Category: American

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Santa Fe Bite – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

“This burger is a wonder. It’s thick, it’s perfectly cooked, juicy and covered in cheese… If eating a burger is a sin, this burger is like going to Vegas with a hooker who you kill, stuff in your trunk, and push off into a canyon.” —The Amateur Gourmet Glass-half-full nay-sayers will tell you it shouldn’t have worked. Housed in a ramshackle building some might describe as being “in the middle of nowhere,” it defied the number one rule for restaurant success: location, location, location. It was Lilliputian in size, incapable of accommodating everyone clamoring to get in. Long waits were common with only a small porch and limited eating as a “waiting area.” Seating was in personal space proximity. in…

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Bar Castañeda – Las Vegas, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Northern New Mexico’s highways and byways are incomparable for their scenic beauty.  From the historical High Road to Taos with its remnants of Spanish occupation to the spectacular Enchanted Circle which circles New Mexico’s highest mountain peak, this region is replete with awe and wonder.  Desiree Aguilar, my friend and former colleague at the University of New Mexico shares my opinion that even these two world-famous byways are eclipsed by a lesser known stretch of road.  We both believe the drive between Las Vegas, New Mexico and Taos is the state’s most enchanting.  Taking this route, you’ll traverse past ramshackle adobe homesteads, small villages and a pine-studded mountain pass through the Carson National Forest.  This nameless route (State Highway 518)…

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Big Mike’s Burgers & More – Belen, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

In 2014, Epicurious compiled a list of  crimes against burgers:  Hockey-puck patties, pressing down with a spatula, over-flipping, unmelted cheese and hard-as-a-rock buns.   For decades most burger aficionados followed these commandments as if their souls depended on them.  We cringed and bristled when burger flippers smashed down burger patties on a grill.  “There goes all the juices” we bemoaned.  “Here comes another dry as a New Mexico dust devil burger” we lamented.  Of all the felonious assaults against our beloved burger, pressing down the spatula was the most grievous, a crime that should be punishable by years of hard labor. Then in the 1970s a Kentucky restaurateur “invented” something we know today as a “smash burger.”  To hasten the preparation…

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Hannah & Nate’s – Albuquerque & Corrales, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

There are just some restaurants at which the stereotypical Ralph Cramden hungry man shouldn’t dine. Hannah & Nate’s might be one of them. It’s not that the food isn’t good. That’s certainly not the case. The troglodytic nature of men is such that we whine and complain when we have to wait more than two minutes for our meals and we become doubly obnoxious when the portions aren’t large enough to feed a small bull elephant. Thankfully, my Kim has been a great civilizing influence on me and I’m able to enjoy restaurants such as Hannah & Nate’s as much as she does. 17 May 2019: Hannah & Nate’s is a home decor and market cafe ideally suited for gentrified…

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Frank’s Famous Chicken & Waffles – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

If one measure of success is having the wherewithal to pursue those things you love most, Frank Willis has led a very successful life. A towering skyscraper of a man, Frank has had four great loves in his life: family, basketball, music and chicken and waffles. They’ve been his passions and his raisons d’être. Maybe that’s why he’s done them all well. You might remember Frank Willis as a heavily coveted recruit who played basketball for the University of New Mexico Lobos, then the only game in town. At 6’8” and 260 pounds, he was a physical presence down on the post, helping the Lobos win the Western Athletic Conference championship in 1994. Knee injuries kept him from achieving the…

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Burger Boy – Cedar Crest, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

The vividly hued threads that comprise a beautiful community tapestry are its diverse and unique characters. Some are quirky and eccentric, some are brash and loud, others are indistinct and don’t stand out, but all are essential in weaving that beautiful community tapestry, that compendium of personalities that make up a whole. One of the most vivid threads in the rich and diverse tapestry that is the alpine community of Cedar Crest, New Mexico was prolific artist, carver and tinkerer Ross Ward. Before settling in New Mexico, Ross was a show painter for carnivals, traversing the country for more than three decades. It was in Cedar Crest that Ross built Tinkertown, a folk art environment replete with an impressive array…

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The Rock Inn Mountain Tavern – Estes Park, Colorado

Gil Garduno

During my years at St. Anthony’s in Peñasco, I frequently tried the patience of the saintly nuns.   Thankfully capital punishment was not permissible or you wouldn’t be reading this.  It’s bad enough I wore out a few rulers and hopefully one elderly nun’s knuckles which often found their way to my head (that may explain a few things).  I wasn’t a malicious student, just one who didn’t always conform.  It wasn’t the age of “doing your own thing” though I certainly did my best to be an individual.  Albeit, I was an individual who didn’t do his homework or study for tests (but still managed to ace them all). My antics were never deliberately destructive.  In some ways I…

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The Post Chicken & Beer – Estes Park, Colorado

Gil Garduno

In 1974 prolific author Stephen King and his wife Tabitha spent a night in Room 217 of The Stanley, a a 140-room Colonial Revival hotel in Estes Park, about five miles from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.  The hotel staff was preparing to close the hotel for the season so the Kings found themselves the only guests in the place.  King wrote about the experience on his website: “Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect—maybe the archetypical—setting for a ghost story. That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous…

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Cafe Genevieve – Jackson, Wyoming

Gil Garduno

My friend and former Intel colleague Steve Caine will forever rue the day he asked me to help him with an expense report for a business trip he made to Portland, Oregon. His itemized expense report indicated he had dined twice at Chevy’s, a middling quality Americanized Mexican restaurant which wouldn’t survive in the tough Albuquerque market. I teased him mercilessly. Worse, when my boss saw what the commotion was all about, he immediately put Steve on double-secret probation. Steve has never lived down visiting a Chevy’s in Portland where he could have had some of the country’s freshest and best seafood. When the din died down, Steve admitted somewhat sheepishly that after two days in Portland, he was missing…

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Bigwood Bread Cafe – Ketchum, Idaho

Gil Garduno

Ernest Hemingway spent much of the roaring twenties in Paris, a city whose own liberal attitudes attracted poets, painters and writers from throughout the world. Paris was a vibrant city which drew many expats from the so-called “lost generation” of cynical young people disillusioned with the materialism and individualism prevalent in society at the time.  As a young writer penning “A Moveable Feast,” Hemingway observed: “You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris,” because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.” An avid outdoorsman, Ernest Hemingway, was a Sun Valley habitué even before establishing a…

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The Sawtooth Club – Ketchum, Idaho

Gil Garduno

Our server Kara (who resembles a much more attractive Maggie Gyllenhaal) reasons that The Sawtooth Club is the number one restaurant in the country.  That was news to me so I asked how she arrived at that conclusion.  Her reasoning is that the Sawtooth Club has been the highest rated restaurant in the Sun Valley for five consecutive years.  The Sun Valley is currently rated the number one ski resort in the country.  Ergo, one highest rated restaurant plus one highest rated ski resort equals the best restaurant in the country.  That’s akin to fuzzy math, but Kara is so cute I was almost inclined to agree with her. From the balcony of our rental in Ketchum, Idaho we could…