Stanger invites you to sit down and enjoy a warming pot pie over conversation. “It’s one of the top heritage foods that gets us through the winter months.” “Pie is the oldest food there is,” she notes. As a former pastry chef, Stanger considers savory pies one of her specialties, and they’ll be featured on the menu along with shared, family-style plates. “People take more time to eat when it’s cold outside,” she says.
“I love funeral potatoes,” she explains, “and they’re about as Utah as it gets.”įor winter, heartier foods will appear at the Lakehouse. That includes iconic local dishes like funeral potatoes, which are crowd-pleasing and heartwarming. “Instead of comfort foods from other places, let’s focus on things found here,” she says. “Let’s rediscover the foods that started this place.”īy reintroducing the lay of the land, Stanger hopes to show diners that they can’t always get what they want, when they want it-a habit that can engender a lack of appreciation for food that’s abundant from a specific area. “There was so much that this valley produced back in the day,” she adds. “People in Utah were all fish eaters at one point,” she notes fish came from the Great Basin area, and people trekked to the lake to eat. (Calling it American fare would, she feels, be a disservice to Utah’s food culture.) Her focus is on reviving food that indigenous peoples and early pioneers ate. Stanger sums up The Lakehouse at Deer Creek’s food in three words: Utah heritage cuisine. I want to tell the story of everything that has happened in Utah. The terroir of the area has so much to do with the food we should be eating. “I want to tell the story of everything that has happened in Utah.” “The terroir of the area has so much to do with the food we should be eating,” she adds. Stanger didn’t want it to be just another restaurant, but rather a showcase for ingedients prevalent in our own backyard. “It was something that I just needed to do,” she says about coming back to Utah to help open the Lakehouse, despite doing so in unpredictable times. Stanger landed at The Lakehouse at Deer Creek in Heber City ( 43, ) after the acclaimed Cotton & Copper in Tempe, Arizona-which she co-owned-shut down due to the pandemic. The Lakehouse Restaurant located at The Island area of Deer Creek State Park. Raised in a ghost town in central Utah, she grew up foraging and using what was abundant on the land-a life skill that would later put her on the map as one of the most visionary chefs in the country.
Chef Tamara Stanger is no stranger to the Beehive State.