11 hours Ago
Utah is home to plenty of interesting bar concepts. Quarters — with locations in downtown Salt Lake City and Sugar House — is an arcade bar. Prohibition in Murray is a speakeasy that will transport you to the 1920s.
Bar Nohm in Central 9th is a Japanese izakaya, or after-work drinking spot. But a shoe repair shop that’s also a bar? It just hasn’t been done in Utah, said Dax Williamson, the owner of Lucky Sole Shoe Repair in Lehi. Opening a speakeasy saloon behind his traditional repair shop is his dream, anyway.
While Williamson has been working toward getting a liquor license for Lucky Sole, at 173 W. Main St., its front door is barely too close to a small church down the street to qualify, according to Utah’s proximity restrictions .
So until something changes (Williamson said the city just bought the church property), he’s planning on hosting pop-up events with alcohol at his shop using 72-hour permits. His first such event, which he’s calling the shop’s “grand reopening,” is happening this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Lamenting a lack of nightlife and hangout spots in Lehi, Williamson said, “We really wanted to create a space for the community to gather and enjoy a historical craft.
” ‘So much neat history’ (Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Boots for sale line a shelf at Lucky Sole Shoe Repair in Lehi on Thursday, April 17, 2025. When walking into Lucky Sole Shoe Repair, on Lehi’s historical Main Street, the first thing you notice is the smell. The scent, a heady mix of glue and leather, tells you you’re in a place where old things are restored to their original glory.
Shelves full of cowboy boots and shoes of all kinds line the walls. A tiny white dog named Chloe lounges on a rug. A blue-eyed cat named Kittay keeps his post on a shelf.
Williamson, in a well-worn apron, stands ready to greet customers. “This poor town just doesn’t get the credit that it deserves,” Williamson said. “There’s so much neat history just on this street alone and it’s all going away really fast.
So we’re trying to keep it.” Williamson’s dad, Craig “Willie” Williamson, started Lucky Sole about 30 years ago, when he was also a ski patroller at Sundance Mountain Resort, his son said. When Williamson was growing up, he always told his dad that he also wanted to be a ski patroller when he got older.
He didn’t want to go into the family business of cobbling shoes, he said. Soon after Williamson graduated from high school, though, he started going to Lucky Sole to help his dad with the ever-growing pile of shoes that needed mending. Williamson ended up going into the service industry, including working in bars in fine-dining restaurants and ski resorts.
In 2020, when his dad died with 40 years as a ski patroller under his belt, Williamson also lost his job running the Snowpine Lodge at Alta due to the COVID pandemic. With his dad gone, Williamson wasn’t sure what to do with Lucky Sole, since no one in his family was interested in taking up cobbling, he said. At one point, Williamson even listed the shop for sale, and started making plans to move to Montana.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Owner Dax Williamson helps a customer at Lucky Sole Shoe Repair in Lehi on Thursday, April 17, 2025. But he kept going in and working on shoes, and he found that business was picking up. “I was like, ‘Man, I’d be stupid to sell this place,’ because we were so busy,” he said.
After COVID, “people weren’t going out and spending money on new, and they were bringing all their old, broken stuff in here.” So Williamson took over Lucky Sole, but he found that the building was in rough shape. “Every time it rained, I had to get buckets out, and every time we turned a machine on, the circuit breaker would flip,” he said.
The building was so dilapidated that “we should have torn it down, but we ended up saving it and we kept the original bones,” Williamson said. Over seven months, Williamson and several contractors completely overhauled the shop, redoing the plumbing and installing new electrical and a new roof. The new cobbler’s table, bar top and benches inside the shop were made using wood from an old elm tree that had been cut down in a local farmer’s field, Williamson said.
And once the stars align, he’s moving forward with a plan that Williamson and his dad had talked about just before he died: eventually opening a permanent bar at Lucky Sole. “He loved the idea,” Williamson said. A ‘grand reopening’ (Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Owner Dax Williamson points out the patio space behind Lucky Sole Shoe Repair in Lehi on Thursday, April 17, 2025.
This weekend’s three-day event will start Friday with a ribbon-cutting for the shop by the Lehi Chamber of Commerce at 5:30 p.m. From 6 p.
m. to midnight, bartenders from Salt Lake City cocktail bar Water Witch will take over the shop, mixing drinks among the same machines that Williamson and his team use to repair shoes. On Saturday and Sunday, there will be a workshop before the evening social kicks off at 6 p.
m. On Saturday from 4:30 to 6 p.m.
, Jimmy Santangelo, founder of the Wine Academy of Utah , will teach a tutorial on whiskey and host a tasting, showcasing whiskey from Sugar House Distillery and around the world. That whiskey knowledge will be paired with information about leather by Williamson, who will talk about different types and textures of leather and discuss how the shop and repairs work. On Sunday from 4:30 to 6 p.
m., Francis Fecteau from Libation will teach a workshop on mezcal and host a tasting, which will be combined with more information on leathers from Williamson. While Lucky Sole will hold a free open house during the day all weekend, the two workshops are ticketed events.
The tickets are available at LuckySoleShoeRepair.com and cost $58.90; admission for the evening social afterward is included in the ticket price.
If you just want to have a drink and socialize after the workshops, admission is $10 at the door. Most of the weekend’s festivities will be held in the patio space behind the shop, with a pop-up bar along one wall and plenty of seating and tables. A food truck from Jurassic Tacos will keep everyone fed.
After the event, Lucky Sole will go back to being just a shoe repair shop. For now. (Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tools lie on a bench at Lucky Sole Shoe Repair in Lehi on Thursday, April 17, 2025.
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