Helper Beer — Restaurant in Helper

A gem of a restaurant in a unique town.

My colleagues and I happened to stumble across this brewery while looking for lunch on our way from Moab to Salt Lake City. They just opened three weeks ago.

We are very glad we stopped. The beer and the pizza are both excellent.

The brewery is named after the town: Helper, Utah. I highly recommend the eponymous Helper Beer: a light, crisp, and very drinkable lager. We also quite enjoyed the Nitro Stout.

As for the food, we ordered a margarita pizza, a prosciutto pizza, and the bruschetta.

The bruschetta was deconstructed: half a head of garlic sliced horizontally, a round of cheese with flaked nuts, and some smashed tomatoes, all oven-roasted, with eight baguette slices. The combined effect was delicious.

The pizzas were also excellent: light, fluffy crusts, crispy at the bottom, topped with fresh ingredients. I particularly enjoyed the garlic sauce in the prosciutto and mushroom pizza.

The town itself is worth a mention. It’s puzzling at first: everything looks like a well-maintained town from the ‘40’s or ‘50’s, but upon close examination, it’s all art.

Turns out that Helper was a classic boom-and-bust coal mining town that went through a serious bust in the ‘90’s and early 2000’s. About that time, though, land in Moab started to get expensive, and artists discovered Helper and began to move north.

Today, there are still plenty of coal miners who living in Helper, but the town also has 25 full-time resident artists, and the town is full of their work.

The combined effect makes both the town and the brewery a must-stop for anyone heading South from Salt Lake City towards Utah’s national parks. Just make sure you’ve got a designated driver: Utah’s DUI laws are the strictest...

The beer is great. They're just behind Templin for best beer in Utah. They have a good variety of styles, German pils, Czech pils, English mild, American ipa... And they're all solid, without major flaw and very tasty. The beer gets a 5 star (relative to Utah breweries). The Czech pils was very solid... Soft, floral hops etc, but lacked the typical presence of diacetyl that Czech pils are known for. They've got a couple horizontal (10bbl?) lager tanks...

The pizza is also very very good. I had the margherita pizza. I think their pizza is supposed to be Neapolitan style, but the oven appears to be natural gas and not wood fired. The crust on mine was sub par in comparison to the beer quality. The bottom was overdone, more crispy than soft/chewy, and the outer crust was also overdone being more crispy than chewy and soft, with a noticeable astringent thing from the char or too much flour on it before cooking. It seemed that their oven was not hot enough and the pizza was left in long enough to get a char, which was too long to get the right texture. Otherwise, the flavors of the pizza were awesome. Quality ingredients.

This place is a gem in the Utah...

This place is a MUST STOP if you’re passing through Helper! The food is excellent, the drinks are enjoyable, the atmosphere is relaxing, the service is great, and the bathrooms are very clean.

For appetizers, we ordered mixed olives and they were flavorful. For lunch, we ordered three types of pizza—cheese, pepperoni, and garlic burrata. The dough was delicious and the crust was the perfect thickness and doneness, the sauces were balanced, and the toppings were of great quality and flavor. For dessert, the kids split a nutella bar, which was rich in taste and gooey in texture.

We ordered two drinks—lime gose and Danish pilsner. The gose had a refreshing aroma and a taste that matched perfectly. The pilsner was true to the description and enjoyable.

Willard was our server. He was attentive from start to finish, even after the place started getting crowded.

Overall, I highly recommend stopping here on your way through. It’s a gem in the middle of nowhere and you will not be disappointed by...