The omelettes. Mmmmmm. The omelettes made the drive worthwhile. For another customer, it might have been Karen Crompton's special white bean chili or Behle's baby back ribs and live music on a Friday night.
Crompton's Roadside Attraction quietly closed this week, ending 20 years of great food, service and music for thousands of Utahns for whom the comfy restaurant four miles up Emigration Canyon served as a second home and favorite eatery.During the past few days, customers have pulled up to the funky wooden business only to find their fantasies about Chili Barba cheese fries lost behind papered windows and a locked door.
No chocolate cheesecake today. No humdinger salad. No Avalanch omelette with browned potatoes and spicy black beans.
"Thanks for 20 great years with the best customers in Utah. We will miss you!!" signs in the windows read.
Nothing's wrong, nobody's hurt, there's no trouble afoot, Karen Crompton assured her customers and friends Friday. "It's just time to retire. It's been 20 years and 20 years is long enough."
So as the canyon leaves turn from green to gold to rust, employees packed boxes inside Crompton's cabinlike interior.
The bottomless white ceramic coffee cups are still lined up on a shelf, but everything else is in moving-out disarray. Pictures and photographs have been pulled off the walls. The wooden chairs and tables are lined up and pushed aside, ready to be sold.
Here, silverware and spices peek out of sacks and cardboard. Over there, boxes of consumables are headed for the Salvation Army kitchen.
Outside, Nikki, the husky white shepherd who is a Crompton trademark, is lounging in the sun, having contemplated one last iron skillet full of bacon, cheese and chicken goulash.
"Tell me it isn't so," a voice cried out from the restaurant's answering machine Friday. "This is the worst day of my life. Tell me there's going to be another Crompton's somewhere."
The answering machine has been full of messages like this, Crompton said. She and her husband, Dave, have been trying to answer calls personally.
There won't be another Crompton's, though. Dave and Karen owned everything inside the walls of the business but not the building just off the road's north side.
Instead, the family is going to finish an epic remodel of their Emigration Canyon home. It's been dragging on for years.
No specific hardship made them close their doors so suddenly, but restaurant help is getting increasingly hard to find, which means Karen and Dave have been putting in more and more hours. It's taxing, she said. Getting out of the business will allow the family some time to regroup. They've given many years to the customers; now it's time for the Cromptons.
"It's really a positive move," Crompton said. "We're not going to be moving, we're just not going to be doing this."
The couple's youngest son, Hart, is 4. Chance is 7. The boys grew up dodging waiters and waitresses. But there will be no restauranting for the boys and their parents for a while.
"Not in the foreseeable future anyway," Crompton said. "We're going to take time to relax for a while."
Word began circulating in the Emigration Canyon community Wednesday that the restaurant had closed. Employees showed up to work and found the doors locked. Customers stopped, saw the sign, stared and drove on. A simple answering machine message told callers the business was closed and to leave a message.
They didn't want the closing to be a big production, Crompton said. "It has been here so long . . . If they all wanted to come up here for one last weekend, we wouldn't have been able to handle everybody."
Dave Crompton started the business 20 years ago. The kitchen floor was still made of dirt then, and the state health department made him upgrade pretty quickly. The business has continued to expand over the years with a deck and more dining room space.
The shutdown may be the biggest loss for local musicians and their fans.
Gigs there didn't pay musicians the best rates in town, but the Cromptons were known as true, blue, music lovers. They featured traditional favorites: old-time Appalachian and Celtic styles.
Bobby McFerrin, who spent time in Salt Lake City in the 1970s, played regularly on Sunday mornings back then.
Musicians were always treated well, and loved to play there, said Sharon Mitchell, a member of the Public Domain String Band.
"Dave Crompton was very friendly to the music community," said Mitchell, for whom Crompton's was a steady gig for three years. "We loved to play there. A lot of people came to listen to music, and they appreciated what you did."