Hell’s Backbone Grill

Food as Meditation

At dusk on a summer evening, honey-warm light shines from the expanse of windows in the large timber and tin-roofed building. Kids tumble on the lawn out front, and horses graze in lush green grass in the pasture. While people dine in shorts and t-shirts on the patio, curious cats circle a small pond. Saucer-sized hollyhocks frame the stone path that leads up to the screen door, and Tibetan prayer flags wave in the sagebrush-scented air.

The place is the small town of Boulder, high on the Aquarius Plateau overlooking the slickrock wilderness of southeast Utah. The restaurant is Hell’s Backbone Grill, named for the narrow nearby bridge that first linked Boulder to the outside world in the 1930s.

In many ways this restaurant is an unusual, and unexpected, surprise in this sparsely settled region. The owners are two women, Blake Spalding and Jen Castle.
Both were motivated to start the business by a strong commitment to providing delicious, healthful organic food with lots of heart and soul. “Our aim,” they profess, “is to be a restaurant with a conscience.”

For Blake, it’s a matter of putting her Buddhist teachings into practice: “I’ve learned to meditate while cooking to infuse the food with a quality of loving-kindness and generosity.” Every decision she and Jen make gets put through a “filter”: is it a sustainable choice, is it good for the community, does it reflect their value system?

Both women were working as cooks when they met – Blake for river companies and Jen as a baker for a coffeehouse in Flagstaff, Arizona. They had adventures together in backcountry catering, and when the opportunity arose to buy the restaurant adjoining the rustic Boulder Mountain Lodge, they decided to take the plunge. “We had a similar pace and energy,” Jen recalls, and an “intuitive taste” about food. And, she laughs, they knew the place was a real restaurant because it already “came with a sign.”

The first two years proved tough in the tight-knit Mormon town, population 200, give or take a few. But as they became more comfortable in the community and business improved, things started to look up. National media attention hasn’t hurt (the grill has received favorable notice in Sunset and Oprah magazines and The New York Times, to name a few). After four years of very hard work, both Jen and Blake smile and say they’ve realized a dream come true in a place they consider paradise.

At Hell’s Backbone Grill, every dish is made with fresh, seasonal, and, when possible, organic and locally produced ingredients. Both Blake and Jen design all the menus. A spring dinner will feature asparagus soup, a summer breakfast may offer fresh cherry pancakes, a fall meal will end with pear gingerbread. Other common ingredients are corn, piñon nuts, goat cheese, and juniper berries for seasoning. Much of this reflects Jen’s New Mexico upbringing in a big family, where there was “always a lot of cooking, canning, and gardening.” Basically, Blake notes, on any given day they look at what they have that they can turn into a dish.

With the nearest “real” grocery store a couple hours away, creativity and resourcefulness are requirements. Blake and Jen do receive regular food deliveries from Salt Lake City and a California co-op, but pride themselves on purchasing locally whenever they can. Beef and lamb come from neighboring ranchers, and trout from a fish farm in a nearby town. Organic chicken is harder to come by, but is on the menu at times. Again, diners at Hell’s Backbone can rest assured that any meats have been selected from animals that were well fed and well cared for. That is a Mormon tradition anyway, Blake observes, and so their neighbors readily understand what they want. Local eggs have huge yolks that are an “unearthly color of orange,” she adds. An employee and longtime local resident makes tortillas and a special “she-devil sauce” for those brave enough to try it. Another specialty is Jen’s Lemon Chiffon Cake, a blue-ribbon winner at the county fair.

Jen and Blake employ a full-time gardener who harvests innumerable vegetables – lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes, chiles, squash, beets, beans, peas – along with strawberries, rhubarb, and many herbs. A nearby orchard overflows with heirloom apples, peaches, pears, apricots, and small yellow plums. “In summer, whatever we have going on with fruits, you’ll see it on the menu,” remarks Blake – plum butter, plum glaze, plum jam, even plum barbeque sauce. They also raise beautiful old-fashioned flowers – pansies, nasturtiums, marigolds, zinnias, and daisies. Many are edible; a steak may come served with snips of marigold petals, or fresh limeade is garnished with a demure violet.

Boulder is situated at 6,800 feet in elevation, and the Aquarius Plateau is blessed with winter snow, summer rain, and good growing conditions. It would be more convenient just to order something from “somewhere far away,” says Blake, “but food that’s prepared and eaten in the place where it is also produced has the very specific and special flavor of the land. That’s what travelers to our restaurant really seem to respond to.”

Their thoughtful decision-making is evident not only in the food but in every other detail, including the handling of trash. The town of Boulder does not have a recycling center or even curbside garbage pickup. The rule is that “everything we grow, buy, and order must be used and used and reused,” vow Jen and Blake. For example, the restaurant reduces waste by serving only draft beer, rather than beer in glass bottles. Composting is a given. Table scraps are collected to feed local animals.

With tables filled nearly every night during the season from mid-March to the end of October, the restaurant has been a great success. It seats about sixty diners at one time, but when asked how many they serve each week or month, Blake and Jen don’t have a ready answer. “We pay more attention to personal connections than numbers,” replies Blake. She and Jen have lately been discussing what they might want to do should they have money left over. And, not surprisingly, they would like to put it to good use locally too: “build a park, buy violins for the school kids, pay higher wages,” notes Jen. They’ve also started a yearly tradition of a musical Folkfest and Farmers Market in August that features local talent and wares.

In the fall of 2004, Blake and Jen self-published their own cookbook, With a Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small-Town Restaurant. Co-written with Blake’s sister, Lavinia Spalding, and photographed by Eric Swanson, it contains “signature recipes, lively anecdotes, and a healthy dose of old-fashioned rural wisdom.”

And now that they’ve “made it,” so to speak, Blake has found that
the mostrewarding part is “promoting an ‘earth-to-table’ eating experience.” For Jen, it’s knowing that she’s preparing and serving food that’s “really honest and really true."

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This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.

Jen Castle