Category: American

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The Farmacy – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

In this age of “fake news,” biased media slants and unabashed tell-alls, the one recent headline which has pleased me most comes from Bloomberg. Splashed in bold typeface was the eye-catching lead “Mom-and-Pop Joints Are Trouncing America’s Big Restaurant Chains.” Elaborating on this contention, the first paragraph reads: “Americans are rejecting the consistency of national restaurant chains after decades of dominance in favor of the authenticity of locally owned eateries, with their daily specials and Mom’s watercolors decorating the walls.” The numbers bear this out–“annual revenue for independents will grow about 5 percent through 2020, while the growth for chains will be about 3 percent.” Fittingly, I read this article during my inaugural visit to The Farmacy, a Lilliputian lair…

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Milly’s Restaurant – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Until rather recently, if there was a wide diversity of opinion about Albuquerque’s restaurant scene, it wasn’t widely shared. Albuquerque’s two daily periodicals, the Albuquerque Journal and the Albuquerque Tribune as well as a number of alternative publications published weekly restaurant reviews, but opinions and observations expressed therein were rather one-sided. It wasn’t until about 2008 that crowd-sourced restaurant reviews really took off in the Duke City. Published in such online mediums as TripAdvisor (founded in 2000), Yelp (launched in 2004) and Urbanspoon (debuted in 2006), crowd-sourced review venues gave everyone an opportunity to become a “critic.” More than ever before “Joe and Jane Diner” had license to express rather colorful (sometimes bordering on libel) versions of their truth. One…

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The Owl Cafe & Bar – San Antonio, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

25 February 2023: Over the past twelve years, the Owl Cafe in San Antonio, New Mexico has been one of the three most frequently launched reviews on Gil’s Thrilling (And Filling) Blog, ranking behind only Mary & Tito’s and the Buckhorn Tavern as the third most frequently launched review of all time. What accounts for the Owl’s popularity? It truly is a timeless institution beloved for its consistently excellent burgers. San Antonio may be but a blip on the map, but its storied and pioneering history make this sparsely populated agricultural community arguably one of New Mexico’s most important towns.In 1629, San Antonio was the site on which Franciscan friars planted the first vineyard (for sacramental wine) in New Mexico (in defiance of…

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Horno Restaurant – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

By the time my Kim and I returned to New Mexico in 1995, the days of my family steam-baking chicos in hornos were long past, but she sure was intrigued by our mud and adobe outdoor ovens.  She wasn’t so much interesting in exaggerated tales of our back-breaking labors, but of the process of baking chicos in those hornos.  We explained that the process began by building a fire inside the oven and letting it burn for hours–long enough for the hornos’ mud walls and floor to acquire a thermal capacity perfect for steaming corn.  The corn isn’t inserted into the horno until all that’s left of the fire is red embers.  With the corn nestled comfortably atop the ashes,…

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Matty G’s – Chandler, Arizona

Gil Garduno

In the inspirational 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner stars as an Iowa farmer named Ray Kinsella. As a farmer, Ray has fallen on hard times.  While standing in his corn field one day, he has a vision of a baseball field where part of his cornfield is.  A disembodied voice (credited by IMDB to “The Voice”) tells him, “If you build it, he will come.” Ray then sets out to make the baseball field of his vision a reality.  All the while, he is spurred onward by the voice urging him that if he builds it, “he” or “they” will come. To the initial consternation of his wife and friends, Ray builds the baseball field. Ray’s friends and…

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Culver’s – Payson, Arizona

Gil Garduno

In the summer of 2022, two of my sisters spent a nearly three weeks in Switzerland, Austria and Germany. They visited the breathtaking snow-capped mountains of the Alps and took Europe’s highest cable car to the top of the Matterhorn.  They walked in picturesque villages reminiscent of your favorite fairy-tale as well as medieval towns resplendent with covered bridges, waterfront promenades, historic buildings replete with frescoes painted by the masters, and sun-drenched plazas with bubbling fountains.  Naturally, my questions about their vacation were centered on cuisine.  Dolores, one of my sisters, recalled most fondly the bread and butter served with every meal on their excursion.  She’s a Garduño after my own heart. During our years in Europe, my Kim and I were…

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Sugar Nymphs Bistro – Peñasco, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Peñasco has always been the beautiful stepsister ignored by the dutiful suitors who prefer the company of Taos, its more glamorous sibling. Taos, the mystical art colony to which new age subscribers seem preternaturally drawn is the terminus of the high road, starting and end point of the enchanted circle and one of the most beautiful communities in the country, if not the world. Sugar Nymphs Bistro is helping Peñasco lure some of those suitors away…at least for a spectacular meal or ten.  A 2002 entry into the Taos county restaurant scene, Sugar Nymphs offers a sophisticated menu that belies Peñasco’s rural simplicity while celebrating its agrarian traditions and serving its local home-grown organic produce.  It’s quite simply one of…

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Rowley Farmhouse Ales – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Only in John Denver’s hit song “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” is life on the farm “kinda laid back.” In actuality, farm life can be downright arduous, requiring back-breaking work in climatic extremes for low wages. It was much worse in colonial days when life on a farm generally meant very few luxuries outside of a warm fire and a tankard (or ten) of house-brewed ale. Beer was brewed not only to refresh, sustain and comfort hard-working farmers, but because during sanitation-deprived colonial times, it was safer than water. Farm-brewed beer was created with what was on hand, whether it be wheat, hops, barley or rye supplemented with such ingredients as evergreen boughs, juniper berries, honey and fruit. Because…

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El Camino Dining Room – Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Many of us who predate, however slightly, the explosion of institutionalized fast food retain a fondness for the remaining independent family restaurants whose arsenal in the competition for hungry diners consists of reasonable portions of great meals at budget-conscious prices all served by a friendly and accommodating waitsfaff. An Albuquerque restaurant which epitomizes those ideals is the El Camino Dining Room, captured brilliantly above by the fabulous photographer Deanna Nichols. The El Camino was built by Clyde H. Tyler in 1950, five years after the latest “war to end all wars” and 13 years after Route 66 was “straightened” so that it would bypass Santa Fe completely.  Albuquerque was much more innocent back then.  Some might even describe it as…

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Tula’s Kitchen – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Tula: “My mom was always cooking foods filled with warmth and wisdom… and never forgetting that side dish of steaming-hot guilt.” As it celebrates its twenty year anniversary the 2002 Rom-Com “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” remains as timeless and funny as it was when it debuted.  Moreover, it’s still a heart-warming movie with which some of us can relate.  In my estimation, it could easily have been called “My Big Fat Northern New Mexican Wedding” and it could have been set in Peñasco.  The similarities between Greek families and Northern New Mexican families around which I grew up were startling.  That’s especially true about the food, family and eccentricities, the latter especially prominent among the movie’s well-meaning and hovering aunts…

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Socorro Springs Brewing Company – Socorro, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Socorro, New Mexico is a dichotomous town.  It is the second oldest inhabited community in our culturally blessed Land of Enchantment, yet it boasts one of the nation’s premier research universities.   It is steeped in history and tradition, inextricably linked to its storied past while embracing the technologies which are laying the groundwork for future peace and prosperity.  According to Visit Socorro “Socorro (literally to give aid, to give succor) was indeed a source of help to the first expedition of Spanish families traveling north from Mexico in 1598, led by Don Juan de Oñate y Salazar. Socorro’s first inhabitants, Piro-speaking people of the Teypana Pueblo, welcomed the scouting party of Oñate and his men. They showed no fear…