SALT LAKE CITY — “A restaurant like this, if it’s in L.A. or San Francisco, it would be jam-packed.”
• “Even though it’s famous, a lot of people don’t know about it.”
• “I’m afraid the younger generation might get turned off because their parents and grandparents like it so much.”
Each of the above somewhat contradictory statements was made by Francis Liong, the relatively new owner of Lamb’s Grill in downtown Salt Lake.
On a recent weekday, Liong could be found sitting in the restaurant dining room, talking about the pluses and minuses of owning an icon.
Three and a half years ago, when he bought Lamb’s from John Speros, whose family had run the business for 70 years, Liong knew he’d acquired something unique. It isn’t every day you purchase the oldest of anything, and he’d just purchased the oldest restaurant in Utah.
Ever since Greek immigrant George Lamb opened his café in Logan on George Washington’s birthday in 1919, Lamb’s has served food to Utahns. The restaurant moved to Salt Lake City in 1939 and has been at its present location at 169 S. Main St. ever since.
In three weeks it will celebrate its 96th birthday.
“Owning the oldest restaurant in Utah is a real privilege,” says Liong.
He says it proudly but also with a bit of a grimace, because, as he explains, just because you’ve been around forever doesn’t mean you’re going to be around forever.
That’s especially true in the restaurant business. No establishment, no matter how venerable, has a guaranteed contract for the future.
Lamb’s challenges du jour include the new billion-dollar mall on the next block and its myriad of food choices, the disruption caused by the construction just up the street for the new performing arts center, and too many former Lamb’s “regulars” who have retired and moved to St. George.
One challenge: how to entice a younger generation that isn’t as enamored by menu classics such as braised lamb shank and rice pudding as their grandparents were.
Another one: how to compete in a restaurant-rich downtown with a hundred dining choices within a half-mile radius.
Liong is bound and determined he’s going to figure it out. “I like to make people happy,” he says. “If you’re running a restaurant and you’re not making people happy you’re not doing your job.”
He’s modernized the menu, adding, for one thing, a line of bigger, better burgers — like the hickory and Moroccan lamb — with top-grade beef and a brioche bun.
But he’s also retained old favorites, including the braised lamb shank and rice pudding, and he’s sticking with the almost-century-old décor, including the chairs and tables — and portrait of George Washington — that George Lamb brought down with him on the move from Logan 75 years ago.
In a little over a year, the performing arts center is projected to be finished. That’s definitely something to look forward to. Lamb’s will be in prime position for before-show and after-show dining, with the kind of menu to entice a discriminating theater crowd.
Liong knows that type of clientele. The first restaurant he worked in was the one his family owned on the corner of Santa Monica and Western in Hollywood, California. He was 13 when he started washing dishes and busing tables at the Imperial Inn, a popular Chinese-American restaurant that lasted until his parents retired.
Liong remained in the business and progressed up the restaurateur chain until he was general manager of the highly regarded Chaya Brasserie restaurant in Beverly Hills.
He left that position four years ago when he and his Utah-born wife, former runway model Joan Barlow of Logan, moved to Salt Lake City with their two children.
As it turned out, he was shopping for a new business opportunity the same time John Speros was ready to sell Lamb’s.
Now, at 58, the newcomer from California finds himself tasked with preserving a significant part of Utah’s food-business history.
If Lamb’s is going to make it to 100, it appears it will be on his watch.
“I don’t see any reason that’s not going to happen,” he says, brightening. “Look at all we have going for us. We have location, we have legacy and we have potential.”
Legacy and potential. In Lamb’s latest lingo, that means you can have your hickory burger and your rice pudding too.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com