Category: Rating: N/R (Not Rated)

BarbecueDog FriendlyRating: N/R (Not Rated)TexasUnited States

Black’s Barbecue – Lockhart, Texas

Gil Garduno12:54 PM

Yabba-dabba-doo!  After finishing another day of toiling at the quarry, Fred Flintsone rushes home to pick up his modern stone-age family for a drive-in movie, an exclusive one-night only viewing of The Monster.  Courtesy of Fred’s two feet, the family then proceeds to Bronto Burgers & Ribs Drive-In for an order of ribs.  Somehow a slim waitress manages to heft the behemoth ribs over to Fred’s car, but when she deposits them onto the carhop window service tray, the vehicle and all its occupants tip over.  Until our visit to Black’s Barbecue in Lockhart, Texas, we believed ribs that big…

AmericanClosed in 2023Dog FriendlyDonutsGone But Not ForgottenRating: N/R (Not Rated)TexasUnited States

Gourdough’s Public House – Austin, Texas (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno4:23 PM

Donuts could have gone their entire existences fat, dumb and happy with a following–mostly cops, adult men my age (39) and households with annual incomes of less than $10,000–who expected nothing more out of them than we were already getting.  Essentially just fried or fruit-filled delivery mechanisms for quadruple our recommended daily allowance of calories, sugar and guilt, donuts have always been predictable, unchanging…reliably there for us.  Our expectations for these sweet, ring-shaped fried cakes weren’t exactly very high.  Then something changed.  Donuts became “gourmet,” experiencing a much-needed make-over.   In recent years, several foods have experienced a similar artisinal reinvention,…

AmericanBrunchChickenDog FriendlyRating: N/R (Not Rated)SouthernTexasUnited States

Lucy’s Fried Chicken – Austin, Texas

Gil Garduno8:04 AM

“I‘m only eating the skins, so the chicken’s up for grabs.” ~Joey Tribbiani Several of my earliest memories of growing up in agrarian Peñasco, New Mexico involve chickens.  Some of those memories–such as getting viciously pecked by my Grandma Piedad’s cantankerous old rooster–were rather painful.  Other memories, however, were of mischievous fun my brothers and I had with our friends Estevan and Gabriel Lopez.  Once, for example, we emptied the contents of an entire can of beer onto the corn and grain mixture fed to the chickens.  It was hilarious fun watching drunken chickens stumble about and especially seeing the…

MexicanNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Barbacoa El Primo – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno6:43 PM

“I went down Nagolitos looking for some barbacoa and Big Red. I went down to Nagolitos for some barbacoa and Big Red. Well, I could’ve had menudo but I got some cabeza instead. Give me two pounds of regular, cause I like a little fat. You may like la puro carne, but for me fat is where it’s at.” ~Randy Garibay, Barbacoa Blues As chief of nonresident training for my career field, one of my favorite duties was working with other subject matter experts to develop “psychometrics” (specialty knowledge tests to measure promotion fitness) for the United States Air Force. …

AlbuquerqueDog FriendlyFood TruckNew MexicanNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Rollin’ On In Food Truck – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno1:44 PM

While their brick-and-mortar counterparts can afford to have multi-page menus to please a wide variety of palates, mobile food kitchens (that’s food trucks to you, Bob) are somewhat at a disadvantage. By sheer necessity, food trucks must be limited, well-defined, maybe even singularly focused.  The advantage the successful ones have is that they can concentrate on creating memorable dishes around their concept using a few common ingredients.  Rollin’ On In, for example, lists only four entrees on its menu: three tacos, a quesadilla, three enchiladas and a burrito. With those four entrees, however, there are an infinite number of “build-your-own”…

AlbuquerqueBrewery-PubDog FriendlyNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Steel Bender Brewyard – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno11:58 AM

“Sometimes you want to go Where everybody knows your name And they’re always glad you came You want to be where you can see The troubles are all the same You want to be where everybody knows your name.” ~Theme Song From Cheers Just another banal, meaningless television show jingle?  Think again.  Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg might even argue that the Cheers theme song exemplifies his concept of “third place.”    In 1989, Oldenburg published That Good Place in which he introduced the concept of third place into the lexicon.  Third place refers to places where people spend time between…

AlbuquerqueAmericanNew MexicanNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Copper Canyon Cafe – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno7:22 PM

“The Copper Canyon of northern Mexico–a place so huge and desolate that even today there are still some native people who have never seen an automobile.” ~Victor Villasenor Beyond Rain of Gold If you’ve ever watched the classic Humphrey Bogart movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre or read Victor Villasenor’s spell-binding tome, “Rain of Gold,” you’ve got at least a passing acquaintance with Mexico’s awe-inspiring Copper Canyon. Hidden in the Northern part of Mexico lies an astonishing system of gorges comprised of six vast canyons wider and deeper than the Grand Canyon. Although copper is mined in parts of the…

AlbuquerqueDog FriendlyFood TruckNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Street Food Institute – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno5:43 PM

“The more street food we have, the more it’s embraced by every income strata, the better world we have.” ~Anthony Bourdain Jonathan Gold, the first restaurant critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, called food trucks “the new incubators of culinary innovation.” Indeed, chefs and entrepreneurs who ply their talents in food trucks and express themselves through  distinctively creative cuisine aren’t just fostering culinary trends.  They’re doing so at a rate at which their brick-and-mortar counterparts couldn’t conceive, much less execute. Food trucks are exposing consumers to unorthodox flavor combinations and ingredient fusions, creating a growing demand for more…

Dog FriendlyFine DiningNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)Santa Fe

Terra – Tesuque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno10:46 AM

Several years ago, I asked my grandmother if she might consider aromatherapy as a treatment for the nagging aches and pains she suffered daily.  Aromatherapy, I explained was being hailed by New Age devotees in Santa Fe and Taos as a holistic healing treatment used to promote health and well-being. “Mi hijito,” she said gently, “In Northern New Mexico we are always surrounded by aromatherapy. We experience it when we bake bread in our hornos and roast chile in our comals. Aromatherapy is the petrichor of wet earth after the first rain. It’s the piñon-scented air we breathe every day.”…

BreakfastDog FriendlyNew MexicanNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)Santa Fe

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…

AlbuquerqueChineseNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Rising Star Chinese Eatery – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno9:22 PM

Let’s get one thing straight. General Tso’s chicken is not some weird cold war Chinese one-upmanship response to Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken. In other words, China did not deliberately seek to outdo the United States by creating a chicken dish and naming it for a General, a rank superior to the rank of Colonel. Not even close! Back in the early 50s, Colonel Harlan Sanders actually did create a revolutionary way of preparing poultry (pressure fried, eleven herbs and spices, yada, yada, yada). General Zuo Zongtang (romanized as Tso Tsung-t’ang), on the other hand, did not create the dish…