Don't Judge a Cover....
- Posted by Ann
I know. That’s not the way the saying goes, but that is part of the point of this post! One of the lessons of life I keep needing to relearn is that you limit your experiences by making too early of a judgement about how good or bad something is by how it looks or by what you think you know about it. And that applies to places, people or - in this case - restaurants.
Snow Canyon is a beautiful state park that we discovered when doing a Google search on “hidden gems Utah State Parks.” It wasn’t in our original trip plan so we knew very little about it ahead of time. Dan will write about how and why our plans changed, in a future post, but one of the search results raved about Snow Canyon’s natural beauty and said that Snow Canyon could well have been made a National Park but for the fact that nearby Zion National Park had recently been added to the National Parks system. It sounded like the kind of place Dan and I would like, and has the benefit of not too many people.
Here are a few shots from our two days in the park.
I’m sure those of you who know Utah could tell us that St. George (a town only a few miles from the Canyon) is one of the warmest places in the state of Utah. And man, it is HOT. It was the 3rd week in May and hitting the high 90s each day. So between shooting at dawn and shooting at sunset - we just had to find someplace cool to be. Hiking (and internally cooking), photographing (and internally cooking) or sitting in camp (and cooking) - well, we mild-climate Oregonians just couldn’t cut it.
Sometime during our first baking afternoon, Dan had a great idea - “Why not get some ice cream? “ After a search on Yelp, we found only one listed ice cream place that turned out to be a frozen yogurt place. Frozen yogurt and ice cream are not the same thing! Who knew it would be so hard to find an *ice cream place* in the hottest place in Utah? It seems like they would have one on every corner. We ended up getting some cold goodies at a local grocery store, but Good Humor bars and pre-packaged ice cream sandwiches wasn’t what we were hoping for.
The next day, after our early morning shoot, we decided to see a movie and go out for dinner to avoid the heat. We had a choice of three movie complexes showing “Guardians of the Galaxy II” and settled on one that had a show starting at in the early afternoon in a new-ish strip mall. Perfect! The movie was fun, as we expected, and around 4pm we found ourselves sitting in the “hot” (ah...scorching?) van, trying not to get bonded to the seats as our skin started smoking.
Dan had seen the shop earlier and initially thought it was a fast food chain restaurant. Then he noticed that it appeared high up on the Yelp listing and said, “I think that Greek and Middle Eastern restaurant is right over there. We can just walk there.”
I thought, “It seems like it’ll be a typical strip mall food joint - mediocre - though it’s too hot to argue for something better. And there will be air conditioning, so why not?”
As we walked up to it, I saw nothing to indicate I was wrong:
But inside, it didn't look much like a typical fast-food or strip mall joint. And the food definitely wasn't. My Chicken Platter and Tabuli salad was fantastic, as was the hummus and fresh (homemade) pita bread. Orange zest rice pudding, home made Baklava! Wow. I think Dan’s order was also delectable. MMMMMMMmmmmm. Even the left overs were great, the next day.
The walls were covered by stories of the chefs (John and Basila Graham is a husband and wife team) and a “Chart of World History.” One of the newspaper clips on the wall mentions that Basila speaks Chaldean Neo-Aramaic (and English!). My initial impression was totally wrong: this was real Middle Eastern / Greek food!
