By 5:30 on a Thursday, the gravel lot at 4747 South Holladay Blvd is already filling in. Six trucks are parked in rotation, picnic tables are claimed, and somebody's dog is working the crowd for dropped fries. A mile or so away, lawn chairs are staking out real estate on the grass at Holladay City Hall Park ahead of a free Saturday concert that costs nothing and requires no reservation. Neither of these scenes happens at Holladay Village Plaza, the polished retail-and-dining core most people picture when they think of where Holladay gathers.
That's the thing worth sitting with. The neighborhood's real summer calendar runs through a food truck park that spent three years fighting a city ordinance to exist, a food hall built out of a shuttered neighborhood deli, and a municipal park program that never charges admission. None of these were built to draw outside visitors. They were built by residents, for residents, and that distinction shapes what a Thursday or Saturday night here actually feels like.
The Fight That Built SoHo Food Park
SoHo, short for South Holladay, opened in 2015 because Shelly and Mark Olsen wanted a place where a rotating lineup of food trucks could serve dinner every night of the week without any single operator having to commit to brick and mortar. Getting there wasn't quick. Mark Olsen has said plainly that it "took nearly three years to change the ordinance to allow food trucks in Holladay," a detail that says as much about the city's caution around new commercial uses as it does about the Olsens' persistence.
The park changed hands in 2018, sold to Shree Sharma, Craig Hale, and longtime Holladay resident Ben Hale, who kept the format but expanded it. What started as a Thursday-through-Saturday rotation now runs closer to six nights a week, Monday through Saturday, based on current posted hours. The truck lineup itself turns over constantly. Suzy Thai has been serving traditional Thai food here since 2016. Freshies flies in fresh Maine lobster every other day for its rolls. On a given Friday you might find Bacio D'Italia doing handmade pasta next to Franck's Saveurs de France doing French comfort plates, with live music filling the gaps between orders. The season typically runs from early spring into October, and manager Mark Young has been booking the nightly lineup since 2017, curating rather than just filling slots.
A Deli That Became a Food Hall
A few minutes away at 4044 South 2700 East sits Block Party 2700, which occupies the old Granato's Deli building. When it opened in 2022, the concept was simple: keep Granato's Gourmet Market as the anchor and add three other local vendors under one roof. The original lineup was Granato's, Santo Tacos, Over the Coles BBQ, and Elephant Press Cafe.
That lineup has since widened. Reviewers now describe the rotation as ranging from Italian to Chilean, with newer names like Celeste Bite serving dishes such as bolognese fettuccine alongside the founding tenants. The practical difference between Block Party and SoHo is daypart. Block Party opens as early as 7 a.m. on Sundays and runs into the evening most days of the week, functioning as a breakfast-through-dinner option. SoHo is dinner only, dusk to closing. Together they cover the hours SoHo alone never tried to.
The Free Calendar Nobody Has to Book
If the food scene in Holladay is distributed across a handful of informal venues, the events calendar is even more concentrated, and it's entirely city-run. The Holladay Summer Concert Series brings a free concert to Holladay City Hall Park every Saturday night through the season, starting at 8 p.m. This year's remaining lineup includes:
- July 18, July 25, August 1, August 8, and August 15 concerts at the park
- August 22, the closing show, featuring a tribute act honoring the music of Linda Ronstadt
The Fourth of July kicked the season off with its own standalone program: a breakfast catered by Isabella's, a bike parade that starts at Olympus Pines Park and ends behind Holladay City Hall, an 8 p.m. concert, and a 10 p.m. drone show that replaced personal fireworks inside the Village Plaza and City Park for safety reasons.
Running alongside the concert series is the second year of the Holladay Summer Musical. After debuting the tradition last summer with Newsies, the city moved to Fiddler on the Roof this year, staged outdoors in the same park. It's a young tradition, only two summers old, but it's already become part of how the city organizes its calendar around free, outdoor, family programming rather than ticketed venues.
What's New on the Plate This Year
The anchor institutions stay fixed, but the restaurant scene around them keeps turning over, and this year brought a few changes worth knowing if you haven't been paying attention. Monti moved into the former Wendy's location on Highland Drive with a health-forward menu of breakfast plates, smoothies, and fresh-squeezed juice, and it's already built a following, with regulars specifically calling out the Sausage Sami and steak and cherry salad. A few blocks over, a new cocktail lounge took over the space that used to house Elixir Lounge, with a full remodel and a new chef-driven menu.
Old Tbilisi Kitchen brought Georgian food to the neighborhood, drawing curious diners who tried it after having Georgian food once while traveling and wanting to see how the local version compared. Hometown Dumpling landed on the same new-openings list, and it didn't take long for the soup dumplings to become the kind of thing regulars specifically call out by name in reviews.
None of this displaces SoHo or Block Party. It sits alongside them, which is really the point. Holladay's summer doesn't run through one Main Street with a single identity. It runs through a scrappy truck park that had to fight for its zoning, a converted deli, a free city park calendar, and a restaurant scene that keeps adding new names without needing a flagship to organize around.
That's an unusual way for a suburban city to build a summer, and it's worth understanding if you live here, because it explains why a Thursday night in Holladay doesn't look like a Thursday night in a neighborhood built around a single commercial strip. It looks like six food trucks in a gravel lot, a food hall that started as a deli, and a free concert nobody had to buy a ticket for.
Understanding how a neighborhood actually organizes its civic and commercial life, rather than how it's marketed, is the same instinct that matters when you're looking at property here professionally. If you ever want a conversation about what's happening on the commercial side of Holladay, from lease activity to how city planning shapes what gets built next, Dan Rip is available to talk. Schedule a free consultation whenever the questions turn from what's for dinner to what's happening with the building next door.
