbrush grow, and wild turkeys and cattle roam.

“When we were deciding to take this on, we were weighing the pros and the cons, and we went down to the space and we sat on that patio and we’re like, ‘How could we possibly turn this down?’” Starr said.

The couple thanked North Creek Grill’s customers in the post: “To the locals and others who drove out, pulled up a chair, and spent an evening (or several) with us, THANK YOU. That’s the whole point, and you gave us more of it than we could have hoped for.”

They also thanked their staff, saying, “None of it happens without you.”

Kawakami and Starr told The Tribune that opening a restaurant has always been their dream as a couple and individuals. On their first date, 14 years ago, which was also the day they met, they walked to a space where Kawakami said he wanted to open a restaurant someday, Starr said.

“We wouldn’t take this experience back for anything,” she said.

Visit Toast.com to make a reservation at North Creek Grill.