With the snap of the wooden chopsticks, squeeze of the sriracha bottle, and slurp of the broth, having a bowl of pho is more than just about the eating. It’s also about the fresh ingredients. The side dish of assorted veggies including bean sprouts, limes, onions, mint, and jalapeño, enhances the flavor of the broth and can be modified truly any way you want.
In typical pho house fashion, the soup speaks for itself. The restaurant, in its simplicity, puts the quality of taste in the food, making the decor and house toned down to let the foods shine as the main attraction. No decked-out tables, just the essentials — hoisin sauce, chili paste, and sriracha.
A gem within a neighborhood in South Salt Lake City, Pho Tay Ho brings Asian communities and other groups the experience of eating traditional Vietnamese soup, pho.
A bowl of beef pho and a side dish of assorted vegetables.
Pho is the ultimate comfort food. Pho Tay Ho is run by Mai Nguyen and her daughter Michelle.
The noodle house opened in 1995 after Mai came to the United States in the 1980s to seek safety during the Vietnam War. With a passion for cooking and Vietnamese food, Mai went from starting her business in an apartment, now where Penny Ann’s cafe resides, to having her own house down the street converted into a pho restaurant.
When the rent agreement was terminated for the apartment building in 2008, Mai was forced out of her business and made the future of the pho restaurant uncertain. Michelle Nguyen would describe the move as a “blessing in disguise.”
The home-turned-restaurant at 1766 Main St. was how the dynamic duo got their business back up and running. This gave the two ownership and the freedom to manage the restaurant their way.
For being in an actual house, location adds to the familiar feeling of home. Now being open for around 27 years, Pho Tay Ho is the place to get both great hospitality and any bowl of pho your heart desires.
Michelle speaks on her role in the business and the experience of growing up in a noodle house. Living in Salt Lake City her whole life, Michelle has worked alongside her mother for as long as she can remember.
Michelle Nguyen working her Saturday shift.
Growing up, Michelle’s childhood was a lot different from the other kids in town. “I didn’t have a typical schedule that most (children) did and since I was of age doing math and writing, I was being immersed into the restaurant,” Michelle said. Looking back, Michelle can confidently say that her childhood is heavily marked with memories at the noodle house that made her experience unique.
Sitting in the restaurant after school, doing homework up until she was at the University of Utah, making her own food and being so close to home, Michelle loved her childhood being centered around the restaurant.
Michelle’s passion for pho is the reason why working at Pho Tay Ho felt like the perfect fit. She said, “I got a degree in communication and worked at a station for a while, but corporate life isn’t what I wanted, so that’s why I decided to do this (work at the restaurant) full time.”
Since she was a little girl when starting to help at the restaurant, Michelle has the unique perspective of having customers that have known her since she was a kid. “We have a joke up front that says employee of the month and there is my kid picture up there…so longest streak ever on employee of the month,” Michelle said.
As for the beauty of the kind of meal pho is, Michelle describes it similar to Subway. “You can make it your own, I always get upset when people say there is a right or wrong way to eat pho because you can spice it up differently… you can change it up however you like,” Michelle said.
The inside seating and dining area at Pho Tay Ho.
It’s all about the broth for Michelle. Serving traditional Northern Vietnamese pho, Pho Tay Ho separates itself from a majority of pho places. With a lot of the influence being taken from the southern region of Vietnam, the Northern holds a lighter flavor compared to the deep richness of southern Vietnamese pho.
Being a part of the community of Salt Lake City, many in surrounding areas also love the familiarity and home feel that the noodle house has. Kathy Chau, a second-year student at the University of Utah, is a regular at Pho Tay Ho and a big fan of Mai and Michelle.
“I’ve been going there with my parents since I was really young and they had it in the apartment complex, it always felt homey and comfortable, like going to a family member’s house,” Chau said. Living in Utah her whole life, Chau loves the pho place for more than just the food, but for the service as well.
“I feel very calm in there, it’s not chaotic, very intimate, they care about the customers, very personable, not so much hustle and bustle, so that’s why I like it,” Chau said.
Being a Vietnamese American, Chau appreciates the quality of Pho Tay Ho’s cooking, along with the care they put into their service.
“Usually other pho restaurants I’ve been to are trying to push you in and out, in and out” Chau elaborates, “so I really appreciate the tastes of the broth and how long they could cook all the meats and other stuff.” Chau agrees with the reviews, Pho Tay Ho does have the best broth in town!
The noodle house has been a staple to people in the Salt Lake City community for around 27 years and is a guaranteed spot for authentic and delicious pho.
The cozy restaurant is a safe place to discover the world of pho. It stands for good family and good food, making sure that you’ll never feel homesick when eating there.
Traditional Vietnamese iced coffee with assorted vegetables.
Just a few short weeks after renewing their contract in Chinatown, South Salt Lake City, the owners of Tea’s Memory were forced to pack up and relocate their business, and fast.
A new franchise café was put in its place. Luckily, Tea’s Memory owners Yuling He and Haiming Yu were planning on expanding their business and had already looked at locations in cities like Farmington, just north of Salt Lake City. There, Tea’s Memory re-opened in June 2021 as the only boba tea shop in the city and its surrounding community.
Yuling He is making an iced citrus tea, which she said is her favorite refreshing drink.
“Utah is a state that I think has an open mind and boba is pretty new to them, but people are loving to try new things, especially in Farmington. That’s one of the things that I’m so appreciative of,” Yuling He said.
Boba, a unique textured drink, became increasingly popular in China when she was growing up, He said. She began making boba in high school and credits her business’ success to her former boss, who taught her the basics beyond typical things like inventory management, consumer relations, budgeting, and more.
“She’s kind of like my first teacher about boba. She taught me how to cook it, she taught me what is good with green tea and what is good with black tea. There is so much knowledge in this market and I learned a lot,” Yuling He said.
A few years after she began her career in the café business, He was accepted to the University of Utah, where she would begin studying accounting six months later. She said she wanted to spend the half year exploring Utah and getting to know the area before moving on to college.
It wasn’t easy to part ways from her friends and family, He said, but a certain animated video about new beginnings brought her high hopes for moving to Salt Lake City and comforted her with the endless possibilities to come.
One of the first occurrences in the United States came as a shock. He said her partner, Haiming Yu, was selected to launch a boba tea shop in Chinatown. The rent was reasonable, He said, and the location was ideal, and so came Tea’s Memory — named after the video that comforted her when moving across the globe.
“I see it kind of like my child because, me and Haiming, at the moment we decided to do it, it became a thing that we really value,” He said. “At the very beginning I didn’t want to do it actually. I’m a student, I want to focus on my study.”
In order to focus in school, she became the brains behind the café’s operation by investing and providing ideas and knowledge to Haiming Yu and their employees, He said. She appreciates the staff as they execute her ideas and run the café day-to-day to make it all possible.
The new store, located at 210 W. Promontory in Farmington, has continued with great success, manager Caralee Donaldson said. Like He, Donaldson said she had no previous interest in working in food service. But, she was inspired by watching content creators on YouTube, like Mike Chen, who create vlogs as they travel the world trying different foods including boba.
Donaldson said she is lucky to have her Filipino mother, who regularly made a dessert from the Philippines called halo halo, meaning “mix mix,” throughout her childhood. She describes the sweet treat as an iced drink with mixed flavoring ingredients comparable to boba and milk tea. Boba is nostalgic to Donaldson, she said, as it reminds her of her grandparents in Arizona.
“It’s always kind of sad because you never know when you’re going to see them again, you know, so we always make a boba shop stop afterwards to cheer ourselves up,” she said.
This sentimentality toward boba brought her to managing the café, where she makes new memories every day. Donaldson said she enjoys the diverse groups of people who come in and stay a while, charmed by the shop’s welcoming environment. She said she predicts that the K-Pop music played in the café will encourage unique crowds to return regularly.
Yuling He said she carefully crafted this cordial environment to stay more involved with her consumer community while she focuses on school. Upon entering the café, there is a vibrant wall of Post-it notes with messages from customers. Some notes feature drawings, from detailed sketches to stick figures. Other notes contain inspirational messages and quotes.
“It’s kind of hard to balance at the beginning because I’m international. I do have some limitations with working. The only thing I could do is give ideas,” He said. “Some people come in and they will read, and they will get inspired.”
Caralee Donaldson is making a drink behind the counter where customers view the menu and place orders.
The menu displays a variety of fruity flavors, floral flavors, milk alternatives, sweeteners, and add-ins like jellies and boba pearls. Customers can watch every step while the barista makes their drink. The barista pulls a cup from a tall stack, each one featuring a sticker with colorful Asian artwork made by Yuling He’s cousin. When the customer receives the visually pleasing drink, they can write a review on a Post-it note on another section of the message wall. Customers look to the colorful stickies to read other people’s experience, which can help them decide what to order.
Donaldson said reading the reviews is uplifting for her as a barista and manager, but “the most fulfilling part about it is I don’t even have to be making eye contact with the person. I can hear someone [say] ‘this is so good like I’m coming back’ and that makes me feel so good about myself.”
The drink is still very new to the United States, He said, and thus many customers don’t understand what makes the drink to be considered “tea.”
Brad Heller, owner and president of the Tea Grotto in Salt Lake City, is a tea expert who enjoys sharing his knowledge with his customers and curious tea consumers. He explains that milk tea usually has powdered Camellia Sinensis plant leaves in its mixture, making it a tea.
“I like to think of Milk Tea with boba as a Taiwan milkshake. It is sweet, creamy, caffeinated, and for most, fun to chew on,” Heller said in an email interview. “I welcome boba’s role in exposing more people to the nearly infinitely complex world of tea.”
The versatility of boba milk teas is convenient to customers who wish to adjust the nutritional values or flavors of the drink, Yuling He said. She hopes people see boba’s future, and encourages customers to customize their drinks to their satisfaction and not limit themselves to a menu.
“You can make it healthy, and I want to expand the boba market, especially in the United States,” He said. “There’s still tons of people that don’t know about boba and I want to be a person who introduces it to them.”
Customer reviews recommend a honeydew coconut smoothie, cloud foam rose tea, Hong Kong coffee milk, caramel oolong, lychee lemon bark tea, taro smoothie, matcha latte, and brown sugar boba.Post-its with phrases and a simple drawing of a frog. Pictured is a brown sugar boba milk tea. All drinks are served in a plastic cup with an artsy sticker.Post-its on the wall are brightly colored, each with a unique drawing or phrase from anonymous café visitors.
It was during the eleventh hour when at last they broke the language barrier for a moment. After 10 days of aiming to communicate, they finally understood what was being said. In fact, it was the only thing said during their stay in Japan that they certainly understood. It was “goodbye.”
They were on their way back to the airport, wrapping up a 10-day trip which they felt went by as fast as the two-month wait for the trip had felt slow. Four months earlier, brothers Mitchell and Treyton Imamura submitted applications through the Kakehashi Project. The Japanese government program partners with the Japanese American Citizens League to offer young Japanese Americans the opportunity to visit Japan in a larger effort to strengthen relations that join the United States and Japan.
“The Kakehashi Program was instituted when I was the national director of the JACL in D.C. Of course I wanted to see our local Salt Lake youth, where I’m from and I was born and raised, be part of the program,” said Floyd Mori, who served as the national executive director of the JACL.
Mori discussed in a phone interview his sense of obligation to do his part in building the bridge, or kakehashi, between his countries of origin. Having a pride in his identity is what drove him through such a successful career, so he felt it was important to share that confidence with other Japanese Americans, starting with those in his hometown.
Growing up during World War II, Mori said he experienced firsthand stereotypes and prejudices that made him ashamed of who he was. His family was always active with the JACL but one day he noticed that his interaction within his community helped to develop a better understanding of the culture. Because of that understanding, he became more appreciative of who he was.
“There is a sense of, you know, we’re real, we can do something, we can be something, and we’re as full of a human being as anybody else, regardless what their background might be,” Mori explained.
Thanks to Mori’s encouragement, the Imamura brothers said they received their acceptance letter a month after they applied. The excitement grew as they prepared for the trip, and Trey couldn’t help but remember his humanitarian trip to Brazil nearly 10 years before. He focused on keeping an open mind, free of assumptions and expectations.
Two months later, Mitch, Trey, and several other Japanese Americans from around the U.S. flew from Los Angeles to Tokyo, where they were separated into smaller groups to travel with throughout the trip. Mori was with Trey’s group as an advisor, so Mitch was on his own to make new friends during his travel.
Display of Japanese foods from around the world.Image of Salt Lake City hotel advertisement.Baseball bat and glove, on display at the museum.
He took photos of things he found interesting or could relate to, starting with the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum in Yokohama. Some photos included an ad for a Japanese hotel in Salt Lake City, a table crowded with international Japanese foods, a baseball glove and bat, and a basic butsudan, or Japanese Buddhist family altar.
Hot meal in a can from a vending machine.
It wasn’t long before Mitch encountered his first culture shock, he said. His first meal was a can of corn chowder from a vending machine. To his surprise, the soup was hot and meal ready. After that, Mitch said, “Whenever I saw a vending machine I just bought something, anything.”
His group’s homestay family invited them into their home in the outskirts of Semboku City. Everyone took their shoes off at the door as standard practice they were already used to. Mitch said he shivered throughout the tour of their home. It was February and central heating was uncommon in the countryside. When he came across the family’s butsudan, he was so amused by the regular upkeep with the altar that he almost forgot it was cold.
“A big part of the Japanese Buddhist ideology is that everything is impermanent, and that we can’t hold on to things. When you have food or flowers on a shrine, you are adding to the things that will go away and you have to keep replacing them with things,” Mitch said. “The religious symbolism in it is impermanence, that nothing is permanent in this world and that everything will go away.”
Imamura family butsudan, with ornate decor and valuables. Butsudan example in the Japanese Overseas Immigration Museum.Mitch Imamura was impressed by his homestay family’s butsudan, with perishables and memory items.
He continued to see things in a new light throughout the trip, he said. He felt at home. He was familiar with much of Japanese culture and was able to connect his memories with his experiences.
The group’s homestay dad took them to the grocery store. Mitch’s roommate, who spoke limited Japanese, translated for the dad. He said he was excited to introduce them to a food they might not have seen before. But Mitch said he recognized sakura mochi, a Japanese confectionery made with rice and red bean paste. He described it as a pastry almost as sweet as the nostalgia it evoked from when his mom made it for him and his brother.
“Throughout my trip was a lot of confirmation that I know Japanese culture really well. There were also things that I didn’t know, so I guess those things together affirmed to me that I am very strongly Japanese and American, and it affirmed to me that there are differences between being Japanese and Japanese American,” Mitch said, explaining how he finds balance within his cultural identity.
On their way to Akita, Mitch had a memorable conversation with a roommate about how they express their cultures back home in the U.S. His roommate said he felt more Japanese just for being there in Japan. Being from the South, there weren’t many other Asian Americans to relate with. His only connection to his Japanese culture was watching anime.
Life-size lantern fixture, like the one Mitch Imamura balanced. Lantern street art as seen by Imamura through the bullet train windows. Lantern-balancing figurine shows the scale of lantern fixtures.
Mitch took photos through the windows of the bullet train windows as they arrived in Akita. There, he experienced something completely new to him — lantern balancing. According to legend, it was once a way for the people of Akita to represent their small towns in a competition. They would hold massive poles with more poles at the top that attached a number of artistic lanterns. While it’s not practiced as a competition today, it serves as a community gathering event.
As he watched the lantern balancing, Mitch said it reminded him of the lanterns that decorate the Obon Festival in Salt Lake City, which for him is an emotional celebration of ancestry. When his turn to balance the lanterns came, he felt almost nostalgic of his own connection to the lanterns, but it was different because he didn’t have a great understanding of lantern balancing.
Mitch Imamura can be seen dancing in this video (at 48:35) on the left side of the frame.
Discovery was a repeating theme, Mitch said. The group went to a snow festival in Akita, where he enjoyed new foods like kiritanpo, an Akita Prefecture original rice dish, and saw intricately detailed snow sculptures. With the language barrier, he said he would remind himself not to let his American tendencies exoticize everything he saw because he was there to experience, not interpret.
Dragon sculpture made of snow at the festival Mitch Imamura attended.
“I don’t know if the festival actually had any religious meaning behind It, or cultural meaning, or if it was just a fun thing to do in the community, but it was a way for them to do something together,” Mitch observed.
Meanwhile, Trey was also making discoveries and connections through experiences with his group. In the town of Minakami located in the Gunma Prefecture, Trey’s homestay family began each day with breakfast before they embarked on whatever adventures the day had in store. Trey said their host expected nothing in return. At one point, Trey recalled, he said a familiar word, kimochi. Without hesitation, Trey thought of his mom.
“She’d always say this word kimochi, kimochi, and I never really fully understood what it meant,” Trey remembered. “She always said it was ‘from the heart, from the heart.’”
He said he came to the realization that his homestay family did generous acts for the group simply because they wanted their guests to have a nice breakfast, they cared. Despite not speaking Japanese, there was a mutual understanding of kimochi as the action not the word.
“The connection that I felt there was beyond words, because I always heard that with my own family and Japanese community. I could never establish an understanding, but after going to Japan and seeing that culture it reaffirmed that we are still Japanese,” Trey said. “It’s who we are and what we do in a lot of our cultural practices.”
Having experienced trains in Hong Kong and New York City, Trey said the systems in Japan were culturally shocking because of the overall cleanliness, to which he credits Japanese culture and respect for others. He said this distinguished his Japanese culture from his American culture and from Asian cultures in general. He spoke about how his ancestors’ struggles with their identity shapes who he is today.
“I’m not going to say that I carry trauma from my grandparents being put into internment camps,” Trey said, “but it’s a sad time in our history where my family was … seen as aliens.”
The Kakehashi Project held a sayōnara luncheon in Tokyo. Trey reflected on his favorite experiences, and said the public bathing house was particularly memorable.
“We were out in this natural hot spring and it starts to snow in Japan. And in the wind — it’s cold, and you’re in the hot water and just looking up at the moon, and I was like, life doesn’t get any better than this,” he said.
Then, a familiar song played during the luncheon. He said he once heard it in a documentary and loved its expression of homesickness and the constant desire to return home.
Mitch Imamuras’s travel group on the bus ride back to the airport.
“It was just really interesting to have this song where they’re talking about that. It’s a very common concept in Japanese culture to go home … and that’s where you know you came from,” Trey said.
On the bus ride to the airport, Mitch’s tour guide sang a melody he recognized. He said he sang along and described a connection he felt with his tour guide, which brought a realization of “we’re not that different.” The song was “Sugiyaki,” a popular worldwide hit some 40 years ago.
“Now when I hear that song, I think of her singing it a cappella to us on a bus,” Mitch said. “It’s a very nice upbeat song, but it’s about people leaving you forever and not being able to see people again.”
Scenery just outside of Akita. Mitch Imamura enjoyed tea at a cafe in a Tokyo mall.Imamura’s first sit-down meal at a restaurant with his homestay family.Kiritanpo made by Imamura’s’s homestay mom.Kiritanpo that he enjoyed at the snow festival.Views of the countryside around the group’s homestay.Imamura’s view during his stay in Tokyo.One of many shinto shrines he saw in Tokyo.Museum example of an immigration ship. Imamura said his grandparents may have immigrated to the United States on such a vessel.
Savory curry ramen, sweet mango sticky rice and much more dance across the tastebuds of customers just through the glass doors of the evolving Tosh’s Ramen Holladay.
“Tosh’s Ramen initially started with a Japanese man named Toshio Sekikawa,” said co-owner Maxwell Peck, during a Zoom interview. “He had been in the food industry for his whole life. … He just recently retired and sold the Holladay location to me and my wife.”
In January 2022 Maxwell and Annie Peck became owners of the restaurant, about 20 minutes away from downtown Salt Lake City. They run one of the two locations — the other located closer to downtown on State Street — and have a big vision involving more than just ramen. Sekikawa, nicknamed “Tosh,” ran both restaurants until selling them so he could retire.
Both Annie and Maxwell say they love running their restaurant. They enjoy the existing customer base and the relationship they have maintained with Sekikawa, who is now 70.
“Everybody loves Tosh,” Maxwell said. “Even trying to do a business deal with Tosh, we love him so much, he’s such a great guy. He stops by every once in a while, but he tries to stay retired.”
Maxwell and Annie were first introduced to Sekikawa and Tosh’s Ramen through a friend. Annie, who is from Thailand, was working at Sawadee Thai Restaurant at the time. The owner, Pom, heard from Sekikawa that he wanted to retire and return to Japan. She told Annie, “Hey, this restaurant is for sale, you and your husband should have it.”
With Pom’s encouragement, Annie left her job at Sawadee to learn how to cook ramen with Tosh and, eventually, assume ownership of the restaurant.
“I got to make ramen for two months with Tosh,” she said in a Zoom interview. “Tosh, he just [taught] me everything, like [the] ingredients.” Annie also studied his business format.
Curry ramen is a favorite of Maxwell and Annie, as well as customers. It is made with Japanese-style pork cutlet, onsen tamago (soft boiled egg), bok choy, negi (spring onion) and wheat noodles.
They have different roles at the restaurant.
“The dynamic of a couple running a restaurant works very well,” Maxwell said. “But you can’t have husband and wife both in the kitchen. You’ll butt heads for sure. Especially if you’re both hardworking people. If you have two very strong energies, one has to control for sure. I leave the kitchen to [Annie]. She runs that perfectly and I handle all the other business aspects.”
Even Annie said that she takes control of the kitchen, while Maxwell checks in on customers, making sure they are enjoying their time dining.
“I have to handle everything, like [making] the food come out,” she said. “[Controlling] the quality, [making] every bowl taste the same. Not salty or sweet, or something like that, and make the food look good. That’s all my work.”
Green tea is a classic from the original menu. Tosh’s Ramen serves Hojicha, which is a homemade green tea that is roasted in a porcelain pot over charcoal.
Annie said that making her dishes look appealing and pretty is something she puts a lot of thought into. She pays close attention to the presentation of every dish, making sure it is appealing to the eye. According to the Pecks, this contrasts with the traditional, simple style of food preparation that Sekikawa favored when it came to his menu and the interior layout of his restaurants. This is something they love about the former owner, but they intend to expand upon his original concept.
“We’ve kept every same recipe because we know that that’s important,” Maxwell said. “But we wanted to do some interior changes. Like we’re painting the walls, we’re gonna put up a mural and make it look more like a restaurant. Right now, it does, kind of, look like an office space. It was a bank before. It still kind of looks like a bank inside.”
Every dish is specially curated by Annie. The mango sticky rice dish is a good example of this with its carefully placed mango slices and mint leaf in the center.
The couple has added to more than just the interior of their restaurant. Along with getting new kitchenware, décor and dishes such as bowls, they have expanded their menu. Things like katsu curry rice, lemon honey green tea and mango sticky rice have all made their way through the kitchen and onto the plates of customers. They are enacting their vision while still doing their best to stay true to that of Sekikawa.
The duo’s vision is something Megumi Haverson, a server who works with Annie and Maxwell, called refreshing. Haverson has been with Tosh’s Ramen Holladay for over three years, working with the Pecks as well as Sekikawa.
“It’s like a different energy,” Haverson said.
Sekikawa was a “typical, older Japanese man,” who stuck with tradition, Haverson said. She noticed customers were intrigued when he strayed from tradition and sold to the Pecks.
Haverson said the additions to the menu and the interior renovations have begun to draw a younger crowd. She said that the new generation, as she called them, get excited to try the new dishes.
“I was really, kind of, nervous about how much Tosh’s Ramen is going to be changing,” Haverson said. But now she is excited to see what the Pecks will bring to the business.
Tosh’s Ramen Holladay is located at 1963 E. Murray Holladay Road. It is open 5-9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 5-9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and closed on Sunday.
On the south side of Salt Lake City, the mountains are accompanied by a grander view. The crimson paifang arch structure marks the entrance to the Chinatown Supermarket.
The Paifang, a traditional Chinese arch, is the first structure seen before getting into the Chinatown Shopping Center.
The aroma of traditional Vietnamese beef pho fills the air before even getting to the shops. Sweet sounds of sizzling fresh meats on the grill and the pure enjoyment of cooking your own hot pot meal.
Chinatown is home to all these sensations.
In the 5.7-acre shopping community, the largest cultural Asian shopping center in Utah takes on an even bigger role within the daily lives of Asian American communities in and around the Salt Lake area — a safe haven.
On 3370 State St., the marketplace and surrounding businesses made their debut opening on July 30, 2014. Before that, Salt Lake City wasn’t known for Asian markets or substantial in size for that matter.
The development of the shopping center went through many phases and with the initial proposal for Chinatown starting in 2005. Lots of trial and error occurred, but with the importance of the project and having a hub for Asian people in Salt Lake City, a $15-million investment was headed by Hong Kong developers Yue So and Wai Chan, according to Voices of Utah.
The population of different Asian American communities residing in Utah, and Salt Lake City in particular, is increasing. According to the Census Bureau, the population was 5.4% in April 2020.
Salt Lake City’s Asian American population is among the faster-growing populations of diverse groups. Having a larger population of Asian Americans, especially those that continue to grow, signifies the need for the Chinatown Center. With South Salt Lake being one of the most Asian populated areas in the county, the location of the marketplace is pivotal to communities nearby.
The outside of the Chinatown Shopping Center with access to the market and other shops inside.
Amongst the karaoke bar, boba shops, and hot soup restaurants, the marketplace and its products are the main attraction. Aisles of all kinds of authentic cuisine, from Chinese to Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese, to Indian, Filipino, and Japanese, the supermarket accommodates the Asian American residents of Salt Lake City.
Justine Nguyen, a University of Utah student and a Chinese-Vietnamese American, came to Utah for school from the East Coast, hoping to find a place that could provide a multicultural food experience. Then she found Chinatown.
She likes to order a Bánh mì sandwich at the supermarket, a French baguette filled with pickled carrots and radish, meat, or tofu, along with other fresh veggies and jalapeños. With just the perfect balance of spicy and sweet, she thought no other sandwich could compete with those she previously tried in Utah.
“I love the feeling of familiarity, the people, the ambient lighting, the chaos of the market, it creates a sense of home for me that I’m missing here in Utah,” said Nguyen over direct messaging.
Nguyen, from Maryland, said there are more Asian markets there. The state also has a higher Asian American population of 6.7%, according to the Census Bureau.
The inside entryway, guarded by a panda bear statue, leads into Chinatown Supermarket.
This wasn’t too much of a cultural shock for Nguyen but with the overall lack of diversity in Utah, the 19-year-old college student wanted a place to call home. “The Chinatown Market is a place where I can go to get a sense of home and feel safe,” Nguyen said. “With recent events (Covid-19 and the growth of Asian hate), it’s scary going around Utah myself. I don’t have to worry about that here (Chinatown) and I can fully embrace my culture.”
Having previously worked at the Tiger Sugar Boba Shop in Chinatown, Nguyen emphasizes the way the experience allowed her to “immerse herself in the Asian culture of Utah.”
The cultures that are highlighted are available to those from different groups as well, giving people from different nationalities and backgrounds the same opportunity to discover all that Chinatown has to offer. Part of Nguyen’s experience includes helping people from other cultures on their food journeys.
Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Cynthia Wang, a Chinese-Vietnamese American, gives insight into the tie to her identity that the shops and restaurants have.
“It feels like home. It smells like the spices and flavors my parents used in their cooking. I see people who look like me,” Wang said over direct messaging.
The third-year student describes what it was like living in Utah growing up, and how markets that were around before the Chinatown market had some traditional Asian products, but in smaller selections and markets. “It makes me feel seen,” Wang said. “Growing up here, there were very few restaurants that served food from my culture, but most of them catered to white consumers.”
The South Salt Lake Chinatown allows the majority of residents in Utah to gain a new perspective through the cultural diversity the market has to offer in customer and employee interaction. Engaging with people from all walks of life is a valuable experience, especially when minority populations continue to rise.
The majority of Utah’s population is white, the Chinatown is a community for the underrepresented. For those who haven’t had a place to belong or relate to. A community to be able to “blend in” as Wang describes it.
With the occasional homesickness, Aurora Xu, 36, a Chinese immigrant, had a relatively easy time adapting to Salt Lake City and its culture.
Asian snacks and drinks are two types of purchases Xu said make her visits to the Chinatown Market. Whether the snacks are shrimp chips, choco-pies, or mochi, Xu enjoys the foods that feel more familiar.
About the living adjustments and the transition of living in Utah, Xu said the Chinatown has foods from her hometown, making connecting to tradition “easy for shopping and with the Supermarket having a lot of restaurants.”
Even though her journey to finding her community wasn’t as difficult as others moving from out of state, Chinatown is a meeting ground for social interaction and for cultivating more relationships. Restaurants around the market like Hero Hotpot are hot spots for Xu and her friends to get together.
The impact that Chinatown has on different Asian American communities in Salt Lake City has brought various groups together in celebration of Asian cultures.
A marketplace, one unlike the American grocery store chains, is more than just the produce and products that reside there. It’s a home, a safe haven, a market for all Asian Americans.
Asian American chef Naomi Larsen opens up about her custard business in Salt Lake City. In step with the times, she brought a popular Japanese dessert here, to the place she fits in and calls it home.
A long way has already been done, but a long way still needs to be done. Women in business have often had to struggle to reach important positions.
Today, many companies can boast gender diversity within them, but the pink power is still not enough, especially within minorities. This is a demonstration of how much the business world has to work to achieve true equality.
There is still a lot to do to enhance females in business even if in the past years it has grown, from 77,800 in 2015 to 80,092 in 2019, according to The Salt Lake Tribune article published in 2021.
And what about double-minority? Female and Asian Americans, for example.
Asian American female chef, Naomi Larsen, tells her story and her business.
She was born and raised in Japan and came to the U.S. when she was only 21 to study. Her dream was to go back and open an import retro business. “I love American retro style, especially the 1950s and 1960s,” she said, and laughing she added, “but this dream disappeared.”
With time, perspectives changed, and Larsen is happy to call Salt Lake City and Utah her home. She identifies herself as an American since she got her citizenship about 25 years ago, and an immigrant.
The transition wasn’t too bad for her. “There were some minor cultural shocks, but I am fitting here much better than in Japan,” she said in a Zoom interview. “I never felt Japan was my home. Is it terrible to say? I never fit in that country,” she added in an email.
Larsen said she suffered the fact that Japanese people say one thing and you have to know nine other meanings for that thing, and she couldn’t do that. It’s easier for her here, even if at the beginning her biggest struggle in the U.S. was the language.
“I remember one time, after three months I was in the U.S., I had a breakdown and just cried. I was at a friend’s house and I just locked myself in the bathroom and started crying for hours because I didn’t understand what they were saying,” she said.
Besides the new language, different culture, and different food, Larsen made her way and her impact in Salt Lake City.
About eight years ago, Larsen and her Japanese friend, Ai Levy, started a Bento business.
“Both of us had been working in the restaurant industry for a long time but that was the first time we started our own,” she said in the interview over Zoom. And she added, “We were getting sick of working for others.”
But when her friend moved out of state, she couldn’t keep Bento by herself. So, she thought, “What is the one thing I can keep doing by myself?” The answer is the Japanese-style custard and her business, Prin-Ya Custard.
Vegan Custard, Mango Vegan Custard, Cocoa Vegan Custard, Matcha Vegan Custard at Jade’s market. Larsen’s products are very appreciated by customers, who can’t believe they are vegan.
But what is the Japanese custard? Do you know about it?
Japanese custard is an intriguing dessert, simple to prepare but really effective. It is characterized by the classic flavor of the combination of simple ingredients such as eggs, milk, sugar. Ideal for an original snack or as an elegant end to a meal, Larsen’s Japanese-style custard offers a dense and creamy consistency that is truly irresistible.
“I decided to offer the Japanese-style custard because we have flan here and it is different. I couldn’t find the same thing here, so I thought I would make it and introduce it here to Salt Lake City,” she said.
It is one of the most popular desserts in Japan and, there, they could combine it in fancy ways too.
Larsen remembered the custard as a treat to herself when she was young. “In Japan, when I was going to cafés or restaurants, I was just getting the custard arranged in a fancy glass or with fruits.”
As simple as it might seem, the traditional baked custard has a silky soft texture. That caramelized sugar at the bottom is a must, but in a lot of places they don’t have that, Larsen said. It has a mild sweetness and her favorite flavor is cappuccino because she loves coffee. “My husband eats it almost every day,” she said.
The difference between the Japanese custard and the one she makes here is the texture, but ingredients are really just milk and eggs and they are not really “Japanese ingredients,” she said.
She selects local eggs and fruits from the market and other vendors and she tries to use as many local ingredients as she can.
Cocoa Vegan Custard at Jade’s market. Customers are never tired of this flavor.
“It all started with one traditional custard and vegan version because the veganism was growing fast here and with that, it became easier to have different flavors, so I kept making them,” she said.
She also said she packages the dessert in jar containers, so the customer can flip it and put it on a plate and garnish it as they please. “Customers get surprised when they tried the vegan one, because of the creaminess. They can’t believe it’s vegan.”
Larsen humbly doesn’t recognize herself as a real chef, but as a person who was confident enough to make this dessert and decided to just do it.
She is a hope for a lot of Asian Americans and females who want to live in the US or open their own business, or startup company.
“I never thought it was difficult to start a business, as a minority. Although I never applied for any real jobs, I learned that there are many business loans, grants, and aids available for minority people who want to start a business. I am especially grateful for Spice Kitchen and IRC (International Rescue Committee) for providing us the help we need,” Larsen said.
Spice Kitchen Incubator, a project of the IRC that provides help, guidance and support for those who want to start a business in Utah, talks about Prin-Ya Custard: “She strives toward less waste and an ecologically friendly business model. Custards come in a reusable glass jar that can be returned for credit at Hello Bulk Market.”
The onset of the pandemic surely affected her business negatively. Before the pandemic, she had seven retail stores and restaurants carrying her products, but after that, most of them had to shut down their business.
In 2020, food sampling was prohibited in farmers markets where she had a booth. “Due to the pandemic, it was difficult to sell products without having customers to taste them,” she said.
The pandemic also caused a lot of problems regarding major supply chains. All small businesses suffered. “Even now it’s still hard to find certain ingredients and containers,” she said.
On an ordinary day, without us expecting it, life has changed. The simplest habits, like having a coffee with your friend, going out with your partner, hugging someone you love, have become forbidden. And so, we found ourselves living in the present and in a bubble, uncertain about the future but sure of only one thing: moving forward.
And chef Naomi Larsen, even if she doesn’t refer to herself in that way, kept going.
One way of doing that was taking advantage of technology to connect with customers and spread the love for her custard.
“I learned several tricks to post as effectively, like what time to post, what hashtags to use, which photos, etc., but being an older generation, it takes a lot of effort for me,” she said.
Simple to say, difficult to do. It is difficult to create yourself as a female Asian American entrepreneur, especially during the pandemic. If it is true that change is the only certainty in life, it is just as hard to get used to it.
Rethinking in a new perspective, however, is the only possible way. At least now, at least until this war against coronavirus is won. And this is what Naomi Larsen did with her custard business, Prin-Ya.
When Asian hate crimes began to rise around the country during the 2020 pandemic, Carrie Shin knew she had to do something about it.
Shin took a trip from Utah and ended up volunteering in Oakland, California, at a place called Compassion in Oakland. This group helps empower and support the Asian American community. Compassion in Oakland does community service projects, provides companionship, and supports those who are being affected by hate crimes.
It was at this place that Shin felt especially inspired and motivated to do more when she returned home to Utah and within her own community.
“Utah is greatly in need of an organization like this,” Shin said in a phone interview.
So, she started the Asian Link Project in Salt Lake City in late 2021.
The Asian Link Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The group links the Asian community and volunteers for group assignments to help those in need. Its mission is to promote real connections and unity through partnership, sponsors, events and news.
The group Compassion in Oakland inspired Carrie Shin to start The Asian Link Project in Salt Lake City. Photo courtesy of Carrie Shin.
The team consists of five directors, a digital marketing manager, a Vietnamese community coordinator, an event manager, and two Chinese community coordinators. The nonprofit also has a long list of volunteers as well as a youth leadership team.
The organization was inspired to help with a response plan for all of the surge of Asian-American hate crimes during the pandemic. As Asian Americans themselves, they knew just how important this type of work was at that time and will forever be.
Shin, the directors, and the rest of the staff are proud of their recent project called The Chaperone Project. It was created to ease the burden of senior and younger Asian Americans who do not feel safe being alone in the community. Free chaperone services are provided to residents in the Salt Lake Valley so they can feel safer.
The Asian Link Project provides chaperone services to Asian American residents in the Salt Lake Valley to prevent hate crimes. Photo courtesy of Shin.
Another initiative the group was able to be a part of was The Window Project. A local Asian restaurant had its window vandalized. The profanity was etched into the glass, so it wasn’t even able to be cleaned. It had to be physically replaced so the team joined up with some local glass companies to have it paid for and fixed.
The restaurant owners told Shin the business was barely making ends meet and because the vandalism happened during the pandemic they couldn’t afford to pay for the new window. The news wanted to air the story, but this type of hate crime is so shameful for the Asian community, and for them personally and their business, the owners declined to air the story at the time that it occurred.
“We are able to hear these stories that have brought pain, anger, and sadness, and try to give our community something positive to do with that,” Shin said.
The Asian Festival is the current venture that the staff works on tirelessly. This festival is being held July 9, 2022. It is being held to showcase speakers, performers, and food culture across the board for the Asian American community. This is a daylong event that takes at least six to nine months of planning, but Shin said in a phone interview, “It is all worth it in the end.”
Utah’s 45th annual Asian Festival will be held July 22, 2022. It will host hundreds of local businesses. Photo courtesy of Shin.
The festival is filled with beautiful displays and vibrant colors. The warmth and smells are all-encompassing, and it isn’t a day anyone would want to miss.
“So many volunteers have come forward to make this event possible,” Shin said with gratitude. It is because of the efforts from the people in The Asian Link Project that help those being affected by hate crimes, feel seen. Their efforts show that someone is available to be there to support them and that they aren’t alone. They also ensure that the needs are met for those in the community not able or willing to speak out.
Shin received a bachelor of science degree from Southern Utah University in 2002. She is currently a paralegal in criminal law. Her domestic partner and co-founder of The Asian Link Project has an MBA from Westminster College and is the director of finance in his current career. Her partner is also a martial arts teacher in Salt Lake City.
The board of directors at The Asian Link Project all have personal experiences with being harassed due to their ethnicity and came together to find ways to end the toxic behaviors.
Carrie Shin is the director and founder of The Asian Link Project. Photo courtesy of Shin.
Kate Forth is among some of the volunteers for The Asian Link Project. She got involved with the group to help contribute to safety in her community. Forth has spent time helping and donating her time when at all possible. She was able to be a part of The Window Project as well as The Chaperone Project. “I am grateful to be a part of such a wonderful organization,” Forth said in a phone interview.
Shin added, “To help chaperone our Asian senior Americans in need, to help fix damaged property to innocent Asian-owned businesses, to help empower our Asian community to join and be a part of something better than the sad stories on the news. We take a proactive approach to try and get positive results.”
In the heart of downtown Salt Lake City sits a quaint one-of-a-kind bakery. Customers who enter see Japanese-style floor seating, electronic futuristic ordering and plenty of artistic treats to choose from. The hustle and bustle of workers will instantly fill your ears as employees shuffle around making authentic Japanese desserts. Laughter and conversation permeate the walls as many locals enjoy something you cannot get anywhere else in the entire state of Utah.
Doki Doki is the only Japanese bakery of its kind in Salt Lake City. It is owned by Irie Cao, who is a young entrepreneur and self-taught baker.
Doki Doki is a Japanese bakery and is owned and operated by Irie Cao. She is a 30-year-old self-taught baker and entrepreneur.
Cao was born and raised in Vietnam and moved to San Gabriel, California, when she turned 15 in 2006. She said she would often visit local bakeries with her friends and family growing up to enjoy Japanese specialties around the city. California has a higher population of Asians and Asian Americans, so with that comes more options for authentic foods.
Cao started baking on her own at an early age at home and continued to do so as she grew older. Her passion for baking only got stronger once she moved to Utah. She wasn’t as satisfied with the options that Salt Lake City had to offer regarding Japanese desserts. She enjoyed all the options she once had at her fingertips in California and wanted to bring that availability to Utah.
Cao remembered thinking, “I wish I could just open my own Japanese bakery.”
After little convincing, Cao made her dreams become a reality by opening her very own bakery, Doki Doki. In Japanese this means, to feel your heartbeat. She chose this name because she feels this type of connection to her work. She always thought to herself, with the amount of time it takes to bake Japanese desserts at home, it made more sense for her to mass produce her goodies instead. Also, this way she was also able to share her passions with others.
Japanese treats are well known for their decadent and distinct tastes. The Japanese culture prides itself on using no refined sugars or artificial flavors. Japanese desserts do contain less sugar than most American desserts. However, they are still perfectly sweet.
Taiyaki is a traditional dessert that is sold at Doki Doki, 249 E. 400 South. It is a wafer-like batter that is shaped into a fish shape or a cone. Taiyaki is then accompanied with ice cream that comes in many flavors and fresh layered toppings.
Strawberry is a popular flavor at the bakery. It is strawberry ice cream with Oreos, raspberry rosé sauce, fresh strawberry bites, Taiyaki with custard filling, topped with wafer sticks and strawberries.
Fluffy pancakes are also quite common while exploring treats across Japan. They happen to be Cao’s most popular and time consuming menu item. Fluffy pancakes get their special texture by using a soufflé technique. The egg whites are whipped up with a sugary gloss, then they are mixed with the batter that is made with the yolks. It leaves the pancakes light, jiggly, soft and so delicious.
“They are so delicate and are like eating a cloud,” said Joseph Cox, a regular Doki Doki customer. “Her fluffy pancakes are like air.”
Crepe cakes are another menu item. They are made of 20 layers of thin crepes placed together like an architectural masterpiece with flavors that melt in one’s mouth. Other popular handcrafted desserts that Cao offers are butter cookies, and mille-feuille.
These delicate and detailed desserts do not come without a cost, which is many hours of practice and skill to get them just right.
Cao said the hardest part of opening her own bakery was the extensive training she implemented to get it so her employees knew how to bake properly. They shadowed her for many hours as she trained them in all aspects of baking. It was hard to teach her employees something she had been practicing for over a decade.
The business side came easier to her than the training she did for her employees. She also said that it was much easier to open a business in Salt Lake City than to do so in California because it costs a lot more money.
One of Doki Doki’s most popular desserts is the Japanese crepe cake. It is made from 20-plus light golden brown crepes layered with homemade creams. The passion fruit flavor is shown here.
You might think that with all the recent Asian hate crimes we have seen, a young Asian woman opening her own business may have many trials. But for her, it flowed naturally. Like fate.
Cao said, “I am very lucky.”
In 2020 the pandemic struck the world. The coronavirus devastated local business owners as hundreds of owners were forced to shut down. Many businesses have still yet to recover, and some were forced to close permanently.
For Cao, it had the opposite effect. The community was forced to do takeout only so it gave Cao free marketing across all of the food delivery sites.
As a new business owner, marketing can be one of the most expensive aspects of opening.
Customers became more aware of her bakery after it was listed on food ordering platforms such as Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates and DoorDash. All of a sudden everyone knew who she was, and that Doki Doki existed.
“It’s like I blew up overnight,” Cao said in a phone interview.
Cao said she is also forever grateful for the many influencers and foodies in Salt Lake City who blogged, posted and continued to share her work. They helped and continue to help spread her passions of baking and all of the hard work that goes into it, all across every social media platform.
Sherrita “Rita” Magalde is the owner of Sheer Ambrosia, a small business based in Salt Lake City dedicated to baking baklava to sell to customers.
Over the last year, Magalde’s business has reached new heights.
She’s seen a big spike in sales and has met arguably the greatest commercial success of her business’s lifetime.
However, it wasn’t always glitz and glamour for her brand, as she, like many up-and-coming small-business owners, ran into many roadblocks along the way.
Many of these roadblocks predate her business’s very foundation and go back several years before she even came up with the idea to sell homemade baklava.
During a phone interview, she explained that she’s been involved in independent, entrepreneurial endeavors stretching as far back as the mid-90s.
In 1996, she and her then-husband moved from Spain to Salt Lake City due to its reputation as a great place to go skiing.
She started a small mortgage brokerage and later ran a travel agency with her husband.
Despite her success with her independently run business, her relationship with her husband wouldn’t last in the long run.
“We were six years into running the travel agency when we got a divorce and neither one of us wanted to leave the business. So we tried to make it work, but I was very unhappy so I decided to quit. I still wanted to be a business owner, but I wanted something that was all my own, so he bought me out of the agency in 2008, which is when I also started the bakery,” she said.
Rita Magalde
Magalde always enjoyed cooking and baking, having grown up learning from her mother.
Baklava, the dessert Magalde’s business is built around, was primarily learned from hanging around a Greek family she worked with while growing up in North Carolina.
“The baklava has stuck with me through the years, so I decided I wanted to see if I could turn it into a business. So I decided to start slow from home and got a cottage food license from the Department of Agriculture and began my baklava business then,” Magalde said.
Despite her experience running independent businesses in the past, the transition was not a smooth endeavor.
“One of the big differences between running a travel agency and a bakery is now you have to deal with inventory,” Magalde said. “It also isn’t as lucrative a business as a travel agency, so I’m selling my baklava at $3 a piece and wasn’t able to hire people right away. Also, unlike when I began the travel industry, I now had two children and was without a partner.”
She also refused to take any bank loans and only used the funds she gathered from selling her share of the travel agency.
The barrier to entry felt much steeper than previous endeavors.
Over time, she was able to find a degree of success with her business.
In 2013, five years after beginning Sheer Ambrosia, she took a big step to legitimize her business.
She ventured out into a commercial space in hopes of getting more people to take her business seriously.
“I put $50,000 of my own money into the space to build it out and was able to legitimize my business and really bring Sheer Ambrosia to the forefront. People weren’t taking me seriously until I did that,” she said.
Although while her business continued to do well, it didn’t do as well as she had hoped.
After the death of her father, Magalde decided to cut back, as the long hours which required her to work upward of 16-hour days every day of the week took its toll on her.
“I decided to sell the space to another bakery and moved Sheer Ambrosia back into my home,” Magalde said. “I fell into some debt, and my son who was graduating high school wanted to go to an expensive college. So I said I’m going to sell my home so I could get out of debt and allow my son to go to the college he wanted to attend.”
Things got especially stressful when the pandemic hit.
Magalde’s business, like many small businesses, was severely hit when it all began.
“No one wanted baklava, they all wanted toilet paper and hand sanitizer, so I had to get another job to make ends meet when the pandemic hit,” she said.
Rita Magalde
Then, in the midst of the pandemic, a tragedy occurred that shook the entire nation to its core.
“In horror, we got to see George Floyd murdered before our very faces by a Minneapolis police officer. Black people have been watching this kind of thing happen for years, and it seems as though the white community has been oblivious to it,” she said. “Right after that, there were so many white folks in the community who decided they wanted to support local Black-owned businesses.”
While Magalde was initially reluctant to embrace this swell of support because she didn’t want to feel she was capitalizing off a tragedy, she changed her mindset when she realized how it played into a good cause.
“I started to think about it and saw that these were people who don’t necessarily want to protest in the street. They don’t want to get out there and hold a sign and yell, and walk the street protesting that way. This is their way of putting their money where their mouth is by supporting Black-owned businesses,” she said.
She also came to realize that while they may initially support her business because she’s Black, that didn’t mean they would continue their support if her products weren’t satisfying.
“It’s still my job as a business owner to make sure they want to come back by giving them a quality product and amazing service. So it’s not going to be free service, I still have to earn their repeat service, so this a challenge for me,” she said.
The success led to a busy holiday season, one where she would need some additional help if she was going to continue thriving.
Helene Simpson and her daughter, Desi Hayda, offered their services.
“She’s very dedicated. She’s very grateful for everything, and it’s hard that it was the death of somebody which created an influx of sales, her product is what continues her business and for people to come back to her,” Simpson said during a phone interview. “It’s not just because people think ‘Black Lives Matter’ and only supporting her for that reason. She sells quality products, has excellent customer service.”
Simpson said she appreciates Magalde’s positive guidance.
“I think she’s very thorough. Just how she explains things to you and wants things done, and that’s to be expected because everything she does is pretty perfectionist, so you just follow her instructions and help her out when you can. She’s awesome to work for,” Hayda said.
“Now I’ve got a following that I can parlay this into growth for my business, and I’m hoping for one day to quit my second job and go back to running my business full-time,” Magalde said.
Salt Lake City’s NAACP Chapter vice president Shawn Newell joined an asynchronous interview with student journalists at the University of Utah in early February. There, he said that one of the biggest issues that any Black community in America faces is its misrepresentation in mainstream media. “[They] wait until there’s a murder or … a gang fight … before [they] go into these communities, and then [they] want to engage people,” he said.
For the most part, his words ring true for the Black community in Utah as well. An internet search of the words “Utah Black” or “Utah African American” brings up stories about Black culture’s rejection in Utah, or how difficult it is to be Black in such an overwhelmingly white state.
What these stories fail to show is that Utah’s Black community is actually full of supportive, successful and ambitious individuals who are devoted to its growth and development. Despite their sheer lack of coverage from mainstream news outlets, the state’s myriad professionals, business owners and community leaders contribute daily to the continued success of Black Utahns.
To observe the effects of their positive influences in the state’s Black community firsthand, Voices of Utah spoke with three of Salt Lake City’s Black leaders as they explained the ways they make a difference in their community, and why the work they do matters.
Makaya Caters
Chef Roody Salvator moved to Utah in 2008 from Florida, hoping to find a corporate job. The last thing on his mind then was to become a professional chef. However, on casual weekend gatherings with friends, he was drawn instinctively to the kitchen. He recreated dishes from his native Haiti that he remembered from his childhood – flavors that his American friends had never tasted before.
Saying that his food was, “too good not to share,” Salvator’s friends urged him for years to consider cooking professionally. Even though he had been training for an office job for nearly a decade, Salvator finally decided to take a leap of faith and open Makaya Caters in 2017, with the humble goal of bringing a taste of Haiti to Salt Lake City. Renting out a kitchen space on 300 W. Paxton Ave., Salvator started taking appointments to cater weddings, parties and corporate meetings.
Makaya quickly rose to fame in the Salt Lake City community. Along with his business’s success, Salvator soon amassed a social media following of 10,000 people and boasted exclusively five-star rated reviews. Despite his rapid success, however, Salvator did not lose sight of his foundational ideology in cooking.
Chef Roody Salvator is the founder and owner of Makaya Caters. Makaya is the official catering service of Black Lives Matter Utah, and is well known for its food donations across the city. Photo courtesy of Makaya Caters.
“I came from a place where I knew what hunger feels like … [and] to not know where your next meal’s going to come from,” says Salvator about his upbringing in Haiti over a phone interview. “If someone is hungry … and I have the means to feed them, I will do that.”
Turning to the community that embraced him, Salvator began making food donations with any surplus ingredients he had. He delivered meals free of charge to the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center, and to the Black Lives Matter Utah summer camps – the latter of which saw Makaya becoming BLM Utah’s official catering service.
When the pandemic arrived in 2020, however, Salvator was met with unprecedented challenges. He lost almost all of his catering clients who held in-person events, and was forced to switch his business model to a more affordable food trailer operation. He reluctantly set up a GoFundMe page, asking now for the help of the very community which he fondly cared for in the past.
Even so, Salvator’s commitment to the Salt Lake City community remained unhindered. Working odd hours out of a food trailer that is too small to be considered a kitchen space but too big to parallel park, Salvator still managed to cook and donate 50 meals to the city’s homeless population in November 2020.
Salvator says that his dream for Makaya Caters now is to establish a physical store location in the near future – to continue his work both in the kitchen and in the community. Two-thirds of his desired $10,000 goal has been reached on his GoFundMe page, which aims to keep Makaya in business in order to continue its important mission.
A ‘La Mode
In 2014, sisters Jasmine and Angelique Gordon founded an online shopping service with a mission to empower women of all shapes, sizes and social backgrounds. Their business, A ‘La Mode, caters to specific fashion needs on a budget.
Angelique (left) and Jasmine Gordon are founders and owners of A ‘La Mode. The sisters help their Salt Lake City clients network through their business, and donate frequently to various charities. Photo courtesy of A ‘La Mode.
The sisters’ successful business model – which promotes women of color who have realistic body types, and uses an accessible custom-styling system on their website – has garnered high praise from their clients over the past seven years. In fact, the sisters’ massive success inspired them in 2018 to open an offline boutique on 265 E. 900 South in downtown Salt Lake City.
That’s when they began to feel that they could branch out of their client base to serve a wider community. “When we moved to Salt Lake after [being] online for a couple of years … our No. 1 focus was being more engaged in our city,” says co-founder and owner Jasmine Gordon in a phone interview about her and her sister’s decision to contribute to their newfound community.
The sisters began by partnering with other small businesses in the area (Utah Key Real Estate, Image Studios and Olympus Health & Performance, to name a few) to host monthly networking events for their clients. Soon enough, they found themselves donating to notable charities like YWCA Utah, as well as to the Rose Park Elementary School and the city’s growing homeless population. The two were even on the board to plan a women’s music festival before the pandemic began.
Despite these numerous contributions to their community, the sisters were not exempt from the challenges of being Black entrepreneurs in Utah. Jasmine Gordon recalls that at first, she was fearful that A ‘La Mode’s use of Black models in their advertisements and on their website would be considered “too Black” for Utah’s majority white audience. The phrase, she says, is one that has been used to devalue the success of Black Utahns for generations.
That’s why Gordon says that her goal now is to keep on succeeding as a Black entrepreneur in order to serve as a positive example of Black leadership to the youth. “Seeing Black adults in day-to-day leadership roles … as teachers, as coaches, as local business owners … is something that sticks in their minds,” she says.
Utah Black Chamber
James Jackson III is regarded as one of the most ambitious and devoted leaders in Utah’s Black community today. Working as the supplier diversity program manager at the Zions Bancorporation and as the principal consultant at J3 Motivation (a company he owns and runs), Jackson is also the founder and executive director of the Utah Black Chamber.
But 12 years ago, Jackson was just a young section manager at Morgan Stanley who noticed that Utah’s Black population greatly lacked a sense of community. Even though Black Utahns made up only 0.9% of the entire state’s population, Jackson realized, they rarely had opportunities to connect with one another.
That’s why, in 2009, Jackson took it upon himself to create an organization that could lay the foundations for a tightly knit Black community in Utah. He named his new project ACCEL — short for African Americans Advancing in Commerce, Communication, Education and Leadership (which he now admits was a horrendously long name) – and began efforts to facilitate networking between the state’s Black professionals.
Jackson fondly recalls one First Friday event which he absent-mindedly planned for a July 6. While he worried that the event would be overshadowed by Independence Day festivities, over 60 people showed up keen to connect with fellow Black professionals. On that day, Jackson realized that his ambitious project had turned into a true catalyst for the creation of a thriving Black community in Utah.
Since starting ACCEL, Jackson has worked tirelessly for over a decade to grow his organization (now called the Utah Black Chamber after two name changes) to what he calls an “enterprise.” With nearly 300 members, two separate chapters across the state, and plans to create a Black Success Center to offer training to Black professionals, the Utah Black Chamber has grown into the state’s most formidable Black-run organization.
Transcending the realm of networking, the Utah Black Chamber now focuses on providing financial training to Black business owners, championing Black leaders for local government positions, and even plans to open a transitional housing complex for struggling homeowners. Its goal now, says Jackson in a Zoom interview, is to elevate Utah’s Black community to a level that will garner national renown and respect.
“It’s exhausting but we know that this is the role that we play,” Jackson reflects, “to be the voice for those that just don’t have one.”
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