Mikel Trapp’s 30+ year career as a chef, restaurant owner and food and beverage director was launched at the Park Café, a small restaurant in the heart of Salt Lake City.  Today he is one of the city’s most popular and successful restaurateurs.  As owner and Operating Partner of Fresco Italian Café, Café Trio and Café Trio Cottonwood, he has come full circle.

Trapp essentially learned his craft on the job and quickly moved from the Park Café to Utah’s top destination resort, The Stein Eriksen Lodge in Deer Valley. At each area he cooked, managed and eventually operated numerous restaurants, discovering that he was as much of an expert (and a natural) manager as he was a chef.  

After seven years at Steins, he went on to gain local and national recognition as executive chef at Metropolitan, one of downtown Salt Lake’s most lauded—and progressive—dining establishments. Under his direction, the restaurant received one of Salt Lake’s first DiRoNA’s.  His “handcrafted American cuisine” and attention to procuring the finest ingredients at Metropolitan (and earlier at the Stein Eriksen Lodge) helped to set the pace for other restaurants in Salt Lake, just as the city’s fine dining scene was coming of age, prior to the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.  Trapp also conducted sold-out cooking classes at Metropolitan—one of his favorite ways of connecting with diners and sharing his knowledge of ingredients and techniques.

After a year at Metropolitan, Trapp returned to Stein Eriksen as director of food and beverage at the award-winning slope side resort. Consistently rated among the “Top 10 Resorts in the World” by Conde Nast Traveler, the Stein Eriksen Lodge is known especially for its cuisine.  From there he returned to another scene of his earlier culinary life, assuming the position of managing director of food and beverage and executive chef at Snowbird, overseeing 13 restaurants.

Trapp, who is an avid supporter of organic, sustainably farmed and local food products, was always interested in going back to a smaller kitchen, developing menus for more intimate venues where he could really affect diners’ experiences.  To that end, when the opportunity came up, he and a business partner purchased and took over operations of two neighborhood gems, Fresco Italian Café and Café Trio early in 2004. In July of 2005 the partners successfully opened a second Café Trio in Cottonwood. Trapp and his small team of professional chefs, now enjoy cooking the food they love and sharing it with appreciative diners at all three restaurants.

Trapp has also worked as a chef/consultant for three Olympic Games as food and beverage manager for Jet Sports, the world’s leading Olympic Games hospitality program provider and management company.

He and his wife Janel are the proud, and very busy parents of triplets, Ryan, Olivia and Gwen.