Clay Pot Restaurant – Albuquerque, New Mexico

“This stuffing of food in your fellow diners’ face is called gursha, and that’s what you do to show your affection and respect. Try this at the Waffle House some time and prepare for awkwardness.” ~Anthony Bourdain, Season 6 of Parts Unknown Eating Ethiopian cuisine involves eating with your hands. That can also be said about eating pizza, sandwiches, tacos, gyros and a number of other foods common to the American palate. But what about being fed from someone else’s hand?  In Ethiopia, that practice is called gursha.  Gursha is a term for the Ethiopian tradition of hand-feeding a bite of food, wrapped in injera, to someone else as a gesture of love, friendship, and respect. It signifies hospitality, often extended to…

Sugar Nymphs Bistro – Peñasco, New Mexico

Peñasco has always been the beautiful stepsister ignored by the dutiful suitors who prefer the company of Taos, its more glamorous sibling. Taos, the mystical art colony to which new age subscribers seem preternaturally drawn is the terminus of the high road, starting and end point of the enchanted circle and one of the most beautiful communities in the country, if not the world. Sugar Nymphs Bistro is helping Peñasco lure some of those suitors away…at least for a spectacular meal or ten.  A 2002 entry into the Taos county restaurant scene, Sugar Nymphs offers a sophisticated menu that belies Peñasco’s rural simplicity while celebrating its agrarian traditions and serving its local home-grown organic produce.  It’s quite simply one of…