Eating Wyoming: Eve’s Brings Fine Dining Fusion To Rock Springs Golf Course

ROCK SPRINGS — An artistic touch is everywhere you look at Eve’s.

It’s hanging on the walls in local paintings and photos. It’s in the decor, which marries rugged wooden floors with a massive, coppery fireplace in a space that feels instantly cozy.

Picture windows capture a picturesque scene outside — the river running by, green trees and grass, and rocky hills off in the distance, giving the sense of a mountainside retreat.

The bar even has shelving built to resemble mountains, stacked with sparkly glasses waiting to hold delicious amber liquors. 

Where the artist’s touch really shows up the strongest, though, are the plates of food themselves.

Pan-seared Atlantic salmon swims in a swirl of lemongrass and chili hollandaise, anchored by two black rice onigiri (aka Japanese rice balls). It’s accented with dried tomato chips scattered about like petals from a flower. Two heart-shaped dollops of pureed pea and lime wink up at the diner. 

The finishing touch is pure decadence. It’s a condiment called bottarga, made in Sicily.

It’s an umami-rich delicacy created by salt curing and drying fish roe. It’s an expensive, uncommon ingredient that requires a lot of hand labor, and it’s not often found at anything but the most upscale of Mediterranean restaurants. 

But this Wyoming spot isn’t in Jackson Hole, Sheridan or Cheyenne. It’s fine dining at a golf course on the outskirts of Rock Springs.

That means it doesn’t always show up on Google Maps for hungry travelers seeking dinner at someplace different in Rock Springs. 

For those who do find it, this off-the-beaten path restaurant is more than worth the trip.

Veg Stock Wasn't Magical

The path to becoming a culinary wizard was a bit of an off-the-beaten-path journey for the restaurant’s owner, Eve Piza.

Her first culinary experiences weren’t all that amazing. There was that time in her parent’s kitchen when she hauled out the cookbooks and started playing around with ingredients.

“I was 9 or something when I made this, uh, dark chocolate and vanilla marble cheesecake and a veg stock,” she said. “But I didn’t know what a veg stock was.”

She put all her vegetables in the pot with the amount of water that was called for and followed the recipe as closely as any 9-year-old could possibly do.

When she was finished, she tasted the stock she’d just made, thinking it would be like a fresh-tasting soup.

“I was so disappointed,” she said. “I just didn’t understand.”

Singing and dancing seemed more likely pursuits after that experience.

“I always liked the arts,” she said. “I was always painting or doing pottery or dancing and singing.”

She even studied music for a time at a conservatory in Boston after high school. But it just didn’t hold her attention the way food does.

“I just started working at these little chef-driven restaurants,” Piza said. “And then it just went from there. You work for people, and you kind of learn under them, so that’s what I did.”

No Famous Chefs

Her first real kitchen lesson happened because she was bored one night, working as a server at a place in Boston called The Wrap.

“I offered to help the chef in the back cut stuff up, and he showed me how to hold my fingers so I didn’t chop them off,” she said, chuckling a little bit. “I still have the tips of all my fingers.”

Another time, she was working at a restaurant that had suddenly become shorthanded in the kitchen. The chef asked her to cover a station she’d never tried before.

Piza was eager to do it, even though she had nothing but a menu to help her along. She figured out and learned to adapt on the fly.

“I think being a line cook, you just have to think fast on your feet in general,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Oh my god, I thought we had enough asparagus, but we don’t. So, what are we going to substitute?' And then you all of a sudden have to make a bunch of stuff in, like, the last hour before service.”

In the long run, it helped that Piza was always asking questions about the food and always asking if she could help in the kitchen.

She gained experience in different positions, from front of the house to back, from lots of brilliant chefs who might not have been famous but were willing to take her under their wings.

Wyoming Wildflowers Did It

Landing in Wyoming was another important turn along her path, and it happened by pure, dumb luck.

“My partner is a community college professor, and he was working in Boston,” she said. “It’s hard to get a tenured position at community colleges there, which is the population he really wanted to work with.”

That had him traveling to this and that college, slogging through Boston traffic for three or more hours a day. Because of that, he started looking for a new position somewhere else, somewhere that tenure was more likely.

One of those possibilities was Western Wyoming Community College.

“My sister and I had come out here, and we had traveled cross country when I was like 19,” Piza said. “And I’d always wanted to see the wildflowers in Wyoming in the spring. So, when he was like, ‘Oh, Wyoming’s an option,' I was like, ‘We should go there.’”

Happy wife, happy life. That’s exactly what they ended up doing. 

Piza’s first jobs were as a caterer, but she found she missed working with people, so she took a job at a restaurant called Coyote Creek, which is no longer in business.

That was just filling time, though. The real change was ahead.

A mentor called her up and asked for help opening a restaurant on the East Coast. This was something she couldn’t resist. It was a chance to learn the business side of restaurants.

“I told him I want to leave this situation with an understanding about ordering and inventory,” she said. “And to really have more of an understanding of the business side of it.”

When she came back, an opening at the hospital running its kitchen came up, and her experience opening the restaurant gave her the resume she needed to get that job.

The Leap Of Faith

Piza still never thought of herself as a restaurant owner, but it was obvious to her friends and family that she had amazing culinary skill. 

When a request for proposals came through for the city-owned club at the White Mountain Golf Course, one of her friends told her this was clearly tailor-made just for her.

“He was like, ‘Oh my God, you should totally take this, it’s like the perfect opportunity,’” Piza said.

Piza didn’t know what to think of that at first.

“I just didn’t think it was possible,” she said. “But then my husband Josh and I were talking about it, and he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s try it out. What’s the worst that could happen?’”

Piza didn’t feel confident about that at all, either.

“I’m not the kind of person who’s like, ‘Yes my ideas would be the best ideas,’” she said. 

Still, with everyone pushing and pulling for her, she was going to at least write a business plan to see what might be possible.

That business plan showed Piza fairly quickly that it was probably going to take all of the retirement savings she had earned while working at the hospital to buy everything they’d need for the restaurant.

It was a huge leap of faith going beyond that — a first step toward a dream that was going to radically change her life.

With A Newborn, Too

There was never going to be a better opportunity to start a restaurant than the one she took, Piza has now come to realize.

She’s also glad her friends and family were there to encourage her to take that risk.

“I mean, restaurants are just exceptionally expensive,” she said. “From the top down, everything that goes into them, is really expensive to open. To walk into an existing space with, I mean they even had plates. 

“They didn’t have cutlery or glassware, but they had plates,” she continued. “And we had to outfit with pans and stuff like that. But all the stoves, the refrigeration, and all the tables and chairs were already there.”

There was some cleanup work to be done, which her husband helped with, as did both their families. 

“We had a newborn when we were putting it together too, so it was a bit of a crazy time,” Piza said. 

Piza’s family took turns with her husband's family coming to help with things at the restaurant, as well as helping with the newborn. 

There was a lot of outdated stuff to get rid of. Hideous carpeting that smelled like old grease and stinky cheese, a gaudy gold backing in the bar, and old walls that needed fresh paint.

“We had to build walls, too, and we did a lot of cleaning,” she said. “Josh built some tables and built a new bar downstairs, and we painted down there as well.”

Then there was crafting a menu, and sourcing ingredients for it. 

“I used to have this huge whiteboard on the wall of our little house where we would just erase and add new items,” she said. “Like, getting all the licenses and tax numbers. We definitely learned on the job.”

A Taste Of The World

The restaurant has given Piza a new place to keep learning about food.

Every month, she has a tasting event, featuring a four-course meal from some other culture around the globe.

Last time, she explored Egypt, starting with a first course of salata baladi, which is a fresh, chopped vegetable salad whose name translates to “my country salad;” and aish baladi, which is a whole-wheat flatbread.

The second course was a soup called molokhai, and the third course a rich holiday dish called fatta. It is layers of meat, rice, and crispy bread dressed in a zesty sauce. 

The final course, a dessert, was a sweet semolina cake called basbousa. It was soaked in syrup and served with a dense pudding called sad al hanak.

“This way we get to learn a lot about different foods and different methodologies for preparing food and different ingredients,” she said. “And I think it just helps inform me for different like flavor patterns and tastes.”

It’s a little like she’s still learning from other people along the way who were brilliant at what they do, though she’s now the owner of the little chef-driven restaurant.

“We’re always trying to be better at what we do,” she said. “I’m never satisfied.”

Where all that is going in the future, she isn’t sure. She’s still on a twisting, winding path, and struggling to define the identity of her restaurant. 

On the other hand, perhaps the name she already has says it all. Just plain and simply, Eve’s.

“This is like a really hard business,” Piza said. “It’s like exceptionally rewarding, but sometimes it’s just so hard. We rely so intensely on the economy because we make everything from scratch. But, if our food can make you happy, then that’s all we’re looking for.”

A happy meal in a happy place, at someone’s dinner party. That’s the feel she’s really striving for in a little restaurant that lies on the north edge of Rock Springs, amid green trees and flowing rivers, with rocky hills beckoning off in the distance.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.