A streetcar named devour: Stellar food served up at Art City Trolley
In Utah Valley, ribs and burgers are a no-brainer. You can get them at dozens of local restaurants, as well as at national chains where servers wear silly hats and compete to see who can decorate their standard-issue suspenders with the most pieces of flair (in restaurantspeak, this, apparently, means kitschy buttons).
Those places are fine for mass birthday parties or bidding a co-worker farewell, but for a more charming, original take on hearty American fare, head to Springville’s Art City Trolley.
The restaurant is housed in a restored 1931 Brill Bullet Trolley car and adjoining dining room. If you are lucky enough to get a seat in the actual car, you’ll be able to look out the trolley’s windows at the bustling traffic on Main Street.
Beyond the novelty of eating in a train, the restaurant’s menu has a certain hand-crafted spunk that elevates the entrees above standard diner joint fare.
We visited on a recent weeknight, about one week before the restaurant introduced an updated menu with a few new items.
Current offerings are brimming with quirky ingredients — artichokes, bleu cheese, dried cranberries — that add a kick to burgers, salads and sandwiches.
We loved the roma quesadillas, a giant spinach and herb tortilla filled with jack, cheddar and romano cheese, tomatoes, onions and — the best part — fresh spinach. The flavorful fresh spinach was an unexpected twist that differentiated it from the hundreds of quesadillas we’ve eaten in our lifetime.
The restaurant offers a substantial selection of salads, from those made with buffalo shrimp to ones with barbecue chicken. We chose the Real McCoy, a spinach salad tossed with grilled chicken, dried cranberries, gorgonzola cheese, toasted pecans and bacon. There was something about the combination of sweet cranberries with sharp gorgonzola that made us scavenge, like greedy mice, through the spinach leaves to find even the tiniest morsels.
Artichokes: Some people love them, some don’t. We are with the former camp, and were delighted by the tangy, salty artichoke dip schmeared on the artichoke chicken special.
The bleu bacon burger featured a one-billion calorie combination of blue cheese spread, lettuce, tomato and bacon. Lots of bacon. The bleu cheese sauce was a little thin (we would have preferred actual fresh bleu cheese), but was a tasty compliment to the salty bacon.
For the rib and chicken special, we chose the sweet, sugary barbecue glaze for the ribs and the chicken. It was finger-licking (important for ribs), although the ribs themselves had quite a bit of fat, as ribs often do. The chicken was lean, though, as well as tender and moist.
We rarely have room for dessert, but were tempted by the sign promising that desserts are “imported from heaven.”
The New York creme brulee cheesecake does have a certain ethereal quality, thick and creamy and topped by just a hint of bubbly skin. Paired with tart raspberries, it was, in fact, a little out of this world.
With quick service and a heaping dose of rustic charm, it’s easy to see why Art City Trolley is a local favorite.
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D11.
Dining
