Rocking V Cafe runs out of a 125-year-old brick building at 97 W Center Street in Kanab — Center Street being the main strip in a town of about 4,500 that doubles as the gateway to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, the Wave permits, and the Vermilion Cliffs. Victor Cooper opened the cafe around the turn of the century, building a slow-food kitchen in a town where most of the dining at the time was diner-format and trail-end. He ran it for two decades. The current operators — a four-person partnership — took over from him, and the Voyage Utah profile from 2023 lays out the new structure: Dan Potter, Delia Robinson, Sarah Jackson, and Allen Jackson.

Four Owners, Four Roles

Delia Robinson came in with thirty-five years of restaurant experience. Sarah Jackson handles the books with twenty-seven years of accounting. Allen Jackson came from a corporate and government background. Dan Potter rounds out the partnership. That kind of role-defined four-way ownership is uncommon in small-town restaurant work, and the structure is part of why the kitchen has held its standards through the transition from Cooper. Robinson runs the kitchen end. Jackson runs the office. The format hasn’t drifted from what Cooper built.

Slow Food, Art on the Walls, a Wine List That Surprises

The menu leans slow-food: meats sourced from independent producers, vegetarian and vegan options that aren’t an afterthought, scratch desserts, and a wine list that punches above what travelers expect to find in a Kane County town. The cafe doubles as an art space, with rotating exhibitions through the dining room. The wine program is the part that surprises out-of-towners most — the kind of bottle list that wouldn’t be out of place in Salt Lake City, in a building older than the state of Utah.

Rocking V in the 435

For a register of locally rooted Southern Utah businesses, Rocking V is the most-recognized fine-casual independent in Kanab and a clean entry on the sheet. Kanab is a key 435 town outside the St. George metro — the town is small enough that the cafes and tour operators on Center Street more or less define its identity to visitors — and Rocking V’s position in that small landscape is structural. The handoff from Cooper to the four-person partnership is the kind of transition the register can surface in one place, instead of leaving the question half-answered across Yelp and TripAdvisor.

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