Things to Do in Murray Utah This Summer and What's New

"It's exciting to bring our immersive dining experience to Murray's growing population," Fogo de Chão CEO Barry McGowan said when the Brazilian steakhouse chain picked Murray for its first Utah location. That single sentence explains more about this city's restaurant row than most people realize. Murray isn't just adding restaurants this year. It's being used as the state's testing ground, and one of the buildings that made room for it used to be the last Macaroni Grill left in Utah.

If you live here, you've probably noticed the churn along State Street without connecting the dots. Here's the fuller picture, plus the part of Murray's calendar that hasn't changed at all while the restaurant scene rewrites itself around Fashion Place Mall.

The Corner That Keeps Landing Firsts

Fogo de Chão opened its doors on Monday, November 24, 2025, at 6223 South State Street inside Fashion Place Mall, and it marked the chain's first location anywhere in Utah. General manager Allan Pereira, who started as a gaucho at Fogo's Las Vegas location in 2011, now runs a restaurant with an open churrasco grill, dry-aged meat lockers, and a Market Table stocked with seasonal salads and fresh fruit. The opening created more than 100 local jobs, and Fogo donated 10 percent of its first week of sales to the Utah Food Bank.

That's the kind of detail that tells you something about how national brands see Murray. This wasn't a Salt Lake City or Sandy decision. Fashion Place Mall is where a chain with more than 115 locations worldwide chose to plant its Utah flag.

The Demolition Nobody Explained

A few blocks south of the mall, at 102 East Winchester Street, something stranger happened. Customers noticed as far back as March 2025 that the Romano's Macaroni Grill there had closed with a note calling it temporary. It wasn't. That Murray location was the last Macaroni Grill standing anywhere in Utah, and instead of reopening, the building came down entirely.

Lazy Dog Restaurants, a casual dining chain that started in Orange County in 2003 and takes its name and aesthetic from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, acquired the property and told KSL the old building would be demolished and rebuilt from scratch for its own first Utah location. The company's public timeline pointed to a mid-2026 opening. As of this writing, no updated opening date has circulated beyond that original target, which means the site that used to serve chicken parmesan is still becoming something else.

Two national chains, two Murray addresses, both picked as the company's Utah debut, within roughly a year of each other. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's a pattern about what this stretch of State Street has become.

What Never Left the Menu

None of this displaced the places locals already treat as their regulars. A few that keep showing up in Murray dining conversations, chain openings or not:

• Sicilia Mia, open since 2014, still built around handcrafted pastas and tableside presentations rooted in Sicilian family recipes.
• Hoof & Vine, a steakhouse food writers point to as the only spot in the Salt Lake Valley doing its own in-house dry-aging.
• Tea Rose Diner, a modest storefront serving Thai food on a heat scale of 1 to 10, where regulars warn first-timers not to go past a 2 or 3.
• Prohibition, a 1920s speakeasy-themed room known for its Friday and Saturday night burlesque shows, which reviewers consistently call one of Murray's better-kept surprises.

That list has held steady even as newer names like Murray Taqueria, JJ Restaurant Halal, and El Parche Colombian Food have filled in around the edges over the past year. The corridor is getting more crowded, not more homogenous.

The Calendar That Didn't Need a Grand Opening

While State Street sorts out its chains, the rest of Murray's summer runs on venues that never needed a press release. Wheeler Historic Farm keeps its Sunday farmers market going through the warm months, and its Friday-night Farm and Sky Star Party series, which draws stargazers with telescopes set up across the farm's open fields, returns on a roughly monthly schedule whenever the skies cooperate.

Murray Park and the Murray Theater carry the rest of the season. Here's what's actually on the calendar right now:

The summer musical opens tonight and runs through August 15. Neither concert in September needs a mall renovation or a new building permit to happen. They've been part of Murray's civic rhythm for years, priced the same way regardless of what's happening a mile up the road.

Two Speeds, One Town

That's the real shape of Murray right now. One version of this city is corporate, fast-moving, and driven by real estate decisions made in Newport Beach and Porto Alegre boardrooms. The other runs on a farm schedule and a theater box office, and it hasn't sped up or slowed down because a steakhouse or a casual dining chain picked this zip code.

Neither version cancels out the other. A resident deciding what to do this Friday might end up at Fogo de Chão's Market Table or at Wheeler Farm's Star Party, and both choices are equally Murray. What's changed is that the city now offers a genuinely wider range on any given week than it did even two years ago, without losing the places that made it feel like home in the first place.

If you're watching Murray from the outside and wondering whether this kind of growth changes what it's like to actually live here, that's exactly the kind of question worth a real conversation. Nikole Andersen Real Estate works this market closely and can walk you through what a neighborhood like Murray actually offers day to day, not just what shows up in a listing. Contact Nikole for a complimentary market consultation.