Category: Albuquerque

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Rustico Italian Kitchen – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno

What does it say about a restaurant when it runs out of food?  Nine times out of ten, you’d probably say it’s either brand new and doesn’t yet have a feel for its traffic volume or their inventory management just isn’t very good.  Our inaugural visit to Rustico Italian Kitchen on a bright Sunday morning introduced us to another reason.  The restaurant was so busy the previous night that diners polished off everything on the menu save for pizza and salad.  For denizens of Albuquerque’s far northeast heights, that’s actually reason for celebration.  It means outstanding Italian food has finally made a triumphant return to this quadrant of the city. Not that many years ago, I lamented that with the…

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Mighty Mike’s Meats – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Thank you, Mighty Mike! Thank you for restoring our faith in barbecue just one day after my Kim declared “I don’t want to have barbecue for a long time.”  Readers might find it hard to believe, but we uncovered a barbecue restaurant so bad our one visit risked turning us both off barbecue completely (and no, I won’t be reviewing it because if you can’t say anything nice…).  If our lifelong love for barbecue was to be restored, it was really important that our next barbecue experience be absolutely amazing and that it happen quickly (like getting back on the proverbial horse that bucked us off). The very next day, I decided to take my Kim to a food truck…

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Ikigai ABQ – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

While ikigai (pronounced ee-key-guy) may sound like what grade school girls called me many years ago, in Japanese the term ikigai is a Japanese concept combining the terms “iki,” meaning “alive” or “life,” and “gai,” meaning “benefit” or “worth.”  Though there is no direct English translation, when combined these terms embody “that which gives your life worth, meaning, or purpose.”  Essentially, ikigai is the reason why you get up in the morning. It makes a lot of sense therefore that the signage for Ikigai, a sushi restaurant ensconced in a Lilliputian pod within the El Vado Motel complex, would be subtitled “a sushi shop with purpose.”  For some of us, sushi gives life worth, meaning and purpose.  Sushi was the…

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Gyros Mediterranean – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

It’s not easy being a gastronome about town when you make less than a thousand dollars a month and have a car payment, rent and a social life. Stationed at Kirtland in the early 1980s, my Air Force salary pretty much dictated that most of my meals were at the base’s chow hall (which thankfully was legions better than mystery meat meals at the Peñasco High School cafeteria). The little that was left of my meager monthly take-home pay meant social outings were pretty much of the cheap eats variety. The epicenter for many of my off-site meals seemed to be Cornell Drive where it was possible to find restaurants with a broad socioeconomic appeal–restaurants which nurtured a refreshing open-mindedness…

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Mama Zahira Foodies – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno

FROM THE BITE:  “In Albuquerque alone, there are too many places doing falafel for us to dine at them in quick succession. That’s despite the Wacky Iraqi’s temporary relocation to Michigan (he tells us he hopes to return in a few years). It’s so easy to be judgmental, to take things at face value…to assume.  As my friend Bruce “Sr. Plata” Silver and I approached Mama Zahira Foodies’ order window, we espied the self-deprecating term “The Wacky Iraqi in Albuquerque” scrawled by the vehicle’s rear wheel well.  The term “wacky” made us wary.  It’s just not a term we associate with great food.  No sooner had we reached the window when we were greeted by Riadh Seheem, a thickly accented,…

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Bamboo Grill – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno

In his 30s, curmudgeonly London food critic Jay Rayner who’s been called the “enfant terrible (literally “terrifying child) of the gastronomic scene,” came to the realization that he hated hangovers more than he hated being drunk.  During a visit to a Vietnamese restaurant in London, he achieved an epiphany:  “huge steaming bowls of a deeply aromatic beef broth called pho, bobbing with slivers of meat and wide rice noodles – would prove a perfect cure. The head pain would ease. The pitch and roll of the stomach would steady. A gentle, soft comfy cloud of well being would descend. And all this for not very much money at all.” A 2017 article from the travel experts of Lonely Planet also…

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S-A Barbecue – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

London-based restaurant critic Jay Rayner makes barbecue sound a bit like a scientific process: “the long, virtuous interplay of fire, smoke and time on cow and pig muscle fibre; who sees only joyous caramelisation and the deep flavours gifted by the Maillard reaction, when heat says hello to amino acids and natural sugars and they all get along famously.”  He’s actually quite right, but most of us got enough chemistry formulas in high school.   We recognize that at its most basic, the formula for barbecue is expressed much more simply: meat plus smoke plus time plus (or minus) sauce equals delicious bliss. Okay, my formula only sounds simple.  Mastering the art and science of “low and slow” actually takes…

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Kabab House – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Unlike New York City, Albuquerque might not ever truly be mistaken for “a cultural melting pot.”  Though numerous ethnicities are scattered throughout the city’s 189.5 square miles, some of their culinary cultures are vastly underrepresented (if at all represented) among the city’s restaurants. Not even in the International District–where you might feel as if you’re jumping from continent to continent as you take in mutually incomprehensible languages–will you find restaurants representing some of the world’s great culinary cultures.  As we’ve espied people draped in the traditional attire of their homelands assiduously scouring Talin Market’s shelves, we’ve often contemplated the dearth of such restaurants.  For gastronomes, one of the pleasures of eating out is experiencing unfamiliar foods and new flavors.  We…

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Salty Catch – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

As children growing up in landlocked and agrarian Peñasco, my siblings and I led a very sheltered life. Our extremely provincial experience with “seafood” was limited to Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks which we dipped in Kraft’s sandwich spread (we didn’t know about tartar sauce) and (gasp, the horror) Mrs. Paul’s fried shrimp. Sure, we snared the legal limit (yeah, right) of German brown trout, cutthroat trout and rainbow trout in the cold, rocky waters of the mountain streams in our backyard, but that wasn’t “seafood.” That was fish! One commonality among the “seafood” and even the “fish” we experienced was that it was all fried. Okay, so the Mrs. Paul’s seafood was already breaded and fried when we removed it…

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M’tucci’s Twenty-Five – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

“The best ingredient I discovered in America was ‘freedom.’ The freedom to experiment in the kitchen and the freedom to be open to those experiments in the dining room.” ~Massimo Bottura, Osteria Francescana Chef and Owner Adesso basta!  I’ve had it with the haughty pedantry of my Air Force comrades-in-arms who were blessed to have been stationed in La Bele Paese and to have dined on its incomparable dishes. They’re oh-so-quick to vilify Italian-American cuisine, calling it an inauthentic parody of the madrepatria‘s sacrosanct and sublime cuisine.  They’re even quicker to criticize my devotion to such Italian-American restaurants as Joe’s Pasta House.   I know damn well that the Italian-American cuisine millions of us enjoy might not be recognized in all…

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Urbano Pasta Kitchen – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno

“To break bread together,” a phrase as old as the Bible, captures the power of a meal to forge relationships, bury anger, provoke laughter.” ~The Joy of Food From National Geographic Sharing a meal creates a unique sense of intimacy felt by all who sit together at the table.  It’s an act that can spark new friendships, solidify lifetime bonds and serve as the backdrop for new memories.   Dining together is the most communal and binding action humans can take–an act The Atlantic describes  as “a quintessential human experience.”  It’s a universal act that transcends cultures, borders and geopolitical divides and it’s been practiced since the dawn of time.   Or at least for 300,000 years  according to archaeologists…