After a million-dollar makeover, Brownstone 22 is ready to welcome diners

Taking a seat in Brownstone 22, across from City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake City, is to be surrounded by elegance — whether in the dining room, the lounge or the second floor.

Chandeliers made of hundreds of hand-blown glass petals grace the ceilings, and the blue and gold velvet upholstery of the chairs and booths is soft to the touch.

It’s hard to believe this stately building at 22 E. 100 South was condemned when owner Bill Campbell bought it in 1992, and it’s come a long way since then. However, the renovations that co-owners Campbell, Richard Romney and chef Travis Herbert oversaw to open Brownstone 22 marked the first remodeling the space has seen since 1997.

With the help of a design team, Romney, Herbert and Campbell worked together to give the building a literal million-dollar makeover. They opened Brownstone 22 in February as a seafood and martini bar with the aim that the food would be “as approachable as possible” while still being elevated and chef-driven.

“Each of our places that we’ve opened, we want anybody and everybody to feel comfortable coming in here and that there’ll be something on the menu for them,” Romney said.

“So there’s burgers on the menu all the way up to filet mignon and elk osso buco, and then a whole array of seafood as well,” he continued.

‘Something a little bit more modern’

Before the building was ever Brownstone 22, it was known as the Utah Commercial Savings and Bank Building. It was built by 1890 by German-born architect Richard K.A. Kletting.

When Campbell bought the building for $144,000 in the early ’90s, he said it was in “terrible” shape. In fact, the building, though listed on the National Register of Historic Places, had been condemned for seven years.

The roof was almost nonexistent, and rain was “just pouring in,” he said. The ceilings were gone, and the floor was rotten. Satanic messages had been spray-painted on the walls, and hypodermic needles were everywhere, he said.

“Because I’m an idiot, I decided to buy it anyway and turn it into what it is,” Campbell said.

He renovated the building in 1994, but donated its beautiful sandstone facade to the Utah Heritage Foundation, so that the building could never be torn down.

The first tenant was Cafe del Arte, in 1995. Two years later, the well-known restaurant Martine moved in and remodeled the building, utilizing a lot of mahogany and green velvet upholstery.

“It was a very conservative, more traditional kind of space,” Campbell said.

After Martine closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Campbell put the building up for lease. He said he got four offers from businesses, including one from a Polish bakery.

But in the end, Campbell decided he wanted to try opening his own restaurant, so he could control “the aesthetics [and] the buildout, and control the quality of the tenant,” he said.

So he teamed up with Romney and Herbert, and the three of them put their heads together to come up with a concept.

Herbert said he and Romney like to let the space dictate what kind of business they open inside, like they did with their first bar, Felt Bar & Eatery, at 341 S. Main St.

When they saw the main and upper floors inside the Utah Commercial Savings and Bank Building, they knew they wanted to open an East Coast-style oyster and martini bar there, Herbert said.

(In an instance of serendipity, after Romney and Herbert decided they wanted to open a concept in the space, they learned that the same architect, Kletting, had also built the Felt Building, which houses Felt Bar & Eatery.)

Unlike Martine, with Brownstone 22, “I wanted to do something a little bit more modern,” Campbell said. So he, Romney and Herbert hired designers Jamie Clyde and Gary Vlasic from the Salt Lake City firm V. Project to replace all of the flooring, lighting, art and tables. The designers also reupholstered booths from Martine to give them a second life.

The paintings inside Brownstone 22 were created by Los Angeles artist Jessalyn Brooks, whose work usually depicts nude women — like the abstract ones in the large mural in the dining room.

The rest of the space is heavily influenced by the style of art deco, with its curves and bold lines.

The four chandeliers in the dining room and lounge cost $5,000 each and were painstakingly assembled petal by petal. In the dinnertime twilight, they cast their glow upon the diners below.

As part of the remodel, crews brought the mezzanine out about 6 feet and built a new set of metal stairs that reach that floor, so you can dine at the edge of the mezzanine in full view of the chandeliers.

The three main seating areas of Brownstone 22 all have their own feel, and Romney said he seats customers depending on what they’re looking for that night.

“If they want more of a restaurant vibe, it’s a little bit livelier, [the] dining room is probably the best bet,” he said. The lounge is “a little more casual, and then upstairs is going to be quieter, more intimate.”

Creating the ‘wows’

Romney and Herbert both started out in the restaurant industry as dishwashers when they were in high school. Romney said they “have never really worked outside of restaurants since.”

Herbert, especially, has come a long way from his dishwashing days. In January, he was nominated for a James Beard award for the first time, as one of 20 regional semifinalists in the Best Chef: Mountain category, which covers Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. In March, he found out he was a finalist.

With the food at Brownstone 22, Herbert said he has taken classic dishes and put his own “thumbprint” on them, like making cocktail sauce with fish sauce instead of Worcestershire sauce, or spicing up grilled oysters Kilpatrick by adding smoked pepper miso butter made with Thai chillies.

As he’s working to create something new, “I like to have ‘wows’ on my dishes,” Herbert said. “So when we’re testing things, if I taste it and it doesn’t make me say ‘wow,’ we keep going back to the test grounds.”

Another example of a twist is the osso buco. Typically made with veal or lamb, the osso buco at Brownstone 22 is made with elk. Herbert, Romney said, “grew up in Montana, doing a lot of hunting and fishing, working with a lot of game meats, so he loves to have that represented on the menu.”

And instead of a regular demi-glace on the osso buco, Herbert created a jalapeño blackberry demi-glace, with “lots of big, bold flavors,” he said.

The seafood side of the menu brings fruits of the sea to the table raw and cooked. Fresh fish and oysters are flown in every day.

While they sell about 200 oysters a week at Felt, at Brownstone 22 they’re selling 200 oysters a night, Herbert said.

And he said that the way they’re treating the oysters, crab and shrimp “are all traditional things, but we change up the sauces, we change up the presentations. ... We put a spin on almost everything.”

Some of the dishes are unique because of where they come from. The salmon, for example, is farmed in New Zealand, but they’re farmed within an entire bay, Herbert said, so they eat and swim just as wild salmon would.

The cold water makes the fish especially fatty, creating a meat that’s “like the wagyu of the salmon family,” Herbert said.

Eating this dish is to experience a dance of opposites, with the crunchy crust of pine nuts and tahini contrasting in texture against the delicate fish, and the buttery taste of the meat playing off the sharp garlicky flavors in the toum sauce.

The menu also features a variety of pastas, all made in-house. And the cocktail menu includes several “classics and riffs,” like a sazerac with umeboshi.

When visiting Brownstone 22, think of your dinner as an adventure: You never know when a secret ingredient might show up and become a beautiful note in your meal.

“There’s something for everybody here,” Herbert said. “So just come sit down, have an open mind and see what you can find.”

Brownstone 22 is open nightly from 4 to 11 p.m., and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Reservations can be made on the restaurant’s website, brownstone22.com. All guests must be 21 or older, and show a valid ID.