The After-Pizza Dessert Crawl: Salt Lake's Best Sweet Spots
A great pizza deserves a great encore. Once you've polished off a Litzas pie, point the car toward one of these Salt Lake dessert institutions — or, if you're feeling ambitious, string a few together into a proper sweet-tooth tour of the city. Salt Lake punches way above its weight on desserts, and every one of these is locally owned and made from scratch.
- Rockwell Ice Cream — Super-premium, locally made, and the product of one Utah kid's dream: founder Justin Williams started churning small batches at home with his family before turning it into a downtown parlor. The ice cream runs around 16% butterfat — about as rich as it legally gets — and the flavors are fearless. The award-winning "G.O.A.T." (goat-cheese base, rosemary, almonds, blackberry jam) is the conversation piece; the Honeycomb is the move.
- Blacksmith Ice Cream — Hand-churned in Millcreek with bold, rotating flavors you can watch them make right in front of you. The kind of small-batch, artisan operation that quietly ruins other ice cream for you.
- Dolcetti Gelato — Tucked into 9th & 9th and billed as the oldest gelato shop in Utah, with roots going back to 2004 and a start as three Italian ice carts rolling around the city. Today it's a rotating cabinet of around 40 from-scratch flavors — Coconut Sticky Rice, Pistachio, Cold Brew — plus macarons, Belgian waffles, and pastries, all under a gloriously eclectic "I Spy"-book interior.
- Sweetaly Gelato — Italian gelato made with ingredients sourced straight from Italy, and routinely ranked at the very top of the city's lists. Fitting, after an Italian dinner.
- Capo Gelateria Italiana — A downtown spot for authentic, traditional Italian gelato, for the purists who want their post-pizza dessert to keep the theme going.
- Doki Doki — A downtown Japanese dessert café known for layered crepe cakes and taiyaki — fish-shaped, soft-serve-filled cones that are as fun to photograph as they are to eat.
- Monkeywrench — Salt Lake's premier vegan ice cream shop, with a dozen-plus homemade flavors, a coffee bar, and milkshakes (Banana Brownie, Mocha Mud Pie) good enough that the dairy crowd won't notice anything's missing.
- Hatch Family Chocolates — A beloved Avenues chocolatier — cozy, family-run, and the right call when you want to take the sweetness home or settle in with a hot chocolate.
Our suggestion: start with the pizza, hit two or three of these, and don't apologize to anyone for any of it. That's not a dessert run — that's a Salt Lake tradition.
