osole!” I said to myself, as the plane I had caught in Chicago touched down on a cold day last winter. I thought for a moment that, in my excitement, I had said it out loud. Some of the passengers around me were, in fact, muttering to themselves loudly enough to be heard, and some of what they muttered was not polite. An ice storm having kept our plane from landing in Kansas City, which happens to be my hometown, the flight had continued on to its next stop—Albuquerque, New Mexico. A few minutes before, I had been disappointed about having to bypass Kansas City. Since the plane took off from Chicago, at about six that morning, I’d been overcome with hometown barbecue nostalgia, and I’d begun charting out the logistics involved in punctuating my appointments that day with lunch at two or three of the rib purveyors my Kansas City friend Fats Goldberg used to refer to, with affection born out of long patronage, as greasepits.
Now, though, I was seized with the vision of posole. For a decade or so after my dreams of Taos County were dashed by Irwin’s insistence that a good porterhouse steak was just what Manhattan needed, I had visited Northern New Mexico now and then. But as that plane arrived in Albuquerque unexpectedly, I realized that I hadn’t been in what I still thought of as posole country for 20 years. The barbecue nostalgia had already evaporated. I phoned Dave Grusin and Nan Newton, friends of mine who live in Santa Fe, and asked them if they were busy for lunch.
An hour or so later, I was in Santa Fe and Dave and Nan and I were sitting at a pleasant restaurant called Cafe San Estevan, which does a somewhat upscale version of Northern New Mexican cuisine. I was eating a bowl of quality posole. I didn’t even notice what Dave and Nan were eating. I was at peace. I had been chased by a storm since early that morning—a storm that first threatened to shut the airport in Chicago, then did shut down virtually the entire city of Kansas City, and, from what I’d heard on the car radio on the ride up from the airport, was now approaching Albuquerque—but I was, at least for the moment, unconcerned.
With my posole, I had an order of sopaipillas. I don’t think I’ve ever had sopaipillas anywhere but in New Mexico. The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook describes them as “puffy, golden ‘sofa pillows’ of deep-fried leavened dough.” I think of them as popovers that have fallen in with a fast crowd. A lot of restaurants in Northern New Mexico keep honey on the table to put on sopaipillas. Old-time residents sometimes explain to visitors that sopaipillas with honey are used during a meal to blunt the impact of particularly hot chiles—the way that parents in the English countryside explain to their children that nature always provides dockweed near stinging nettles because an application of dockweed will soothe the sting. Cafe San Estevan happens to make particularly airy sopaipillas. I had to run for the airport before the storm caught up with me, but I told Dave and Nan that I’d be back.
Could I have forgotten about carne adovada?” I was saying to Dave and Nan. “Or is it possible that I somehow didn’t know about carne adovada? Is it possible that knowledge of carne adovada was, for some reason, kept from me—and that I therefore lost an untold number of opportunities to eat carne adovada?” This outburst took place three or four months after I’d been sheltered from the storm at Cafe San Estevan. A few hours before, I had finally made it back to Santa Fe, and I was having dinner with Dave and Nan at Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen. Although Maria’s features more than a hundred Margaritas and has a rack in the foyer filled with brochures of local tourist attractions and employs a trio of strolling Mexican musicians, it nonetheless remains for residents of Santa Fe a dependable specialist in Northern New Mexican food. My intention was simple: I was going to eat enough of such food to hold me for a while.
Since my diversion to Albuquerque, I had made some efforts to find an outpost of posole country in Manhattan. After all, I figured, a lot had happened in the New York restaurant business in the past 30 years. My efforts had not met with success. One of the places I’d heard about, Los Dos Molinos, seemed to have been designed for citizens who have gotten about ten years past spring break at Daytona Beach but had not lost their taste for specialties like a “Kick-Ass Pitcher” of Margaritas. Although the red and green chile served as a dip with the chips would have been perfectly recognizable to a New Mexico purist, he would have been put off by his first glance at the menu. Sopaipillas were listed under desserts. In the most serious deviation from the gospel, the red and the green were identified on the menu as “chili”—a spelling that would make any New Mexican connoisseur shudder. Chili is what people in Texas and California eat at chili contests and, to the astonishment of people from Northern New Mexico, even in between chili contests—chopped meat and chili powder and maybe beans. It has no relation to a bowl of New Mexican red or green, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of a sauce or a soup or a stew, perhaps with a few pieces of meat in it, and is spelled “chile.” I was reminded of the time my younger daughter and I set out to check the authenticity of American-style hamburgers in Paris and found that the first place we went to on the Champs-Élysées served burgers that were rectangular rather than round: There’s an urge to pull the proprietors aside and say, “Guys, we’ve got some pretty basic work to do here.”
The other restaurant that seemed to have a connection to New Mexico was a grill on the Upper East Side called Canyon Road—presumably named after the street in Santa Fe that is known for its art galleries. At Canyon Road, chile was spelled in the New Mexican manner (as in a “goat cheese and poblano chile” quesadilla), but, by New Mexico standards, there wasn’t any. Although it had the faux-adobe interior and exposed beams often found in Santa Fe, Canyon Road—like Los Dos Molinos, which is part of a small Arizona-based chain—turned out to be more of a southwestern restaurant. Neither Canyon Road nor Los Dos Molinos had posole on the menu, and I had the feeling that it wouldn’t do me any good to return to either of them during Christmas season and check again.
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