Category: Gone But Not Forgotten

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Pacific Paradise Tropical Grill & Sushi Bar – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno4:53 AM

Shangri-La. Eden.  Paradise. Heaven on Earth.  The concept of a remote and exotic utopia, a faraway haven or hideaway of idyllic beauty and tranquility, has long intrigued mankind.  Paul Gauguin, the famous French post-impressionist artist thought his persistent pilgrimage for Paradise was over when he moved to Tahiti in the tropical South Pacific.  Alas, his picturesque paradise, as with anything that seems too good to be true, was also discovered by French colonists who quickly transformed Tahiti into the antithesis of the “sensual loafer’s paradise” he had envisioned. For aficionados of Asian cuisine, paradise might be defined as a restaurant from whose kitchen emanates the culinary diversity of the Pacific: time-honored and traditional delicacies, contrasting yet complementary flavors, exotic and…

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The Burger Stand – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno2:44 PM

“If you need good hot grillin’, Try my burger stand. If you need a slice of thrillin’, I’m the baddest in the land. Any way you want it baby, I am your burger man.” ~Burger Man by ZZ Top Those of us invited on occasion to judge competitive food events try to follow a few very sensical but ironclad rules to ensure our evaluations are fair, balanced and accurate—or at least as accurate as any largely subjective matter can be. Though we commit these rules to memory, it’s very easy to forget about them and give way to unbridled desire, especially when you’re judging what has been deemed the best of the best, the most delicious of its genre. Such…

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Brixens – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno12:01 AM

My friend Bill Resnik has and will always be one of my favorite dining companions. He’s a brilliant conversationalist and one of the very funniest people you could ever hope to meet (two hours after my appendectomy he had me in more stitches than the actual surgery). Back in October, 2017, he asked if I wanted to go to “the restaurant opened by the love child of Vixen and Blitzen” (two of Santa’s reindeer). It didn’t immediately dawn on me that he was talking about Brixens, the very highly touted new downtown restaurant in the heart of Central Avenue. Brixens is not named for the love child of any of Santa’s reindeer. Nor is it named for Brixen, a town…

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Tuerta – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno12:39 AM

“In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is King.” What would you name a one-eyed cat?  One immediately obvious option is Cyclops for the one-eyed giant of Greek mythology.  If you prefer Norse mythology, you could opt for the name Odin, the god of wisdom, poetry, death, divination, and magic.  Or you could go with one-eyed movie characters such as Rooster Cogburn (True Grit), Snake Plissken (Escape from New York) or Big Dan Teague (O Brother Where Art Thou).   A cuter option is Nick Furry, a play on the name of the director of SHIELD, the military counter-terrorism and intelligence agency of Marvel Comics lore.  Sadly, aside from Leela, the one-eyed captain of the Planet…

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Lava Rock Brewing Company – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno6:28 PM

NOTE:  The Lava Rock Brewing Company is no longer affiliated with M’Tucci’s.  The review below remains online for your reading pleasure, but please don’t use it as a guide to the restaurant’s menu. Mark Twain, who quit school at age twelve after having completed the sixth grade, would go on to be widely acknowledged as the father of American literature.  Despite being largely self-taught–valedictorian of the school of hard knocks and salutatorian of street smarts–Twain acknowledged in his posthumously published essay “Taming the Bicycle” that the self-taught man “seldom knows anything accurately” and “does not know a tenth of as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers.”   That would have been especially true if…

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Backstreet Grill – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno9:55 AM

Old Town Albuquerque. Locals love it. We appreciate its unique architecture and have tremendous affection for its character and personality. We hold its religious celebrations in reverence and admire the passion with which its secular fiestas are celebrated. We delight in reminding “colonists” that it’s older than many New England cities which dominate history books. Old Town is where we take all our friends and family who visit us. Much as we love it…and we do love it, many of us don’t visit Old Town as much as its proximity and charm might warrant. Ask locals why they don’t frequent Old Town and the more “honest” ones will likely tell you it’s because it’s no longer solely ours. We have…

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Dia De Los Takos – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno7:47 PM

NOTE: Although Dia De Los Takos has closed, founder-owner-chef Dominic “Dom” Valuenzuela has launched a new restaurant called Tako Ten.  Look for a review soon. Felix, a character in Adi Alsaid’s young adult fiction book North of Happy was asked what makes a taco perfect. “It’s a taco that tastes as good as the idea of a taco itself. A taco that’ll hold steadfast through memory’s attempt to erase it, a taco that’ll be worthy of the nostalgia that it will cause. A taco that won’t satisfy or fill but will satiate your hunger. Not just for tonight but for tacos in general, for food, for life-itself, brother. You will feel full to your soul. “But!” he added, a callused…

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Santa Fe Bite – ABQ – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno12:49 PM

In 1940, Thomas Wolfe penned You Can’t Go Home Again, a novel whose deeply existential title prompted more than water cooler conversations.  It prompted profound philosophical discourse, internal reflection and pangs of nostalgia about better days remembered.  Readers pondered if it was true that “you can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood.”  Realists concluded the novel’s title meant you can’t return to a place of another time and expect that everything would be exactly the same.  Optimists  took it a bit further, positing that while some things may change, other things don’t change and some things might actually be better. Wolfe’s novel came to mind when we first heard a legendary Santa Fe institution had…

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Seasonal Palate – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno11:58 PM

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; ~Ecclesiastes, 3:1-2 Not that very long ago, a “seasonal palate” meant humankind consumed foods only during the season in which they were grown. Today, we can walk down the aisles of our neighborhood grocery stores in January and find a veritable horn of plenty overflowing with the same kinds of fruits and vegetables we were enjoying when they were “in season” back in June. That’s what progress–refrigeration, preservatives, processed foods and a worldwide distribution system–has wrought. Alas, that “progress” may…

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Toltec Brewing Co. – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno11:01 PM

Vincent: And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris? Jules: They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese? Vincent: No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t know what the #%*&! a Quarter Pounder is. Jules: What’d they call it? Vincent: They call it Royale with cheese. Jules: Royale with Cheese. What’d they call a Big Mac? Vincent: Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac. ~Pulp Fiction 265 “f-bombs,” copious racist slurs, torrents of extreme language and some of the most weighty dialogue ever spoken in an American movie. That was Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 apotheosis Pulp Fiction, a low-brow pastiche the cognoscenti consider one of the most quotable…

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Swiss Alps Bakery – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno6:58 PM

Admit it. The second thing that comes to mind when you hear the term “Swiss Alps” is the scene from one of cinema’s most heartwarming movies. It begins with a distant camera drawing closer to a verdant mountainside backdropped by steep, snow-capped peaks. Soothing music grows louder as the camera pans in on a lone figure with arms outstretched. The chappeaued figure twirls and looks skyward as a voice in the background sings “The hills are alive with the sound of Griswolds.” Never mind that Clark Griswold’s dream sequence for the comedy classic European Vacation was actually filmed in the Austrian Alps, not the Swiss Alps. The first thing that comes to mind, of course, is the Swiss Alps Bakery…