Peekaboo Canyon Wood Fired Kitchen

Peekaboo Canyon Wood Fired Kitchen opened in Kanab in fall 2016, founded by an unusual ownership group: Francis and Silva Battista, two of the co-founders of Best Friends Animal Society, alongside Julie Castle, the organization’s current CEO. Best Friends runs the country’s largest no-kill animal sanctuary, headquartered just outside Kanab in the canyon to the north, and the sanctuary’s draw — volunteers, donors, animal-rescue-circuit travelers — has shaped Kanab’s tourism economy more than most outsiders register. Peekaboo Canyon Wood Fired Kitchen sits at 233 W Center Street, a few minutes from the sanctuary entrance.

A Restaurant Tied to a Sanctuary

The Battistas and Castle built the kitchen with values that align with Best Friends: a wood-fired, vegetarian-leaning menu — pizzas, salads, plant-forward plates — that is plant-forward without being strictly vegetarian. The orientation is deliberate. The sanctuary brings tens of thousands of visitors a year through Kanab, and many of them want a kitchen that doesn’t rely on meat as the default. Peekaboo gives them one. The wood oven is the room’s anchor; the menu is short and disciplined; the kitchen runs at the level of the better Springdale dining rooms rather than the diner-format that historically defined Kanab.

Best Friends in the Canyon Just North of Town

The Best Friends Animal Sanctuary occupies thousands of acres in the canyon north of Kanab. It is the largest operation of its kind in the country, and its presence in Kane County has shaped the town’s identity for decades — the volunteer rotations, the adoption traffic, the animal-rescue conferences that pull in attendees from outside the region. The Battistas were among the founders of the organization in the 1980s; Castle’s role as current CEO ties the restaurant to the working leadership of the sanctuary now. That connection is the story the register surfaces carefully — Peekaboo is not a Best Friends operation, but the founding ownership overlaps the sanctuary’s leadership.

Peekaboo in the 435

For a register of locally rooted Southern Utah businesses, Peekaboo is a Kanab independent with clearly documented founders, a distinctive ownership group, and an operating context — the proximity to Best Friends — that materially shapes how the room runs. The wood oven, the menu orientation, and the Center Street address are all the kitchen’s identity. The Best Friends linkage is what makes the listing more than just another Kanab pizza room, and the register’s job is to flag it without overstating the relationship between the restaurant and the nonprofit.