With a Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant

Blake Spalding and Jennifer Castle

With a Measure of Grace recounts with sensitivity and wit the tale of a women-owned, Buddhist-based restaurant becoming a community anchor in a small Mormon town. Within the book’s 176 beautiful, color-photographed pages, former backcountry caterers and professional river chefs Blake Spalding and Jen Castle share their struggles and successes as the co-owners of Hell’s Backbone Grill. Spalding and Castle began with the goal to meld their ideas of place-based, seasonally appropriate cuisine, right livelihood, environmental ethics and social and community responsibility into a restaurant they would operate with compassion, generosity, loving kindness and grace. They were unaware at the time that given the unusual circumstances of their venture, this plan would be the restaurant’s only chance of survival.

Located in the heart of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Boulder, Utah, was the last town in the nation to receive year-round mail by mule train. Today it has no stoplight, ATM, grocery store or medical facilities. But it has Zagat-rated Hell’s Backbone Grill which, despite all odds, has won the acclaim of national and international media. Sixty-five favorite recipes accompany charming anecdotes, old-fashioned rural wisdom and introductions to captivating local characters, making With a Measure of Grace a warm, earthy, and unforgettable read.