9 Utah Restaurant Chains Visitors Line Up For That Locals Drive Past
You’ve got a short Utah trip and a list of places you want to try.
Then you arrive and find a line out the door.
To a local, that same stop might be an ordinary Tuesday lunch. The difference has a lot to do with what brought you there.
These are the Utah restaurant chains visitors line up for that locals drive past.
1. Iceberg’s Zion Stop
Iceberg Drive Inn has scooped soft-serve and hand-dipped shakes since 1960, when founder Lamar Sorensen opened the original stand in Salt Lake City.
That’s more than six decades on the same recipe.
Thirteen Utah addresses carry the Iceberg name today, plus six more in California and one each in Arizona and Idaho.
One of the Utah stops sits in Springdale, the small town guarding the mouth of Zion Canyon.
That’s the same gate nearly 4.7 million people walked through in 2022.
Many want a shake before or after the shuttle line.
Springdale runs on tourists.
Iceberg also runs shops in St. George and Hurricane, both well inside Washington County, but the Springdale shop is the only one that sits at Zion’s gate.
A Utahn in Sandy or Herriman has an Iceberg a few minutes from home and rarely thinks to detour for the Springdale one.
It’s the same menu either way, minus the canyon view.
2. Swig’s Soda Fame
The soda chain Swig broke into national television when Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives put its cast’s soda runs on camera.
The show tied Swig closest to the state’s soda boom and pushed dirty soda into a national obsession.
Everyone wanted a cup.
The chain had already grown from a single 2010 stand in St. George, opened by founder Nicole Tanner, to more than 100 locations across a dozen-plus states by the time the show aired.
Out-of-state fans who caught the show want the origin story.
Locals already have a Swig near the gym, the school, and the grocery store, so the location everyone recognizes from TV isn’t worth a special trip.
3. Cupbop’s Shark Tank Fame
Cupbop started as a single food truck at Salt Lake City’s Gallivan Center in 2013, serving Korean barbecue over rice in a paper cup.
Founder Junghun Song pitched the company on Shark Tank in 2022, and Mark Cuban put in $1 million for a 5% stake.
That episode still reruns nationally.
Visitors who watched it want to see if the bowl matches the pitch, so a Cupbop stop becomes part of the trip.
The bowls have since spread to more than 100 locations across Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Oklahoma, and beyond.
Residents already have a Cupbop near home, work, or the mall, so nobody needs the downtown spot where the truck once parked.
4. Bruges at the Airport
Bruges Belgian Bistro runs a full waffle-and-frites counter inside Salt Lake City’s airport, feeding visitors between flights.
That’s the draw.
Its downtown Salt Lake City location sits a few blocks from Temple Square, where tour buses unload every day of the week.
Tour groups wander in between stops.
Bruges also runs a neighborhood shop on Highland Drive, in a stretch of small businesses regulars have shopped for years.
Few of those regulars fly through the airport or tour Temple Square on a Tuesday.
5. Arctic Circle’s Fry Sauce
Arctic Circle opened its first Salt Lake City location in 1950, back when a drive-thru burger stand was still a novelty nationally.
At the Provo store in the winter of 1955, two employees mixed mayonnaise and ketchup during a slow shift.
Arctic Circle rolled the mix out chain-wide by 1958, and fry sauce had a name.
Not everyone agrees on credit.
The chain now runs more than 70 locations across seven states.
Visitors treat an Arctic Circle stop like a food pilgrimage.
Fry sauce itself sits on nearly every fast-food counter in the state, so a Utahn doesn’t need Arctic Circle to get it.
Who Mixed Fry Sauce First
Arctic Circle didn’t dream up fry sauce from nothing.
Don Carlos Edwards served a mayonnaise-based white sauce at his Salt Lake City barbecue stand back in 1941, more than a decade before the Provo employees added ketchup.
Edwards approved the ketchup version for his franchise partners, which is how the recipe spread statewide.
Ask five different families who invented it, and expect five different answers.
6. Waffle Love’s TV Run
Waffle Love started as a Provo food truck serving Liege-style waffles loaded with toppings.
The truck finished in the top three of Food Network’s Great Food Truck Race in 2015 and returned for the All-Stars season in 2021.
National viewers remember the truck from television.
The clip still circulates.
Fans track down the Provo storefront on vacation just to compare it to what they saw on screen.
Waffle Love has since added storefronts in Draper, Farmington, Midvale, West Jordan, American Fork, and Spanish Fork.
A Utahn in any of those cities already has a Waffle Love minutes from home and skips the trip to the Provo shop the cameras found first.
7. Sub Zero’s Cold Show
Sub Zero Nitrogen Ice Cream still runs the chain’s original-style shop on Center Street in downtown Provo, where liquid nitrogen freezes each order to order.
Founder Jerry Hancock pitched the concept on Shark Tank in 2013, though none of the Sharks made a deal.
The fog draws a crowd.
First-time visitors film the pour for a friend back home, since the cloud of vapor is half the show.
Sub Zero also runs a shop in Sandy, well north of Provo in Salt Lake County, that has been open since 2012.
Salt Lake Valley locals scoop their nitrogen ice cream there instead of driving south to the Provo original for a show they’ve already seen.
8. R&R BBQ Downtown
R&R BBQ opened its first Salt Lake City barbecue counter in the Depot District after twin brothers Rod and Roger Livingston built a name on the competitive circuit.
The pitmasters have taken home wins from Jack Daniels’ world championship and the American Royal.
That pedigree pulls in visitors staying downtown for a game or a convention.
They walk a few blocks from a hotel and call it dinner.
Convenience seals it.
R&R BBQ has since grown into a chain with about a dozen restaurants across Utah and Idaho.
One of those sits in North Salt Lake, giving Salt Lake Valley locals neighborhood barbecue instead of the downtown parking hassle.
Psst! How much do you know about Utah’s other restaurant chains? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Utah Chain History Quiz
These are the Utah chains everyone assumes they already know. See how many origin stories you can name.
Kentucky Fried Chicken’s very first franchised restaurant opened in 1952 in which city?
9. Hires Big H's Celebrity List
Hires Big H has served its Big H cheeseburger and fry sauce from the same Salt Lake City corner since 1959.
Founder Don Hale modeled the drive-in after a Bob's Big Boy he admired on a California trip.
The idea stuck.
Gourmet magazine and the Wall Street Journal have both written it up, a Deseret News retrospective reported.
Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Robert Redford, and Jay Leno have all eaten there.
That kind of write-up brings people through the door on purpose.
Hires Big H has since added locations in Midvale and, as of August 2025, in Daybreak, part of South Jordan.
Car hops still work the downtown lot the way they did in 1959.
A Utahn near the Midvale or Daybreak location pulls up for a Big H out of habit, not because a magazine or a car hop show brought them there.
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