Restaurants in Riverton

Terrace Café is a locally owned eatery and drinkery that recently extended its breakfast and lunchtime services to include the hours and delights of dinner. The breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus offer creative variety, featuring fresh ingredients, healthy recipes (items marked with a "Y" denote a YMCA nutritionist's approval), and enjoyable menu items for both kids and adults trapped in children's bodies due to a worldview-expanding body-swap plotline.

Christened for the Mokihana tree that grows on the island, Moki's name nods to its menu's Hawaiian cultural heritage. Chefs adorn seafood, beef, pork, and chicken with homemade sauces, whipping up the traditional Hawaiian mixed plates that have been lauded by Deseret News. Servers then place the steaming plates, fresh salads, and cold shakes atop tabletops in the festive dining room, where vibrant tropical decor and cheerful island knickknacks speckle the walls. Moki's supplements its casual dining area with a charming gift shop of island-inspired goodies and souvenirs, and the restaurant's drive-thru supplies cars, trucks, and low-flying parasails with freshly made takeout meals. The restaurant also offers extensive catering services for private parties and special events, providing clients with amenities such as whole-roast pigs, fire-breathing shows, and luau-dance performances.

Each crowned by a small flame, circular oil lamps create the warm, low lighting and romantic atmosphere of Little Basil Thai Cuisine, bathing the chef's upscale renditions of Thai staples in their soft glow. Curries and stir-fries employ a whirlwind of vegetables and the diner's choice of poultry, beef, tofu, or vegetarian duck. The restaurant's wide range of beers, wines, and sake complement artfully plated specialty dishes such as striped bass and duck panang curry. Traditional desserts, such as fried bananas, compete for sweet teeth's attention with flights of ice cream, which plate three separate flavors side by side so diners can sample each and decide which one deserves the metaphorical cherry on top.

As Basil’s doors flung open in 2009, the Columbus Dispatch reported on the owner's inspiration: his mother Judy Ruanphae’s string of successful Thai restaurants—beginning with Thai Village in Chicago’s Wicker Park—that she ran with her husband while her son Rhome was growing up. Rhome borrowed his mother’s culinary mastery for Basil, which teleports taste buds to the jungles of Thailand with a menu of authentic southeast-Asian cuisine. Chefs gather rice or egg noodles to lay the foundation for many entrees, such as specialty kee mow, a soft or crispy maelstrom of rice noodles with thai basil, tomatoes, and bell peppers. The pla radprick invites forks to spear a whole fried tilapia adorned with sweet-and-sour garlic sauce and cilantro. The menu also features a rainbow of curry dishes, soups, done-up salads, and appetizers to keep ravenous diners from eating their napkins. The seasoned confines of a former antique shop welcome diners to Basil, decked out with bare brick and a retro advertisement for ice painted on the back wall. As a glittering chandelier casts light on colorful curries, wine-dark panels of varnished wood gaze at diners from the wall, and exposed lengths of ductwork add a neoindustrial aesthetic without the overkill of steam-powered dessert trays or austere Orwellian maitre d's.

Burgundy booths and dark-clothed tables give Sweet Basil Thai House's spacious dining room an alluring mystique, which sets the scene for the artful plating of classic Thai dishes presented by native-born chefs. Their specialties run from favorites such as pad thai and pineapple fried rice to red-curry duck, which they roast to crisp before simmering it with pineapple and vegetables. While these dishes are prepared, the wait staff moves about the tables, dropping off glasses of Thai iced tea and fresh coconut juice or willing corks to leap from bottles of wine that diners brought with them.

At Thai Sweet Basil, chefs shun frozen produce and MSG, instead championing fresh, all-natural ingredients for their menu of traditional Thai cuisine. They simmer five varieties of curries, serving them with fragrant mounds of jasmine rice, and fry up classic noodle dishes, such as pad thai and sweet-basil fried rice. They also plate delicacies such as soft-shell crab with green curry and snapper marinated in tamarind. All the recipes and cooking techniques that they use were developed over the centuries in the Thai royal palace. Servers weave between sunny walls and maroon booths bordering a dining room speckled with emerald fronds, exotic artwork, and linens as white and untarnished as a snowman's criminal record.