Nan and Dave had volunteered to accompany me while I stoked up in Santa Fe and the surrounding area. Nan, though, had already asked how many straight meals of strictly New Mexican food we could manage, since it is hardly spa cuisine. As it happened, I was already a meal ahead of her by the time we sat down at Maria’s: When I’d arrived in town, at two-thirty or three in the afternoon, I was famished, and I popped into a place called La Choza, where, in a funky and agreeable little garden, I’d downed a sopaipilla stuffed with pulled chicken and a fine bowl of posole.
I hadn’t thought I’d be able to eat much just a few hours later, but Maria’s carne adovada had changed all that. It was described on the menu as “lean and tender pork marinated in red chile, herbs, and spices and baked to perfection.” If it were made crudely, I suppose, carne adovada could conjure up the possibility that your grandmother might snap one day and drench her signature brisket with hot sauce before serving it to her unsuspecting family. Made right, it retains the almost smoky taste of red chiles—which are simply green chiles that have been allowed to ripen into redness and have then been dried. I told Dave and Nan that I liked carne adovada almost as much as I liked posole. I had a bowl of posole on the side anyway. Also a bowl of green. Just in case.
At breakfast a couple of days later, I found myself comparing notes with a young man from Denver who had a mission similar to mine. He gets to Santa Fe a lot more on business than I do, but not often enough to stave off a terrible craving for New Mexican food. We had both fetched up at the community table at Tecolote Café—a place that’s open only for breakfast and lunch. In a Northern New Mexican restaurant, of course, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between breakfast and lunch; at the stand at the Albuquerque airport specializing in the food of New Mexico, for instance, the two dishes listed under the category of breakfast are a breakfast burrito and carne adovada with eggs.
Tecolote Café serves the same menu from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and has as its motto, “Great Breakfast—No Toast.” It’s known for its green chile, in the way that La Choza and its less strictly New Mexican older cousin, The Shed, are known for their red chile. (Established restaurants in Santa Fe often have long-term contracts with specific New Mexican chile growers—usually those near Hatch, 250 miles to the south.) My eating companion from Denver said that when he asked the advice of an old Santa Fe hand before his first trip, the friend said to go to Tecolote and “order anything you want, with the green.”
Breakfast turned out to be the meal I always had on my own while I was in Santa Fe. I could picture Nan nibbling on some yogurt and fresh fruit as she contemplated what our lunch and dinner were going to be like, but I tried not to let that spoil my appetite. In fact, one morning, as I began thinking about how few mealtimes there were before my departure compared to how many chile-pits I had left to visit, I downed back-to-back breakfast burritos—first at a place near the Plaza called Tia Sophia’s and then at Horseman’s Haven, a café that occupies part of an abandoned filling station out toward the interstate and outfits its waitresses in T-shirts that say (justifiably, many residents think), “Hottest Chile in Town.” In both places, I had half of the burrito covered in green chile and the other half covered in red—a combination that people in Santa Fe sometimes call Christmas. It beats cornflakes by a mile.
Horseman’s Haven is the sort of place where you can encounter a booth full of actual horsemen, wearing the tightly woven straw hats that ranch hands in the Southwest favor, next to a booth full of people who look as if they might have arrived in the area in the early ’70s to join a crafts commune. It occurred to me that a scholar of Northern New Mexican cuisine could use its menu as evidence that the cultural mingling that started hundreds of years ago with the pobladores and the Indians has never really stopped: The side dishes include home fries, grits, red or green chile, blue corn tortilla, and sprouts.
Not to criticize, but on my last night in Santa Fe, Nan seemed to be flagging. We were having dinner at The Shed, and I noticed that she ordered salad as an appetizer. As I tucked into the enchilada with red, I was thinking that, despite my best efforts, I hadn’t eaten everything I’d come to eat. We’d had lunch at El Paragua in Española, a restaurant I remembered from the ’70s, but we hadn’t had a chance to eat at the highly recommended little stand next door called El Parasol. We’d had some interesting modern takes on traditional Northern New Mexican cuisine—at Cafe Pasqual’s, near the Plaza, for instance—but I hadn’t tried Horseman’s Haven’s intriguing idea of a green chile cheeseburger. I didn’t know how long it would be before I felt a terrible craving that could not be dealt with in New York. After all, despite the opportunities New Yorkers have been given in the past 30 years to sample the cuisine of almost every imaginable country and region and province and maybe even an exotic neighborhood or two, there still didn’t seem to be any New Mexican posole in Manhattan.
No posole in Manhattan! Where had I heard that before? Wouldn’t the obvious solution to a problem like that be to launch a restaurant—a restaurant with an irresistible name, like Taos County? Thirty years later, we would still be ahead of the curve. Taos County was actually a better idea than ever: In the ’70s, I hadn’t even thought of including carne adovada. We’d have to tweak the décor a bit, of course, but that wouldn’t be difficult. The only other problem would be tracking down Irwin.
Pinterest
