The lasagna at Sage doesn't arrive as a slice. It comes as a slab, cut so every portion keeps an edge of crisped Parmigiano Reggiano along one side, the kind of detail a cook only bothers with if they expect you to order it again. That's chef Phelix Gardner's call, and it's been on the menu since he took over the kitchen in March. Six months later, it remains a fixed point on a menu Gardner is developing in stages.
Sage sits inside The Hills Clubhouse at Promontory, a 26-seat bar and lounge with sightlines to the Par-3 course, and for members who've eaten there since the restaurant opened, the obvious question this fall is what a new chef changed. The more useful question is what he hasn't changed yet, and why he's in no hurry to.
A chef who came here to slow down, not speed up
Gardner arrived at Sage after fourteen years with Salt Lake City's Pago Restaurant Group, where he helped open nearly every concept in the company's portfolio, including Finca, East Liberty Tap House and Emigration Cafe. Before that, his training ran through the Peabody Orlando and Walt Disney World, and later chapters took him through Stanza Italian Bistro, Current Fish & Oyster and the Grand America Hotel. It's a résumé built on juggling multiple kitchens at once, which is part of why Sage appealed to him. After turning 49 last year, he told the Park Record he'd started to consider a change, and what drew him to Promontory was the chance to run one restaurant instead of many, with room to shape its future instead of maintaining someone else's system.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A chef managing five concepts learns to standardize fast, because speed is the only way to keep five kitchens consistent. A chef running one restaurant can afford to build slowly, and Gardner has been explicit that he's doing exactly that. Rather than rewriting the menu in his first weeks, he spent them studying how people actually order.
Why the menu barely moved for months
Gardner's read on Sage's ordering pattern breaks down roughly like this: close to 90 percent of guests eat the bread, 40 percent order pizza, and 30 to 40 percent order pasta. Those numbers shaped everything he touched first, because a restaurant with that kind of traffic through its bread basket and pizza oven has to get those basics right before anything else is worth reworking.
It's a builder's logic, not a marketing one, and it explains why the visible changes at Sage since March have been additions rather than a wholesale relaunch. The wood-fired pizza oven now also finishes the Grilled Red Prawns, the Pork Chop and the Butcher's Cut Steak, giving three proteins the same char and smoke the restaurant was already known for on its pizzas. The lasagna is new. The rest of the menu, by his own account, is still a mix of what was there before and what he's layering in as he goes.
Members eating at Sage right now are getting the dishes Gardner has already settled on, with more planned as the year goes on.
The two numbers that mark when it's actually done
Gardner has set himself two specific benchmarks, both aimed at his one-year mark in the kitchen, which lands around March 2027.
The first is pasta. Sage currently runs on a mix of house-made and outsourced pasta, and Gardner's goal is to get that number to 100 percent house-made. The second is sourcing. He's said he wants to link up with local chefs across the Wasatch Back within that same year, because he sees good sourcing as the foundation good food is built on, not a garnish added at the end.
Neither of those is a small lift inside a private club kitchen that also has to hit dinner service every night. A full pasta program means new equipment, new staffing rhythm and enough lead time to build it without slowing down the line. A serious local sourcing relationship means real conversations with Wasatch Back producers, not a seasonal special that disappears after a few weeks. Both are the kind of changes that show up gradually on a menu rather than all at once, which is exactly why nothing at Sage has looked dramatically different from the outside since spring.
What that means for anyone eating there this fall: the current menu is phase one. The version Gardner actually has in mind won't be fully visible until sometime around next spring, and the clearest early signal of progress will be the pasta program, since that's the number he's already put a target on.
Where Sage fits in the club's wider table
Sage is one of six restaurants operating across the Promontory property, each tied to a different clubhouse and a different register of the day. Its home, The Hills Clubhouse, is a newer node in that geography, distinct from the older Village and Nicklaus buildings where Promontory ran its wellness overhaul earlier this year. That split, spa and fitness landing in two separate clubhouses on two separate timelines, is the same pattern showing up again at dinner: Promontory's amenities don't get renovated all at once across the property, they get built out clubhouse by clubhouse, on whatever schedule that specific building's project is running.
General manager Jonathan Fillman framed Gardner's hire as part of that same philosophy, saying the chef's approach to hospitality aligns with the club's commitment to delivering world-class amenities for members. Gardner has echoed the sentiment in his own words, telling the Park Record that what drew him to Sage was watching members circulate table to table on his first visit, treating the room less like a restaurant and more like an extension of their own living space.
That's worth sitting with for a member deciding where to eat this week. Sage isn't positioning itself against the club's other five restaurants. It's building toward becoming the one where the pasta is entirely made in-house and the produce has a name and a farm attached to it, on a timeline the chef himself has already put a number on.
What to order between now and the finished version
For anyone eating at Sage before that one-year mark arrives, a few dishes are worth ordering now rather than waiting for the fuller menu:
- The Nonna's Lasagna, the slab-cut version with the crisped cheese edge, which has been on the menu since Gardner's arrival and isn't going anywhere.
- The Grilled Red Prawns, finished in the wood-fired oven for the same char the pizzas get.
- The Butcher's Cut Steak or Pork Chop, both run through that same oven rather than a standard grill.
- Whatever pasta happens to be on the menu that week, since it's currently the dish most in motion as Gardner works toward his house-made target.
None of that requires waiting for spring. The finished restaurant Gardner is building will look different from the one open right now, but the current version is a real, deliberate first draft, not a placeholder.
Six months into his tenure at Sage, the honest read isn't that a new chef has arrived and shaken things up. It's that a chef with fourteen years of experience running multiple kitchens at once chose to slow down for this one, and he's telling anyone paying attention exactly how he's measuring whether it worked.
If you're weighing what a season at Promontory actually looks like day to day, from the clubhouses to the kitchens inside them, Tara Vaught can walk you through how the property's amenities, dining and real estate fit together. Let's Connect.
