meet the TEAM
Ryan lowder
From baking bagels at Einstein's in the early morning hours to slinging snacks at the Bird Feeder at Snowbird Mountain Resort, homegrown Utahn Ryan Lowder has nearly always worked in the food service industry in one capacity or another. He entered the corporate sector of the food world after college, putting his degree in Economics from the University of Utah to use leasing food processing equipment to companies such as Ocean Beauty Seafood and Garden Fresh Restaurants . After a few years in the business world, Ryan moved to Portland, Oregon and discovered his passion for cooking through an apprenticeship under Mother's Bistro's Lisa Schroeder. Inspired, Ryan enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, which led to an externship at Restaurant Jean-Georges and ultimately, a full-time position at the 3-star Michelin restaurant.
After Jean-Georges, Ryan spent a few years traveling, cooking his way from Colombia to Barcelona. When he returned to New York, Ryan put his Spanish culinary knowledge to use at the Batali group’s Casa Mono, and then as opening executive chef of the authentic Catalan restaurant, Mercat where he met his now-wife, Colleen. In 2009, the duo decided to return to Ryan’s hometown and apply their restaurant training to Salt Lake’s rapidly expanding food scene, opening the
Copper Onion in January of 2010. Since then, the restaurant has grown from a humble mom-and-pop shop into a veritable Salt Lake City institution and hospitality group with multiple dining concepts.
Ryan opened Plum Alley, a pan-Asian street-food concept, next door to the Copper Onion in 2012. At the height of its popularity in 2014, he shuttered Plum Alley to make way for cocktail bar Copper Common, the concept that had originally been intended for the space but was shelved due to the long wait for liquor licenses at the time. Copper Common was promptly followed by the opening of American brasserie-style restaurant, Copper Kitchen, in Holladay. And in 2018, Ryan opened the Daily on Salt Lake City’s Main Street, a daytime café with a focus on coffee and house-baked goods.
ZAKARY PELACCIO
Zakary Pelaccio is an award winning chef and restaurateur who recently relocated to Taos, NM with his wife Jori and dog Waylon. In 2016 Zak received a James Beard Award for Best Chef. Esquire named Fish & Game, the restaurant he owned and operated for 8 years in Hudson, NY, one of the 40 Most Important Restaurants of the Decade. Wine Enthusiast awarded Zak’s Fish & Game one of the top 100 Wine restaurants in the US for 4 years in a row and, in year five, added it to the Hall of Fame. In 2021, Zak sold his other Hudson, NY property, a bar/restaurant called BackBar, which was regularly on Thrillist’s top bars in NY and won one of the 24 Best Bars in America from Esquire.
Prior to his decade spent in New York’s Hudson Valley, Zak built New York City’s internationally acclaimed restaurants Fatty Crab and Fatty ‘Cue, Southeast Asian inspired restaurants influenced by his time working as a cook in Malaysia and Thailand.
In addition to the four NY locations, Zak and crew opened Fatty Crab in St. John, USVI, Hong Kong and, in 2006, Zak developed a spin-off of the brand for the Sanderson Hotel in London called Suka. Fatty Crab and Fatty ‘Cue won more awards and received more press than anyone wants to read or try to remember.
Zak trained as a cook in both Malaysia and Thailand as well as under culinary luminaries Daniel Boulud (Daniel, Café Boulud) and Thomas Keller (French Laundry, Per se). He is noted as one of the chefs who brought nose-to-tail cooking to the mainstream when he opened NY’s first true gastro-pub, The Chickenbone Café, in Williamsburg Brooklyn. Zak has studied at the International Culinary Academy (formerly The French Culinary Institute), The University of Vermont, UC Berkeley, Columbia University and Syracuse University in Florence, Italy. He holds a BA in Literature and Philosophy
The Fatty Crab decade and the Hudson Valley decade have been documented in the two critically acclaimed, notably different, and almost profitable cookbooks Zak wrote: Eat With Your Hands, and Project No. 258 – Making Dinner at Fish & Game.
In his free time, and prior to the pandemic, Pelaccio produced two fiery & funktastic festivals: Peripheral Natural Wine and Fermentation Festival™ and Play With Fire™, a live-fire cooking event where he, along with fire-obsessed fellow chefs cook on custom steel sculptures in a farm in the Hudson Valley.