Category: New Mexico Culinary Treasures Trail

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Restaurante Rancho De Chimayo – Chimayo, New Mexico

Gil Garduno2:26 AM

The humble Northern New Mexico village of Chimayo has a reputation far and wide as a place in which miracles occur. Because of the healing and restorative nature of those miracles, it has even been called the “Lourdes of America.” During Holy Week of 1813, a devout Penitente named Bernardo Abeyta was performing his penances on a hillside when he looked up and saw a bright light emanating from the ground near the river. Abeyta ran to the spot, knelt and began digging with his bare hands toward the light’s source. Within minutes he uncovered a large and wondrous crucifix bearing the image of Nuestro Senor de Esquipulas. The crucifix was processed to the church in Santa Cruz where it was placed in a niche off the main altar, but the next morning it was gone. In fact, the crucifix disappeared three times, only to be found back in its hole.  After the third time, everyone understood that Nuestro Senor de Esquipulas wanted to remain in Chimayo. A tiny chapel was then built above the hole. The miraculous healings began almost immediately with the first recipient being a grievously afflicted Bernardo Abeyta himself. The healings grew so numerous that the…

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El Farolito – El Rito, New Mexico

Gil Garduno3:59 AM

The most contentious seasonal difference of opinion between Northern and Southern New Mexico residents isn’t whether Chimayo produces better chile than Hatch (though this will forever be in dispute). The great civil debate dividing the Land of Enchantment has all to do with semantics. More specifically, it has all to do with the appropriate name for the little paper bag lanterns which house a votive candle and light the way for the Holy Family on Christmas Eve. Misguided citizens of New Mexico’s lower half (just about anywhere south of and including Albuquerque) mistakenly call those lanterns luminarias while their more enlightened Northern brethren call them farolitos. Luminarias–stacked and crossed piñon boughs ignited on Christmas Eve to light the Holy Family’s path to shelter–were brought to the new world from Spain, first to Mexico then to the American Southwest.  When delicate paper lanterns made their way from China to the Southwest via Mexico, they were called farolitos, or little lanterns. No one seems to know for sure how farolitos came to be called luminarias and even a children’s book by Rudolfo Anaya, one of New Mexico’s most prolific novelists, didn’t illuminate the truth.  His book “The Farolitos of Christmas” is a…

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Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Gil Garduno1:00 PM

In 1712, the provincial governor for the kingdom of New Mexico decreed that henceforth, an annual reenactment of Diego De Vargas’ triumphant reentry into Santa Fe would be celebrated every year. Santa Feans have dutifully obeyed the proclamation ever since, making the Fiesta de Santa Fe the oldest civic celebration of its kind in North America.  Approaching its 400th year, the Fiesta is renown not only for its pageantry and pomp, but for its respectful reflection on a significant historical event. By 1951, however, the Fiesta as we know it today, had degenerated into a parody of its former self, a victim of crass commercialism which Santa Fe’s Pulitzer Prize winning writer Oliver La Farge called “a shabby commercial carnival.”  Incensed that the Fiesta was overrun by concessionaires who turned the Fiesta into “a hot dog and popcorn affair,” La Farge recruited a contingent of Santa Fe’s movers and shakers in the business, religious and arts communities to restore dignity to the Fiestas.  Both the Museum of New Mexico and the Catholic Church sided with La Farge’s group. It took the ouster of several Fiesta Council members who had fostered the circus-like atmosphere wrought by deep pocketed concessionaires before the…

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Pete’s Cafe – Belen, New Mexico

Gil Garduno2:09 AM

Located along the braided routes of the historic Camino Real (the Royal Road) which skirts the Rio Grande, Belen remains the hub for two major rail lines. To this day, an average of 70 trains travel through Belen every 24-hour period. In 1901, to capitalize on the railway traffic, the Fred Harvey Company built one of the sixteen Harvey Houses it would build in New Mexico. Belen’s Harvey House provided lunch and dining facilities in close proximity to the tracks. The Harvey House was bustling with railroad crews well into the twentieth century’s fourth decade and served as a social center for the community until its closure shortly after World War II ended. Four years after the war to end all wars, Pete and Eligia Torres launched Pete’s Cafe across the street and acequia from the old Harvey House. Though neither had any restaurant experience, they delighted travelers and railway employees with their cafe–even though the Torres family didn’t begin serving New Mexican cuisine for about twenty years when local traffic surpassed train traffic. With more than sixty years of serving the community of Belen, Pete’s continues to thrive because it operates under a simple philosophy: Not the best because…

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Introducing The New Mexico Culinary Treasures Trail

Gil Garduno4:39 PM

Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who posited the theory of natural selection concluded that “the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting to their environment.”  Though his theory centered around all species of life, could a case be made that the theory applies to restaurants as well?  Do the very best restaurants stand the test of time because they succeed in adapting to their environment?  I, for one, don’t think so! As restaurants demonstrating longevity often demonstrate, adapting to their environments doesn’t  mean changing with the times to become what they’re not.  Restaurants with a timeless appeal tend to be true to themselves–trendsetters, not followers.  Restaurants with a timeless appeal survive because they generally have a good product to begin with.  They provide good value, excellent service and perhaps most of all, a memorable dining experience. Truly timeless classics traverse the span of years and generations, often creating a bond of shared memories between parents and their children. As celebrity chef Mario Batali says, “it’s not all about food, it’s about memories.” Americans are a nostalgic people.  We long for the good old days and don our rose-colored glasses when we reminisce about…

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Charlie’s Front Door – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno1:36 AM

For almost four and a half decades, Charlie Elias, an avuncular septuagenarian with the energy of a teenager,  has greeted his customers and treated them like welcome guests at his eponymous Northeast Heights restaurant and bar. Charlie doesn’t always make it to work nowadays, but his son Jamie, who’s probably the same age today that Charlie was when I first discovered this long-time family favorite, is now the restaurant’s official ambassador, a smiling presence who meets and greets all patrons with the same homespun, genuine friendliness as his father. Charlie was thirty-something when he launched his Front and Back Door operation in 1966.  That type of longevity is rare today and speaks volumes about the loyalty generations of patrons have for Charlie and his restaurant.  An elder statesman among the Duke City’s New Mexican restaurants, Charlie’s Front and Back Doors haven’t changed much over the years, offering the same menu and same friendly service diners have come to expect over the decades.  Newcomers still experience confusion as to the “Front” and “Back” door names, believing them to be the same restaurant, but with front and back door entrances. Charlie’s Front Door’s windowless frontage faces Menaul in the Hoffmantown Shopping Center. …

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The Shed – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Gil Garduno3:50 PM

In the culinary world, the name James Beard is revered perhaps above all others. Considered the “Dean of American Cookery,” Beard established a legacy of culinary excellence and became a household name to generations of home cooks and professional chefs. The cookbooks he authored between 1940 and 1983 are considered “a slice of American history” because those tomes span America’s culinary regions and served as a premonition of the global epicurean expanse to come. Today, the James Beard Foundation, a national not-for-profit organization is dedicated to celebrating, preserving, and nurturing America’s culinary heritage and diversity in order to elevate the appreciation of our culinary excellence. Earning a James Beard award signifies the pinnacle of achievement in the culinary world. It’s the restaurant world’s equivalent of the Academy Award. In 2003, The Shed restaurant earned the Foundation’s “America’s Classics Award,” a prestigious accolade honoring locally owned and operated regional restaurants that have withstood the test of time and are beloved in their communities. The Foundation’s Web site describes The Shed as “A restaurant begun in a burro shed on a dusty alley in a then-sleepy little town might not sound as if it would be – 50 years later – hailed…

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Bode’s General Merchandise Deli & Bakery – Abiquiu, New Mexico

Gil Garduno4:28 PM

Mention food and convenience store in the same sentence and the first thing likely to come to mind is one of those perpetually rotating, alutaceous hot dogs seared to a leathery sheen under a heat lamp inferno. Not even a large slushie spiked with your favorite adult beverage would make that hot dog palatable. Mention food and gas station in the same sentence and all of a sudden that leathery hot dog at the convenience store sounds like a gourmet meal. Salty, cylindrically shaped dry meat snacks with the texture of sawdust and air-filled bags of Cool Ranch Doritos are typical gas station fare. Now mention New Mexican food and gas station in the same sentence and the likely image conjured is scatological, having more to do with “gas” than food and we’re not talking petroleum here. In 2007, Sarah Karnasiewicz, senior editor of Saveur, trekked back to New Mexico to discover some of  the Land of Enchantment’s best “filling stations,” service stations in which you can actually find food that is not only fit for human consumption, it’s quite good, too.  She observed that, “we know of no other state in the Union where you can so consistently find…

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El Modelo – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno3:25 PM

Growing up in the 60s in a bucolic village in Northern New Mexico, we had no idea about such things as political correctness and multi-culturalism. It would be decades before the ascendency of the “woke” movement.  My friends included descendents of Montezuma, scions of the Spanish explorers, Native Americans from a nearby Pueblo and even a few “white” kids.  None of us really thought about things like “inclusion” and “diversity.”  We lived it! Being kids, there was naturally a lot of good-natured name-calling and teasing, but even when tempers flared, I can’t recall racial stereotype-based derogatory terms ever used in anger.  We thought nothing of teasing the “rich” white kids about their “white as them” Rainbo bread sandwiches and they retorted in kind with insults about the “poor” kids and their chicharones and chile engorged tortillas. We were teased that “Mexican” (then a collective term for all Hispanics) children received tamales for Christmas so they would have something to open on Christmas morning.  Rather than think it offensive and racist, we laughed and tried to one-up with something better. It wasn’t until years later that we found out we were supposed to be offended by race-based stereotypes and insults.  It brought…

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El Rancho – Gallup, New Mexico

Gil Garduno4:22 AM

In the 1930s and 1940s, sometimes considered the halcyon days of Western movies, the Four Corners region was the site of many cinematic classics, quite a few featuring battles between the cavalry and “misplaced” American Indians.  Never mind that the Cheyenne and the Sioux actually lived hundreds of miles (and several states) away, the region’s dramatic topography was a perfect backdrop for cowboy conflicts with these Midwestern Indians. Besides that, Navajo “actors” were plentiful.  Producers would attire them in war bonnets, arm them with lances and hand them scripts in which they would invariably succumb to the “righteous might” of the charging cavalry. One movie, John Ford’s classic Cheyenne Autumn, featuring Navajo actors pretending to be Cheyenne, has an almost cult following in Navajo country. Navajo members watching the movie today roar with laughter when Cheyenne leaders speak in Navajo, supposedly discussing treaties and tribal needs.  What the Navajo actors in the film really said in somber tones generally concerned the size of the colonel’s privates (not the ones who march) or some equally disrespectful or bawdy double-entendre. When filming took place in Navajo country close to Gallup, New Mexico, the stars found a temporary home at the El Rancho Hotel,…

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Sabroso – Arroyo Seco, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno3:01 AM

We’ve all heard the expressions from a jack to a king, from a moth to a butterfly, from a lump of coal to a diamond, but who’s ever heard…from a chicken coup to an elegant gourmet restaurant?  That sounds like more than a bit of a stretch, yet that’s the metamorphosis that transpired decades ago at what is currently the site of Sabroso, one of Taos county’s swankiest dining establishments. Local lore posits that in 1960, entrepreneurs started a restaurant not just on the site in which a chicken coup stood, but from its very walls.  That restaurant was christened Casa Cordova, a name it would proudly bear for years. Over time and with changes in ownership, Casa Cordova became Momentitos de la Vida, a restaurant which would go on to earn AAA’s four diamond rating for four consecutive years (2000-2004).  In 2005, Momentitos closed its doors for good.  Several months later, in August of 2006, Sabroso emerged and is carving out its own niche in picturesque Taos county. Sabroso’s new ownership made a conscious effort not to be as ostentatious as its predecessor, a move intended to create a broader appeal to potential local patrons.  A bar menu featuring…