Church Benches and Leviticus Burgers

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

There was only one place in Utah, perhaps only one in the whole world, where you could sit on an old church bench, drink a beer, and eat a Leviticus burger grilled to perfection by a Theoretical Poeticist. 

It was the Dead Goat Saloon, where such wonderful and unusual things happened nearly every day in downtown Salt Lake City for three decades. From 1973 until 2003, the Goat occupied the basement of an old brick building complex known as Arrow Press Square. The Square, comprised of several adjacent structures built in or about 1908, housed three beloved and iconic shrines of my youth.

The first was the old Twelve Oaks Club. Named, for some mysterious reason, after the Wilkes family mansion in the book/movie Gone with the Wind, it was a massive multi-level bar with a huge lighted dance floor. The Twelve Oaks hosted live concerts (top acts like The Gregg Allman Band and the Waitresses in 1983), but also served up some great weekend dancing with rockin’ DJs.

I frequented the place with some other bachelor law school buddies—and some female friends from the Utah College of Nursing—in the mid-1980s. It was a great way to let off steam after a long day of studying tort and contract law. With thin profit margins in the entertainment industry, however, it closed a few years later, was resurrected as Club DV8, but then closed again. A fire in the vacant building sealed the doors forever in about 2010.

After law school, I took a job with the Jones Waldo law firm located around the corner on the same downtown block as the Twelve Oaks. Almost every week, and sometimes twice weekly, I met friends and colleagues for lunch at the Hunan Restaurant, located in another part of Arrow Press Square. 

Operated by immigrants from Taiwan, the Hunan mastered a fine and rare art form—preparing and serving quick, delicious, and inexpensive lunch-size portions of Szechuan chicken (including soup, rice, and an egg roll) for hungry lawyers. I was gastronomically devastated when it closed in the late 1990s.

There were only two problems with the Hunan…no pool table and no burgers. Thus, to add some variety to our Arrow Press Square outings, some of the law firm employees turned our attentions to the Dead Goat. 

The Goat had a bar, a grill, pool tables, and an atmosphere. The owner named it after a goat he saw slaughtered in Nepal as part of a wedding ritual. It was close to tavern perfection.

Some readers may feel an urge to remind me, at this point in the blog, that the Dead Goat also was a prime time live host of many notable jazz and blues musical acts, or that NBA players often hung out there after playing the Utah Jazz across the street at the old Salt Palace. 

That’s all true, fine, and good. I call that the nighttime Goat. Despite those noteworthy features of the place, I must respectfully assert that the Dead Goat was at its finest in the quieter, daylight hours.

We typically had an hour for lunch, give or take a few minutes (especially on a Friday). We could walk over to the Goat, step down into its basement confines, order burgers and beer, shoot a little pool, and make it back to work in reasonably good shape and on time. 

In the daylight hours, we even had the place to ourselves. Well, almost. Michael the bar tender was there too. Michael also was the cook and resident sage of the Dead Goat. He did all those things pretty darn well too. He self-identified as a Theoretical Poeticist, so you just knew that when he chose to say something, it was going to be interesting. 

For example, he once explained, “God is merely a metaphor we use to mark that magic and measurable difference between something that is alive from anything that isn’t, especially itself.” Whoa! A few years later, he wrote on Facebook that his favorite pastime at the Goat was “screwing with people’s minds from the working side of the bar.”

My favorite interaction with him always played out the same way, every time we engaged in it. I would order a burger, well done. He would look at me, expressionless, and respond, “Got it, burnt offerings, one Leviticus burger coming up.” 

The Book of Leviticus, of course, outlines strict Judaic procedures for sacrificial offerings, all with one goal: “It is a burnt offering, a food offering, an aroma pleasing to the Lord.” Michael always got mine just right, including the pleasing aroma part. I often ate it sitting on wooden pews the Goat’s owner had rescued from an old Baptist church. 

To date, it remains one of my favorite and most eclectic near-Old-Testament experiences. Like the Twelve Oaks and the Hunan, however, the Dead Goat fell victim to what I now think was some sort of pervasive Arrow Press Square curse. 

Finances were a perennial Goat problem. New owners invested and re-fashioned the place for a time as the Crazy Goat, featuring exotic dancers. We stopped going. It no longer was an appropriate spot for lunch time escapes.

And soon it was in conflict and litigation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which had its lovely and historic temple just a block away to the north and did not take kindly to having exotic dancers nearby. The Goat was doomed and closed forever a few years later.

These days, when I look up from my desk and out of the window in my downtown Salt Lake City office, there is no Arrow Press Square. Instead, I see an empty lot full of gravel. The Square’s last two or three remaining brick buildings were razed five years ago in 2015, having survived for just over a century.

I have no idea what might replace the edifices where I forged my Twelve Oaks, Hunan, and Dead Goat Saloon memories. I must admit that whatever it is, I am disappointed already. 

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in the Spring of 2021.