Category: Breakfast

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Sherman’s Deli & Bakery – Palm Springs & Palm Desert, California

Gil Garduno1:53 PM

Not everyone appreciated my friend Bob’s stark honesty as much as I did. For nearly twelve years, Bob was my most trusted source for information on the Santa Fe dining scene. He was also a huge advocate for my writing, even when his reaction to one of my particularly “long way around” missives was “what?.” From a style perspective, he was a “get to the point” guy while your humble blogger sometimes (okay, okay, always) takes a circuitous, raconteur’s route to get somewhere. Bob often chided me for not liking cumin on New Mexican food, once telling me “when you fault a place for cumin it immediately moves up on my list of places to try.” Perhaps because of the…

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Crepe Crepe – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno8:17 PM

Richard Olney, a cookbook author best known for his books on French country cooking described crepes thusly: “their greatest pitfalls derive, no doubt, from their versatility — not in itself a fault, but a quality that teases many a cook into overstepping the boundaries of sense and taste. One should never lose sight of the fragile and delicate, thin, tender thing that is the crepe itself.”  In his magnificent tome The French Menu Cookbook, he prefaced a recipe for Gratin of Stuffed Crepes with: “crepes may contain practically anything and they represent one of the prettiest and most satisfactory means of disposing of leftovers.”  Then as to demonstrate their versatility, he listed among the ingredients for the stuffed crepe, one calf’s brain.…

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Campo at Los Poblanos – Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno3:59 PM

A simple day laborer at a wealthy estate, Ysidro began his days by rising early and attending Mass. His fellow laborers complained that they had to do some of his share of the work because he lingered in church. After hearing the complaints of his farmhands, the land owner visited his fields while Ysidro was at Mass. To his astonishment, he saw two angels guiding Ysidro’s plow in his absence. Later when Ysidro returned to work, the angels stood next to him and plowed alongside. Ysidro was essentially doing twice as much work as he would have on his own and while at Mass, his work was getting done, too. One snowy day when taking wheat to the mill to…

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Acapulco Tacos & Burritos – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno1:09 PM

Acapulco–just the name evokes images of pristine sandy beaches, translucent blue waters, a comfortable climate, luxury hotels, and world-class gourmet cuisine. There are many reasons Acapulco has earned its nickname of the “Mexican Riviera,” after the famous French resort area. It’s unlikely Albuquerque’s three Acapulco Tacos & Burritos restaurant will ever be mistaken for one of Acapulco’s pricey and sometimes pretentious three- and four-star restaurants. There’s absolutely nothing pretentious about Acapulco Tacos & Burritos. To the contrary, this humble denizen of deliciousness seem to symbolize the wonderful simplicity of Mexican food in the finest and most complimentary sense of the term. Okay, maybe the crossed palm trees and bright sun painted on the restaurant’s colorful facade might be a bit…

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Tortilla Flats – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Gil Garduno8:29 PM

“Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold.” ~John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat In his 1935 novel Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck introduced the literary world to the downtrodden denizens of Tortilla Flat, an impoverished barrio on the shabby hillside just outside the respectable city of Monterey, California. The quirky inhabitants of the ramshackle community were a dichotomous lot–hedonistic drunks, adulterers and thieves on one hand; on the other, paisanos with surprisingly kind-hearts who asked nothing more from life than loyal friends and a little wine. Unlike their stodgy, orthodox counterparts in Monterey, the men of Tortilla Flat defied social mores, conventions and expectations. They rebuffed the notion of holding down steady employment or paying rent. They had no qualms about cadging…

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Cheeky’s – Palm Springs, California

Gil Garduno9:55 AM

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is widely credited with the aphorism “England and the United States are two nations divided by a common language.” My Kim and I had no idea just how different the Queen’s English is from the English spoken by the colonists until we were assigned to Royal Air Force Fairford. As part of the newcomers orientation, we were required to attend a course in which those vast differences were explained. Many of those differences were rather comedic, but we were warned, “if Yanks aren’t careful, we could perpetuate the dreaded “ugly American” stereotype widely held in some parts of Europe.” We learned, for example, that if an American serviceman walks up to an English lady and…

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Butters Pancakes & Cafe – Scottsdale, Arizona

Gil Garduno8:32 PM

“Spread your tiny wings and fly away And take the snow back with you Where it came from on that day So, little snowbird take me with you when you go To the land of gentle breezes where the peaceful waters flow.” ~ Anne Murray Every autumn, gaggles of geese, flocks of ducks, kettles of hawks and constructions of cranes begin their long, arduous migration from the continent’s northern regions to warmer climes in the South. They fly in formation to more idyllic and much warmer locales such as the Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. Similarly, large numbers of pasty-skinned human migrants from Canada and the northern tier of the fruited plains leave behind the rigors of snow shoveling,…

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Chile Time Restaurant – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno3:08 PM

“For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest.” ~Ecclesiastes 3 Autumn in New Mexico is indisputably chile time. The high mountain air is at its most crisp and salubrious. Foliage is adorned in a vibrant panoply of color. Magnificent cottonwoods and aspens gleam in the evening sun like the fabled cities of gold sought by Spanish explorers. Hazy smoke plumes waft upward from giant rotating drums. These irresistible smoke signals beckon hungry masses to roadside stands where flame-licked chile tumbles in steel-meshed drums. Those chiles blister then seem to hiss and spit in protest as their…

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Lindy’s Diner – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno12:45 AM

“Get your kicks on Route 66” is the mantra of nostalgic motorists who have lobbied for generations to preserve the heritage that is America’s “mother road”, the 2,448 mile highway commissioned in 1926 and decommissioned in 1985 and which traversed eight states between Chicago, Illinois and Santa Monica, California. Though Route 66 generally traces the state’s traditional east-west transportation corridor through the center of the state, its initial route when commissioned in 1926 resembled a giant S-shaped detour. It ran northwest from Santa Rosa to Santa Fe then south (through Bernalillo and Albuquerque) to Los Lunas. At that point, the road resumed its northwesterly route toward Laguna Pueblo, where it finally resumed its western direction. Route 66’s original Albuquerque route…

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Counter Culture Cafe – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Gil Garduno10:21 PM

Counterculture. Growing up in rural Taos County four decades ago, I don’t know how many of us understood that the cultural and political upheaval of the big cities had moved into our isolated corner of the world. All we knew was that these unkempt and unwashed interlopers preaching free love and practicing it in communes had invaded our idyllic agrarian communities and shocked our quiet, small town sensibilities. They rode around in psychedelic school buses and wore multi-colored smocks. The men among them wore their hair as long as their women. More shocking was how these strangers walked around unabashedly nude in the confines of the communes they christened with such colorful names as the Hog Farm, New Buffalo and…

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The Daily Grind – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno9:54 PM

Sometimes–such as when Teri, a faithful reader of this blog, recommended I visit The Daily Grind–being a lexicologist can be a detriment. The first thing that came to mind was the drudgery of the software development project to which I was assigned. Since the 1800s, “grind” has been synonymous with boring, tedious work as in “grinding away.” Why then would I want to visit The Daily Grind when the daily grind was visiting me everyday in the form of SQL databases, configuration scripts and dot-net framework. My Kim, who’s got all the common sense in the family, clarified that the type of grind to which Teri was referring had nothing to do with the tedium of the dog-eat-dog routine. The…