“The doctor gives you a pill and says swallow it I give you food and say swallow it.”īecause he never knows exactly what food he’s going to wind up with on any given day, he doesn’t have a set menu, or set prices either (dinner runs between $17 to $22 on weekdays slightly higher on weekends). Eat his soup, he claims, and get rid of your cold within 48 hours. “This is the stuff that makes people live longer,” he says, and healthier, too. To all of the above he adds “the best of Asian spices” and “the best of French sauces.” He brings in food only in its season, all kinds of vegetables and fruits alongside steaks, chicken and the freshest seafood he can find in Utah (“look at the gills and the eyeballs,” he says of the secret to selecting the freshest fish). The only item that gets delivered is the soft drink syrup - “worst thing here,” proclaims Hai (but he’s sipping a Diet Pepsi as he says it). Hai personally goes to the producers every day, handpicking his ingredients. ![]() ![]() The one thing you won’t see at Thyme & Seasons are delivery trucks. Everything is fresh, like on the Mekong Delta, but there’s also an 1,800 degree grill in the kitchen, like at Ruth’s Chris. The restaurant he created reflects his roots - both of them a blend of Third World southeast Asia and First World America. Until one day, knowing his passion for the food he’d grown up with, Susan asked: “Why don’t you get that restaurant thing out of your system?” They married and settled in Utah, close to Susan’s family in Idaho, and Hai went to work helping upgrade the IT systems for first Wells Fargo Bank and then Primary Children’s Hospital. He lived well, in hotels more than actual homes - until he met Susan Goodliffe, who at the time was serving a Vietnamese-speaking LDS mission in Washington, D.C. For two decades, he hustled his trade, seeking and finding success American style. His adopted father had told him, “You no longer have to be a rice farmer you can be anything you want to be.” This was 1981, two years before IBM would introduce the personal computer. He graduated high school in Pennsylvania and then immersed himself in computer science classes at Ross Perot's Electronic Data Systems. In those pre-internet days he got hold of a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas and read them from A to Z. Hai was 13 when he arrived in America, a veritable sponge of curiosity. who adopted him and his two brothers, first moved the family to an Army base closer to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and then, the end of the Vietnam War looking imminent and not at all favorable in the south, out of the country altogether in 1975. “We couldn’t wait to eat Coca-Cola and processed foods,” remembers Hai, who got his chance when Peter Fitzgerald, the G.I. Preservatives? You preserved food by eating it. They were both poor and rich: two sets of clothes, two straw hats and no shoes but surrounded by abundant herbs, spices, vegetables, fruits and more fresh fish and game than you could possibly count. Everything they ate they grew, raised, trapped or caught. Where he was born they had two seasons: rain and shine, six months of each. The rest 55-year-old Chef Hai can, and probably will, tell you over dinner. soldier who married his mom, was spirited out of his homeland just before the Communists won the war, grew up on the East Coast, became a computer whiz before computer whizzes were cool, came to Utah to do contract work for the IRS in Ogden, joined the LDS Church, married a Mormon girl from Pocatello, traveled thither and yon as an IT specialist to support his growing family - until nine years ago, when he pumped the brakes on his traveling and consumption of the Western diet, and, longing to return to the natural, fresh, healthy food of his childhood, opened his Thyme & Seasons restaurant at the far end of the Winegar’s grocery store parking lot on Orchard Drive. ![]() Hai (pronounced “Hi”) Fitzgerald - “Chef Hai” for short - was born on the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam, was adopted by the U.S. Accompaniments are at the chef’s discretion.Īnd if that sounds unconventional, you ought to meet the owner. The day’s entrée choices are written on the kitchen wall. There is no printed menu, or listed prices for that matter. BOUNTIFUL - His restaurant is in what used to be a Blockbuster video store at the far end of a supermarket parking lot.
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