From the Editors of Salt Lake magazine:
Each year, Salt Lake magazine presents its choices for the best restaurants in Utah. This year, we considered what we enjoyed on the table as well as where the tables of the best restaurants are.
Utah, as you may have heard, is growing. Amid all that change, new neighborhoods and restaurant scenes emerged. Meanwhile, many of our winners have served to anchor their locales and continue to draw both loyal diners and new fans among the recent arrivals.
In the 2025 Salt Lake Magazine Dining Awards appearing in our upcoming March issue, we zoomed in on the individual neighborhoods and fast-growing parts of our state that are emerging as dining destinations. But no matter where they are located—be it a busy downtown block or a charming perch in Southern Utah—by our reckoning, these are the best restaurants in Utah (as well as some new hotspots to watch).
If you’re new in town, let this be your guide to the dining topography of our state. If you’ve been here a minute, let us remind you of greatness in plain sight. Either way, we are once again looking forward to sharing our annual gustatory exploration with you all!
Meet our panelists for the 2025 Salt Lake Magazine Dining Awards:
Darby Doyle is a food, beverage, and outdoor writer who covers the culinary and natural wonders of the American West. She’s freelanced for a passel of print and digital publications, and her stories featuring Utah’s bar and restaurant scene have won multiple journalism awards. And we sure like her.
Lydia Martinez is a freelance food, travel and culture writer. She has written for Salt Lake magazine, Suitcase Foodist and Utah Stories. She is a reluctantly stationary nomad who mostly travels to eat great food. She is a sucker for anything made with lots of butter and has been known to stay in bed until someone brings her coffee.
Stuart is the founder, writer and wrangler at Gastronomic SLC; he’s also a former restaurant critic of more than five years, working for The Salt Lake Tribune. He has worked extensively with multiple local publications and helped consult for national TV shows. Stuart is an award-winning journalist who has covered the Utah dining scene for more than 15 years. He’s largely fueled by a critical obsession with rice, alliteration and the use of big words he doesn’t understand.
