Category: Rating: N/R (Not Rated)

AlbuquerqueBarbecueFood TruckNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Steam Q – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno12:02 AM

“I don’t know why men like to barbecue so much. Maybe its the only thing they can cook. Or maybe they’re just closet pyromaniacs.” ~Cecelia Ahern, P.S. I Love You >Whether or not the dubious and persistent stereotype about men and their grills has any veracity is a topic oft debated.  It’s been discussed anecdotally and it’s been analyzed scientifically.  In a 2010 article for Forbes, Meghan Casserly explained why men love grilling: “Grilling is sort of dangerous (there’s fire!), it lets dudes hang out together while also providing some sort of neutral entertainment (getting to watch one guy do stuff and possibly also criticizing him while he does it), and requires minimal cleaning (self-explanatory).” >In his 1993 essay “Why Do Men Barbecue?,” an article more about gender roles than about meat, anthropologist Richard Shweder expounded on the origins of male and female spaces in different cultures.  He posited that contemporary men and women throughout urban America don’t consider themselves tied to traditional gender roles.  So, where the men among our troglodytic ancestors brought home the mastadon for women to prepare (and bring them a beer or six), today’s men are just as likely to prepare the daily bread with…

New MexicanNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)Rio Rancho

Burrito Express – Rio Rancho, New Mexico

Gil Garduno8:32 PM

In an article entitled “Ode to the Handheld” in the April, 2020 edition of New Mexico Magazine, writer Alicia Inez Guzman noted that when her dad was growing up in the sixties, “the idea of plating a burrito for a sit-down meal was unheard of, laughable even.  That’s because the humble tortilla-as-envelope filled with protein and starch was tailor-made for eating in the fields and long the companion of the farm worker.” Google “burrito” and the results returned will almost invariably ascribe the same adjective used by Alicia Inez Guzman to describe the burrito–humble.  That’s fitting considering burrito translates from Spanish to “little donkey,” also a companion of the farm worker and perhaps the most humble and hard-working of all pack animals.  Etymologists believe the burrito is so named not because tortillas were ever stuffed with donkey meat or because a well-constructed burrito resembles a donkey, but because a rolled, tightly packed burrito looks like a bedroll or the packs on either side of a burrito’s haunches. Catch my friend Carlos on a day in which he’s waxing philosophical and you’ll get an earful about how a savvy dining public staved off the cultural appropriation of the humble burrito by…

BarbecueBurgersNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Greg’s BBQ – Belen, New Mexico

Gil Garduno12:01 AM

On our journey to together forever, my Kim and I have shared meals at thousands of restaurants.  Even when we haven’t enjoyed those meals, without exception we’ve enjoyed our times together.  We share everything…almost.  Maybe the only thing we don’t completely share is the extent, breadth and depth of my passion for food.  You probably won’t believe this, but I’m one of those “live to eat” types who’s certifiably obsessed with food–to the point of looking forward my next culinary adventure before my current meal is even done.  I self gloss as a gastronome, but foodie, gourmand or bon viveur fit, too. In describing my Kim as “insouciant” about food, my thoughts immediately wandered to souffles and sous, two food-related words that sort of rhyme with insouciant.  Talk about being hung-up.  Some of my friends and frequent dining companions would also describe themselves as foodies, but their behavior belies that contention.  Perhaps because of the rarity with which I break bread with someone as preoccupied with the enjoyment of food, fate decreed that the brilliant Linda Johansen would become my boss.  Like me, Linda is a certified Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS) judge.  She’s also served several times as judge…

AlbuquerqueMexicanNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)Tacos

La Reforma Brewery – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno3:27 AM

When my friend Schuyler saw the name of the restaurant on this review, he teased me that my life of dissipation, debasement and debauchery finally caught up with me.  “39-year-old juvenile delinquents like you belong in a reformatory.”   Being the mad scientist cerevisaphile he is, he also told it’s about time I ended my teetotaling ways.  “You’ve tried everything else.  Why not beer?”  Frankly, when my friend Ryan “Break the Chain” Scott first told me about La Reforma Taqueria, Brewery and Distillery, I had no idea what the context of the term “Reforma” meant, but doubted it had anything to do with a reformatory (which Wikipedia defines as “a youth detention center or an adult correctional facility popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Western countries.” Mexican history, a subject in which I’m apparently woefully uneducated, recalls that La Reforma was the Mexican social revolution in the 1850s which led to the ouster of dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (you might remember him from The Alamo) and designation of Mexico as a nation state.   The revolution resulted in the creation of  the Mexican Constitution of 1857 which provided civil, political, and religious freedoms, and…

Dog FriendlyNew MexicoPizzaRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Pizza Barn – Edgewood, New Mexico

Gil Garduno5:16 PM

“I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love Wikipedia describes the 2010 biographical romantic novel Eat Pray Love as “a journey around the world that becomes a quest for“…pizza. Okay, I took some literary liberties with the “pizza” thing.  What author Elizabeth Gilbert was actually in pursuit of was “self-discovery.”  Pizza….Self-discovery.  Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?  In her travels, Elizabeth went all the way to Italy to discover the art of pleasure, a significant aspect of which is the hedonistic, indulgent joy of eating pizza, pasta, gelato and other treasure troves of absolute deliciousness prepared as they can only be prepared in Bel Paese Thankfully denizens of the Duke City don’t have to cross an ocean to partake of the joys of eating very good, if not life-altering pizza.  A recent comment from Jackie suggested such pizza might be found as nearby as Edgewood, just east of the Sandia Mountains.  I realize some people approach a journey beyond the Sandias with the same…

Brewery-PubColoradoDog FriendlyIrishRating: N/R (Not Rated)United States

Shamrock Brewing Co. – Pueblo, Colorado

Gil Garduno1:46 PM

When my friend David Wagner, author of the spell-binding Rick Montoya Italian mysteries, invited us to dinner at the Shamrock Brewing Co. in his hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, I quickly leapt to the conclusion that Shamrock just might be the inspiration for O’Shea’s Irish Pub, the favorite gathering spot for Rick Montoya and other English-speaking expats living in Rome.  I pictured “a decor that could best be described as mid-century modern, that century being the seventeenth” with wood being the dominant feature.  My picture included a “professional tavern owner” with an appropriated name, maybe something like Guido Shamrock, would preside over the place. Shamrock wasn’t much like O’Shea’s.  Thankfully, it wasn’t much like contemporary Irish pubs across the fruited plain either.  You know the type:  the de rigueur Irish name (O’Casey, O’Brien, O’MyGod), tacky green paint with decorative leprechauns leaping around, super-cooled Guinness and lots of that good old-fashioned Irish craic (an old Gaelic term referring to the lively essence of the pub experience).  It’s gotten so bad Irish pubs have become a parody of stereotypes, prompting  some Europeans to denounce them as “the McDonald’s of the pub trade.”     In terms of look, feel and attitude, Shamrock may not…

AlbuquerqueDog FriendlyLatin AmericanNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

La Fonda Del Bosque – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno6:55 PM

In the millennium year, after years of planning and lobbying, the dream was finally realized of a haven dedicated to the preservation, promotion, and advancement of Hispanic culture, arts, and humanities. In 2000, the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC), launched along the Camino Real in the Albuquerque’s historic Barelas neighborhood. The Center is an architectural anomaly in a largely adobe-hued area.  Its unique structures include a renovated hacienda-style school, a stylized Mayan pyramid with interior elements modeled on Romanesque architecture and a torreon (tower) housing a 4,000 square foot concave fresco depicting over 3,000 years of Hispanic history. Ironically the complex chartered to preserve, protect and promote Hispanic culture had to displace several families, thereby disenfranchising some of the very families who embody Albuquerque’s Hispanic culture. One resident–the late Adela Martinez–stared down bureaucrats and made them blink, refusing to move. The forty-million dollar Cultural Center had to be redesigned to accommodate her family in the home she moved into in the 1920s. Today, her family’s two small houses stand out, not like a sore thumb, but as a testament to the courage of one 80-year old Hispanic woman whose treasured memories were worth much more than the monetary treasures government…

AlbuquerqueChineseDim SumNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

It Dim Sum – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno6:22 PM

Shortly after “moving on up to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky,” George Jefferson was uncharacteristically late returning home.  Knowing George had gone to a Chinese restaurant after work, his dutiful wife Weezy asked neighbor Tom Willis what Chinese restaurant George might have visited.  Ever the gourmand, Tom asked what style of Chinese food George liked then proceeded to rattle off five different types of traditional Chinese cuisine available in the neighborhood: Mandarin, Sichuan, Hunan, Cantonese and Shandong.  Until that very moment I had no idea there were so many different styles of Chinese cuisine, wrongly believing there was only Chinese food period. That’s pretty much what most Americans believed even back in the 80s when that particular Jefferson’s episode aired…especially those of us who didn’t live in a populous, cosmopolitan city.  In our naivete, we also believed such favorites as crab Rangoon, orange chicken, chop suey and even the ubiquitous fortune cookie to have originated in China.  It didn’t dawn on us that many Chinese dishes were “invented” to cater to American tastes.  We also had no idea how significantly Chinese dishes in China differed from those adapted to American tastes.   Some of us even…

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

Sweetwater Harvest Kitchen – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Gil Garduno4:15 PM

My friend Schuyler jokes that because the diet of my formative years was mostly beans, chile and tortillas as well as chile, tortillas and beans, I’ve developed an insatiable curiosity and appetite for anything that isn’t beans, chile and tortillas (although I still love those). “No one else,” he claims “is equally enthusiastic about  bacon-infused decadence one day as he is the healthy paleo foods  the next.  Schuyler calls me  “the anti-Mikey” (the little boy in the Life cereal commercials who hated everything, except of course, Life cereal).  He argues that I like everything. In his eyes it doesn’t count that I loath, abhor and detest  cumin when it desecrates the purity of New Mexico’s sacrosanct chile because I love cumin on Indian and Thai food.  I remind him of my profound dislike for tea either as a cold or hot beverage and his retort is a reminder about how much I love the tea leaves smoked duck at Budai Gourmet Chinese.  If you’re getting the impression that arguing with Schuyler is a no-win proposition or exercise in one-upmanship, you’re probably wondering why we’ve been friends for more than three decades. The great philosopher Plutarch probably explains it best: “I…

AlbuquerqueNew MexicanNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Ana’s Kitchen – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno12:44 PM

Several ominous scenarios went through my mind when Ana told me, “I’m sorry.  We don’t accept credit cards.”  Would I be asked to wash dishes for a couple of hours to pay for my meal?  Would Ana ask me to leave my iPhone as collateral while I dashed to an automated teller machine?  Worse, would I be jailed?  Lest you think I’m joking, an Italian lawyer actually spent a night in a New York City jail because he didn’t have his wallet when his bill arrived.  Neither the New York Police department nor the restaurant would accept his offer of leaving his iPhone as collateral or sending a bus boy with him to retrieve the wallet. I need not have worried.  Ever gracious and kind, Ana told me I could pay her the next day.  She wasn’t on duty when I returned the following day, but her chef remembered me having complimented her on my meal.  Still, she was both surprised and happy that I would return to pay off a debt and to leave a doubly generous tip for having inconvenienced Ana’s Kitchen.  It pained me that anyone would skip out on a bill at a small cafe which…

BarbecueDog FriendlyNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Mad Jack’s Mountaintop Barbecue – Cloudcroft, New Mexico

Gil Garduno8:16 AM

Whether it’s movies, Uber drivers or restaurants, human beings seem to predisposed to take stock in rankings and ratings.  Be it a one- to four-star rating method or any other numerical or graphical rating system, many of us won’t even read what a reviewer has to say.  We go straight to the rating.  Of course, for visitors to Gil’s Thrilling (And Filling) Blog, that means you’re missing out on thrilling vocabulary and verbosity.  Then again, maybe you don’t want to wade through my sesquipedalian rants to find my rating. Most reviewers, me included, would just as soon not issue ratings at all.  We would prefer to have readers discern their own impressions based on our magniloquent prose and more importantly, their own observations.  As The Dude, our debonair dachshund, and I walked around the alpine town of Cloudcroft, New Mexico while my Kim waited in line at Mad Jack’s Mountaintop Barbecue, it dawned on me that maybe ratings should be based on how long a diner is willing to wait in line for a meal.  My own threshold, perhaps indicative of my lack of patience, has always been about fifteen minutes.  Any longer than that and I want to bolt…