Flying Fish
Tom Guinney joined Williams and Sieg at the Gastronomy Group the year after The New Yorker opened and swung open the door to expansion—in 1980, the group opened Market Street Grill in the same block as The New Yorker. The group took advantage of the new airline deregulation to fly the freshest fish to Salt Lake City from the coasts. Utah was no longer land-locked—the world was its pantry and no one had yet invented the term “carbon footprint.” Utahns had a seemingly insatiable appetite for seafood, fed by the simply prepared menu items and the fresh-fish markets inside each Market Street Grill. The restaurant cloned itself several times over the years and its marketing mission grew as awareness of safe and sustainable fishing practices became more important. Spokeswoman Marianne Farrier instituted a series of seminars introducing the media to the fisherman, one of the first instances of the kind of food education that would later become a best practice. The emphasis on ingredients sourcing is one that has spread to all levels of the dining scene.
See more inside the 2017 May/June Issue.
