Free · all ages · Saturday 7–8:30 PM · 212 E. 33rd St
The Rundowntoday in 40 seconds
- 01Champion's chain tests whether Boise pays $50 for a 20-inch pie.
- 02River safe at 656 cfs; foothills closed, smoke lingers all weekend.
- 03Wildfire-loss exhibit opens Saturday as smoke hangs over Garden City.
- 04Micron annexation moves Boise's boundary down Federal Way; commute pain incoming.
- 05DIY paletas beat the heat — but skip sweetener and you freeze a brick.
Today's Edition
Thursday is the briefing — the issue you read before you commit to anything. And this weekend, the sky is running the show. Triple-digit heat lands, the Claremont Fire is throwing smoke over the foothills, and every outdoor plan you had is really a decision about when.
Start with The Forecast, because it changes what's even possible: the river is safe, the ridges are closed, and the wind decides your patio. From there the issue reads as one long argument about paying up — a pizza chain testing whether Boise will swallow big-city prices, the largest private bet in state history redrawing a boundary down Federal Way, and an art show born from a fire that took everything. Even the cheap play — a freezer full of fruit pops — is about buying time until the heat breaks.
What you pay this weekend isn't only money — it's timing.
The river is behaving. The sky is not. Every plan this weekend is a timing decision.
— The Editor
THE TABLE
Slice House bets Boise will pay San Francisco pizza prices
A 13-time world champion's fast-casual brand lands near-$50 pies — and a five-star crowd keeps paying.
The Huckleberry Pie hits the counter purple and gold — Larchwood Farms huckleberry jam pooled against baby red and purple potatoes, applewood bacon rendered crisp at the edges, Romano melting down the seams, a cup of cool sour cream on the side to cut the sweet. It's an Idaho-only slice, and it's the first thing that tells you Slice House by Tony Gemignani is paying attention to where it landed.
Gemignani is a 13-time world pizza champion, and the Meridian shop (1582 Orchard Park Dr) runs four distinct styles — New York, Sicilian, Grandma, Detroit — off a roughly 38-person model built to keep multiple specialized ovens honest. The trouble everyone's texting about isn't the crust. It's the check. A 12-inch Cal Italia, the award-winning signature, runs $30.85; a 12-inch Hot Honey is $29.75; the extra-large 20-inch specialty pies hover near $50. Idaho Statesman critic Michael Deeds put it plainly in a column headlined “‘Get ready for San Francisco prices, Boise’: Chain to open 2nd Idaho pizzeria soon” — a second location is impending in Eagle at 676 S. Edgewood Ln.
Here's the part the sticker-shock crowd keeps stumbling over: the reception is strongly positive. One recent five-star review flatly declared, “Compared to other pizzas in the valley, this one isn't in the same bracket!” Locally, it's run by franchisees Jamey Cutter, Steve Cutter, and Clark Morton, and the menu stretches past pizza into fresh pasta, wings, salads, craft beers, and premium wines. It's fast-casual — you order at the counter for dine-in or takeout — so the wait swings hard with volume. The trap: the queue backs out the door during the 6:00–7:30 PM Friday and Saturday rush, and the private patio's 62 seats are heavily contested on a cooler evening.
What to Order • If you're undecided: the Huckleberry Pie by the slice — the accessible, best-value entry point, sweet-savory and unmistakably Idaho, a few dollars to find out if the hype is real. • If you want the full experience: the 12-inch Cal Italia ($30.85) — the champion's signature, the one the trophies are about, worth the splurge if you're here to taste why he wins. • If you already know what you want: the 12-inch Hot Honey ($29.75) — the heat-and-sweet play that reads as a benchmark, not a gamble.
Bring: a group that argues about pizza — this is the table that settles it, or starts a new fight over the bill.
📍 1582 Orchard Park Dr, Suite 100, Meridian 🕒 Sun–Thu 11:00 AM–9:00 PM; Fri–Sat to 10:00 PM 💰 12-inch specialty pies ~$29.75–$30.85; 20-inch specialty near $50 ★ Best value: Huckleberry Pie by the slice — the Idaho-exclusive, pennies against a whole pie
— Nina's Table: Order the slice, skip the 7 PM line, and decide for yourself if Idaho's ready to pay California money for a very good pie.
Near-$50 for a 20-inch pie — and the five-star crowd keeps showing up anyway.
Source · Idaho Statesman — Michael Deeds
THE FORECAST
98° / 61°
The river says yes, the ridge says no, the sky says wait
MOOD OF THE SKY: RESTLESS. The Boise River is running a friendly 656 cfs at the Glenwood Bridge gauge, dead center of the 500–1,500 safe range — and that's the good news, so hold it, because the air sitting on top of that water has other ideas. The National Weather Service has a Red Flag Warning up: high heat, humidity scraping the floor, and dry thunderstorms that throw lightning down without a drop of rain to show for it. The sky has opinions.
Here's how the week runs. Thursday tops near 98°F, SW winds gusting to 40, a 25–35% shot at those dry storms. Friday leans into 100°F, sunny and smoky. Saturday holds at 98°F. Sunday backs off to 95°F. So yes to the river — but get your hard paddling done before the early-afternoon heat and the Red-Flag peak, because triple-digit sun on the water is an express lane to heat exhaustion and a UV burn you'll still feel Monday morning on the porch step. No to the foothills. Full stop. The BLM has slapped an emergency closure on public lands, roads, and trails between Bogus Basin Road, State Highway 21, and Boise Ridge Road, and the Boise River Wildlife Management Area is closed by Idaho Fish & Game.
Now the part a friendly wind shift won't fix. The Claremont Fire is roughly 6,500 acres and 0% contained, throwing air-tanker and ground-crew traffic all over the Military Reserve and Hulls Gulch. And here's the wrinkle: historical unexploded ordnance in the Military Reserve keeps crews from cutting the standard bulldozer containment lines. That slows the fight, and it means smoke and trail closures likely hang on all weekend. Air quality is bouncing between AQI 59 and 105 — Moderate to Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — depending on which way the canyon outflow blows. Check it before any patio dinner, and before Friday's KALEO show at Outlaw Field. One downtown note: the Northside Greenbelt between Pioneer Pathway and 11th Street saw closures this week, so watch for detour signage before you cut through.
This weather guy's marching orders: Float in the morning. Stay off the ridge. Check the AQI before you sit outside.
TODAY
98° / 61°
RESTLESS
TONIGHT
61°F
Clear
TOMORROW
102°F
Sunny
Source · NWS Boise
ARTS & CULTURE
ARTS & CULTURE
An artist lost everything to a fire — their new show opens under our smoke
Camilla Taylor's “PENITENT” lands Saturday in Garden City as the foothills burn.
An artist who lost everything to fire opens a show on fragility — while our ridges burn.
You've been breathing the valley's smoke all week, watching the foothills go orange at dusk and doing the mental math on whether the windows should be open. Now picture making art about that exact feeling — fragility, loss, what a body survives — and hanging it in a Garden City gallery while fire crests the nearby ridges.
Enter “PENITENT,” the Exhibit & Art Talk by Camilla Taylor, this Saturday at Surel's Place.
Where the work comes from Taylor lives in Los Angeles, or did — the 2025 Eaton Fire took nearly all their artwork, materials, and personal possessions when it destroyed their home and studio in Altadena. “This loss and displacement changed the way I make art,” Taylor says. “My work became more fragile and more precious.” The new drawings reference the myth of St. Mary of Egypt, a wanderer painted covered in her own hair after her clothing disintegrated over decades in the desert. You don't need the whole myth. Endurance, and what's left when the material world burns off — that's the throughline, and you'll feel it before you can name it.
The room itself Surel's Place sits in the Surel Mitchell Live-Work-Create District, named for the late Garden City artist, and hands month-long residencies to artists of promise. Small room. The talk isn't a lecture from a stage; it's closer than that, a few feet from the work and the person who made it. For a town watching its own ridges smoke, a show pulled straight out of a California wildfire is the rare kind of catharsis that shows up right on time, whether anyone planned it that way or not.
If you're on the fence: it's free, it's 90 minutes, and it's the most timely hour of art in the valley this weekend. If you're going all in: get there for the 7:00 start, stay through the talk, and let the drawings sit with you before you open your mouth. If you just want one quiet evening: this is it — no cover, no crowd math, out the door by 8:30.
🧭 THE LOCAL BOTTOM LINE Where to find it: Surel's Place, 212 E. 33rd Street, Garden City. Street parking on E. 33rd is tight and heavily residential — park along Chinden Boulevard or a cross street, walk in, and don't block the artists' driveways. When to go: Saturday, July 11, 7:00–8:30 PM. The cover: Free, all ages, no ticket to fuss with. The Verdict: Skip the crowded patio Saturday and bring the friend who feels things hard — this quiet hour will land heavier this week than anything else on the calendar.
Source · Surel's Place
LOCAL HUSTLE
Micron wants 240 more acres —
and Boise's line moves with it
The largest private investment in Idaho history is about to redraw Southeast Boise.
Boise's city limit is about to walk 240 acres down a road most of us drive without thinking about it. Micron Technology is moving to annex that land into city limits along the Federal Way corridor in Southeast Boise — which means the boundary line you never notice is turning a $50 billion headline into lane diversions and utility trenching we'll be parked in for a good while.
What the land is actually for Those 240 acres are the ground floor for Micron's roughly $50 billion campus expansion: two leading-edge, high-volume memory-chip fabrication plants, a large parking structure, office space, and a dedicated power substation. Fair warning on the numbers, though. That $50 billion — and the projected 17,000-plus new Treasure Valley jobs — are the full multi-year expansion figures, not what this one parcel spits out. The whole thing runs on up to $6.4 billion in direct CHIPS Act funding, and output from the first Idaho fab is scheduled to start reaching the global market in 2027.
The ripple you can already see Developers around the Federal Way and Columbia Village corridors are already moving, betting on an influx of manufacturing and engineering talent, per Idaho Statesman reporting from Mark Dee. For anyone renting in Southeast Boise, that's the housing-demand story showing up before the fabs do — speculation now, the price pressure we'll all feel later.
🧭 THE LOCAL BOTTOM LINE The Entity: Micron Technology. The Investment: 240 acres annexed; ~$50 billion campus expansion; 17,000+ projected regional jobs over the coming years. The Verdict: If you commute Federal Way or rent near Columbia Village, brace for both — heavy-machinery traffic and lane diversions on your main artery to downtown, and long-term upward pressure on housing as thousands of specialized workers arrive. What to Watch: the annexation moving through Boise's public process, and 2027 first-fab output — the milestone that turns all the trenching into paychecks.
The city limit isn't a line on a map this year — it's walking down Federal Way.
Source · Idaho Statesman — Mark Dee
boise.term — zsh — 120×40
$ boise --today --topic=family budget
> The fruit-pop bar tutorials skip the one part that matters
You blend the pure fruit, you pour it into the cute molds, you freeze it overnight — and the next afternoon you're all standing around gnawing flavored ice bricks nobody wanted. Been there. The tutorial films the pretty pull and quietly leaves out the part that saves the whole thing.
Enter the DIY paleta bar, done right — the cheap, screen-free, stay-inside play for a weekend hitting 100°F with smoke chasing everybody off the trails.
The Real Cost & Sourcing Here's what I paid at the Target on Eagle Road in Meridian. A reusable silicone popsicle-mold set runs about $8.49 on sale, up to $12.79 — budget around $10. Then fresh fruit (mango or strawberries, ~$4–5), some fruit juice (orange, or a bag of limes, ~$3), and an optional squeeze of honey (~$5 if it's not already in your cupboard). Full batch lands at roughly $16–18 and gives you 6–12 pops.
The Catch (it's chemistry) Water freezes into a solid brick. That's the whole problem. Sugar or honey plus real fruit fiber and pulp interrupt the ice crystals, so the pop stays bitable and closer to creamy — the exact reason commercial pops lean on sweeteners. Two more traps waiting for you: leave about a quarter-inch of headroom, because the liquid expands as it freezes, and plan for 4–6 hours, ideally overnight. A 2 PM mix will not save a 4 PM meltdown. To pop one loose without snapping the stick, dip the mold in warm water about 10 seconds.
Buy vs. Build Mi Linda Michoacana Paleteria in Boise makes the real thing in-house — mango and elote paletas, a few dollars a pop. That's the flavor bar you're chasing. Your batch is pennies per pop; the shop is the standard to beat.
🧭 THE LOCAL BOTTOM LINE What it costs: Target on Eagle Road, Meridian — about $16–18 for a full batch. How long: 4–6 hours, best overnight. The kid verdict: yes — but only if they can't watch it freeze; the payoff is something cold to eat at 7:30 PM when the heat finally breaks. The Verdict: Worth it if you time it right — mix tonight so tomorrow's 100° afternoon has a cold ending, and skip the pure-juice recipes that freeze into a rock.
/* Pure fruit and juice freezes into a rock. The sweetener is the whole trick. */
Source · Target; Mi Linda Michoacana Paleteria
📋 The Ledgerwhat we're watching — and when it moves, you'll read it here
- ●C253/SUB25-12 — State Street rezoning rehearing (8.65 acres, 9744 State St, R1A→R2) — Rehearing date posts to the city's citizen portal, opening the public-comment window (watching since 6/23)
- ●Storyrock subdivision, South Meridian — 300+ homes on 75 acres — Binding Meridian City Council approval vote (watching since 6/26)
- ●$750M recycled-water facility pause / utility affordability ($283/mo avg across five utilities) — Affordability benchmarks and funding options return to Council at summer budget hearings (watching since 6/23)
- ●Boise–Caldwell passenger rail — $503,125 USDOT planning grant — Consultant financial-modeling report (P3 analysis, Boise Depot) delivered to City Council (watching since 6/25)
- ●Union Block, 730 W. Idaho St. — condemned 1902 landmark — State-court refiling window (or it lapses); any obstructed-sidewalk reopening (watching since 6/23)
From the Replies
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