George’s Corner Restaurant & Pub

George’s Corner is in the 1932 building on the corner of Ancestor Square that originally housed the Big Hand Café, owned by George Pace — a great uncle of the restaurant’s current owner, Nicki Richards. Richards is George Pace’s great-great-granddaughter, and the restaurant carries his name in a way that is fairly literal: the namesake actually ran a café in this building, and the family lineage from him to the current owner is direct. That kind of generational continuity inside a single block is rare in St. George; the Walmart era pulled most family-owned downtown businesses out by the early 2000s.

The Same Block as the Painted Pony

George’s Corner shares its address with the Painted Pony — both rooms operate at 2 W St. George Blvd, which is the Ancestor Square historic block at the corner of Main. Until February 2025, Richards (formerly Nicki Pace) co-owned both restaurants with her husband Randall. The Painted Pony sale narrowed her footprint to George’s Corner alone, and that focus showed up in 2025 when Richards led local opposition to a paid-parking proposal that threatened Ancestor Square’s tenant arrangements. The Salt Lake Tribune covered the dispute in December 2025; the Richards name is the surname that surfaces in current coverage, not Pace.

A Pub on a Square With a Pony Next Door

The menu runs more casual than the Painted Pony, by design — breakfast service, full bar, and a pub menu that fills the room day and night. The two restaurants serve different clienteles even though they sit feet from each other. The Pony books for anniversaries and special occasions; George’s Corner is where regulars eat most weekday breakfasts and where downtown workers hold the lunch counter through the afternoon. That division of labor is part of what made the joint ownership work for two decades, and part of what makes George’s Corner an independent operation now that the Pony has changed hands.

George’s Corner in the 435

For a register of locally rooted Southern Utah businesses, George’s Corner is a clean entry: a multigenerational family-named restaurant in a 1932 building, owned by the great-great-granddaughter of the building’s original tenant, with a documented civic role in defending the square it anchors. The Ancestor Square cluster — George’s Corner, the Painted Pony, Benja Thai, Pizza Factory, FeelLove Coffee, Bee Sweet — is itself a register-worthy unit, and Richards’s family is woven into more of that block’s history than any other operating tenant.