AmericanDog FriendlyNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Sammy C’s Rock ‘n’ Sports Pub & Grille – Gallup, New Mexico

Gil Garduno8:30 PM

Gallup, New Mexico is a city of dichotomies, contrasts and contradictions.  As recently as the 1990s, Gallup was known as “Drunk Town, USA” after ranking number one across the fruited plain for the number of alcohol-related deaths.  Despite that ignominious distinction, Gallup also boasts of “more millionaires per capita than any other place in the world,” largely on the strength of Native American art.  In 2013, map and atlas publisher Rand McNally named Gallup “America’s Most Patriotic Small Town.” Four years later, Roadsnacks, an online infotainment media declared Gallup the second most dangerous city in New Mexico, a year after the Federal Bureau of Investigations had ranked it number one. Gallup’s El Rancho Hotel was once called “home of the movie stars” because it served as base camp for more than 100 western movies filmed in the area during the 1930s and 1940s.  Such glitterati as Ronald Reagan, Humphrey Bogart, Mae West, Katherine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, Lucille Ball and more than 150 others stayed at the Old West style hotel.  Early in his career, Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan falsely claimed he was raised in Gallup.  Celebrities not withstanding, in 2013 New Mexico Magazine published 25 reasons to love Gallup. Among those 25 reasons…

AlbuquerqueClosed in 2024Gone But Not ForgottenNew MexicoVietnamese

Le Bistro Bakery & Vietnamese Cuisine – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno4:49 PM

Several years ago and much to the surprise of the proprietor, I ordered a durian shake at a Vietnamese restaurant. She proceeded to caution me that durian has a very powerful aroma and flavor many people find off-putting. When she witnessed my enjoyment of the cold pungent fruit beverage, she gave me a big hug and told me I was the “only white boy” she ever saw who delighted in the odoriferous nuances of what is known widely as “the world’s stinkiest fruit.” Indeed, durian is one of the very few things in the world Travel Network celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern cannot eat. Its sulfurous emanations have been likened to body odor, smelly feet, rotten onions, garbage and even decomposing corpse. It was deja vu all over again (as Yogi Berra once said) when I visited Le Bistro Bakery & Vietnamese Cuisine with my good friends Larry “the professor with the perspicacious palate” McGoldrick and the Dazzling Deanell. When I ordered a durian smoothie, shock and awe registered in the face of proprietor Mindy Nguyen who proceeded to warn me that durian has a very strong flavor, a flavor my well-traveled friends had never before experienced. Much to my own…

AlbuquerqueBurgersDog FriendlyNew MexicoRating: N/R (Not Rated)

Burger 21 – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno9:42 PM

“When people pile seven things onto one burger, it drives me nuts!” ~Bobby Flay Burger meals at the Garduño home are always an interesting dichotomy, some might say a clash of opposing ideals and styles.  For my Kim, a burger is about the meat to bun ratio ameliorated by a minimum of tried and true ingredients, usually just lettuce, relish and mustard (yawn).  For her mad scientist of a husband, meat and buns are tabula rasa, merely starting points for experimentation with sundry ingredient combinations.  Over the years I’ve become rather adept at figuring out what ingredients work well together to create burgers that please my pedantic palate, titillate my tongue and arouse my olfactory senses.  Until I become bored with it, my current favorite homemade burger is constructed with an 80 percent lean and 20 percent fat, hand-formed beef patty, smoked Cheddar, caramelized onions, honey mustard and Ted’s hot dog hot sauce (thank you, Becky)  Without delving into the neuropsychology of flavor and its nuances, the art and science of constructing burgers is largely a matter of personal taste.  Many people are fairly monogamous about their burgers (not that  there’s anything wrong with that) while some of us are…

AlbuquerqueClosed in 2019Dog FriendlyGone But Not ForgottenItalianNew MexicoRating: Outstanding

M’TUCCI’S MARKET & PIZZERIA – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno9:35 AM

Greek mythology recounts the story of Tantalus, progeny of a divine parent (Zeus himself) and a mortal one. Uniquely favored among mortals by being invited to share the food of the gods, Tantalus abused that privilege by slaying his own son and feeding him to the gods as a test of their omniscience. The gods immediately figured out what Tantalus had done and in their rage condemned him to the deepest portion of the underworld where he would be forever “tantalized” with hunger and thirst. Though immersed up to his neck in water, when Tantalus bent to drink, it all drained away. When he reached for the luscious fruit hanging on trees above him, winds blew the branches beyond his reach. For years, Duke City diners have been tantalized by the promise of signage beckoning us to visit “delis” only to realize, much like the gods of Olympus, that all is not as it appears. A sign does not a deli make nor do products from peripatetic distributors. As with Tantalus, we’re left to pine for the authenticity of a true deli, the type of which Albuquerque has not seen since the bygone days of Deli Mart. Savvy diners may…

Closed in 2019Gone But Not ForgottenMariscosMexicanNew Mexico

El Agave – Rio Rancho, New Mexico (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno12:13 AM

“Why, this here sauce is made in New York City!” “New York City? Git a rope!” No matter how broad-minded we may perceive ourselves to be, most of us are burdened by covert biases and prejudices that reveal themselves at inopportune times. One of mine was divulged during my inaugural visit to El Agave Mexican Restaurant in Rio Rancho. After being greeted warmly by effusive hostess Lilly Venegas (who could not possibly have been nicer), I began my usual “twenty questions” routine to learn everything I could about the restaurant. Beaming with pride, she told me her brother-in-law had owned and operated two Mexican restaurants for more than twenty years in Raleigh, North Carolina. North Carolina! North Carolina! My mind raced to the circa 1980s Pace Picante Sauce commercial in which several hungry cowboys threatened to string up the cook for serving a “foreign” salsa (translation: not made in Texas). To be fair, my ridiculous notion that good Mexican food couldn’t possibly be prepared in North Carolina was based on having lived and traveled in the Deep South for eight years. During those octennial years of Mexican food deprivation, we found only one restaurant in Dixie which served good Mexican…

AmericanChickenRating: OutstandingTexasUnited States

GUS’S WORLD-FAMOUS FRIED CHICKEN – Austin, Texas

Gil Garduno11:18 PM

When I told my friend Carlos my Kim and I would be enjoying Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken during our trip to Austin, he quipped “when did Los Pollos Hermanos open a restaurant in Texas?”.  Wrong Gus.  Obviously Carlos was joking about Gus Fring, the stoic Argentinian entrepreneur on the Albuquerque-based Breaking Bad television series.  Gus Fring, as you might recall, used his fried chicken franchise Los Pollos Hermanos as a front for methamphetamine distribution throughout the American Southwest.  The Colonel may have had eleven herbs and spices, but Gus had blue-hued crystal meth. The Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken of which I spoke is a burgeoning franchise which got its start in Memphis, Tennessee.  While Nashville’s incendiary, cayenne-heavy, finger-dying hot chicken may be all the rage, Music City’s piquant poultry seems to be about testing your mettle and demonstrating pain is a flavor.  Gus’s fried chicken, on the other hand, is all about flavors that titillate your taste buds and linger on your lips.  Sure, it’s got heat, but just enough to give you a buzz, not to scald your mouth…and it doesn’t leave your fingers oily and orange.  Moreover, it’s absolutely delicious, easily the best spicy fried chicken…

Dog FriendlyPizzaRating: N/R (Not Rated)TexasUnited States

Via 313 – Austin, Texas

Gil Garduno10:15 AM

It’s oft been said that among males (we’re such children), insults are a form of intimacy.  Perhaps because of societal expectations, many men aren’t comfortable expressing affection toward other males in physically demonstrative ways (even in the Age of Oprah).  In his book A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt – and Why They Shouldn’t, philosophy professor William Irvine contends “the closer the friend, the more teasing there is.”  If the sheer volume of insults is equal to how highly we esteem other men, Jim, my former boss at Intel was esteemed highly indeed. Because Jim was a pretty good guy (and because he was the boss), it was hard (and maybe career-limiting) to attack him on a personal level.  Instead, we teased him mercilessly about his resolute loyalty toward his hometown football team–the hapless, hopeless and helpless Detroit Lions, one of only four NFL teams (the Browns, Jaguars, Lions and Texans are the others) never to reach the Superbowl.  Unlike the bandwagon jumpers who support a team only when it’s winning, Jim never gave up on his beloved Lions.  Privately we all thought it exhibited a masochistic tendency. By extension, we also insulted all things Detroit–its decline from industrial…

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 were to be found solely in animated television cartoons. Now we know better! If the mention of Lockhart, Texas triggered involuntary salivation and an acute longing for smoked meats, you’re an inveterate barbecue aficionado.  Lockhart is a meat lover’s mecca, a town so synonymous with barbecue that it was officially proclaimed “The Barbecue Capital of Texas” (Resolution No. 1024) by the Texas state legislature.   Generations of barbecue lovers don’t just visit Lockhart.  They make pilgrimages to Lockhart–purposeful, inspired, meat-seeking missions to the town of some 15,000 souls that four of the most famous purveyors of low and slow smoked meats…

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, metamorphosing from tasty enough moths into glorious, flavor-packed butterflies.  A more demanding public–especially those of us who self-gloss as foodies or gastronomes–didn’t want to leave well enough alone.  We wanted to explore possibilities, to actualize the foods we love most.  We did it with the most sacrosanct of plebeian foods such as hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwiches and donuts, transforming the prosaic into the inspired with new and different ingredients and preparation methods. No one is under the illusion that these so-called gourmet innovations have supplanted their staid predecessors or converted their loyal sycophants.  There will always be consumer base completely…

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 old rooster become overly amorous with the young chicks but not being able to do anything about it because he couldn’t retain his balance.  One of our favorite spectator sports, a weird sort of mix between football and professional wrestling, also involved chickens. We would catch fresh water sucker fish from the Rio Santa Barbara and toss them into the chicken coop.  The chickens would tear the fish apart and chase each other around the coop trying to take entrails away from whichever chicken had them.  Estevan and Gabriel, by the way, would grow up to make Peñasco very proud. …

AmericanBrunchClosed in 2021Dog FriendlyGone But Not ForgottenTexasUnited States

Contigo – Austin, Texas (CLOSED)

Gil Garduno11:59 PM

There are a phalanx of “best of” lists online and in print publications that celebrate restaurants deemed true stand-outs worthy of accolades.  Such lists are obviously very subjective though by no means definitive.  That holds true as well to the concept of restaurant review ratings, a mere snapshot in time valid really only to that reviewer at that very specific date and time of a visit.  Still, when we travel, I study the restaurant scene at our intended destinations, taking the pulse of what lay diners and cognoscenti have to say and yes, how they rate a restaurant.  When we visit a restaurant in a city to which we travel, we’re unfailingly well armed with information and know full well what to expect. More than “best of” lists and subjective ratings, I’ve come to value the notion of “essential restaurants” a concept posited by Eater that recognizes how much the experiential aspects of a meal really matter.  For Eater, “it’s not about the “best” or the most lavish or the trendiest or the prettiest or the coolest restaurants in the country.  It’s an open-armed embrace of all of America’s culinary achievements, a full-throated refrain for the beautiful, satisfying meals we…