I want you to know that when I had the idea of opening a Northern New Mexican restaurant in Manhattan, I was way ahead of the curve. This was, after all, in 1971. I had returned to New York after a summer in New Mexico, much of it spent in the high-desert country from Santa Fe north. Northern New Mexico is well known as a singularly beautiful place that has always been an inspiration to people of artistic bent—Georgia O’Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence, for instance, not to speak of generations of eastern remittance men who, gazing out of their exquisitely restored adobe houses toward the surrounding mountains, must be moved now and then to compose deeply felt poetry on the subject of their trust funds. After just a couple of months in New Mexico, I myself had been inspired to hatch a scheme for creating a steady source of quality posole in Manhattan. Posole is made by boiling corn kernels in a lime solution (lime as in limestone, not lime as in the juice you have in the Margaritas you drink while you’re waiting for your posole) and then drying them. It is often served in a bowl as a sort of stew, with the addition of pork or chicken and chiles. It has an earthy taste, and a texture that can make you forget your troubles. In Northern New Mexican homes, posole is traditionally served during the Christmas season. My restaurant scheme was based on the desire to eat it every day of the year.
In 1971, of course, the restaurant scene in New York was considerably less open than it is today to the introduction of new American regional cuisines. When residents of Manhattan thought of American regions, they simply divided the country in two—New York and Out of Town—and, unsurprisingly, there were not a lot of restaurants that featured out-of-towners’ cuisine. Restaurant menus did not boast about having acquired their mussels from Puget Sound or their morels from Michigan; the menu word that justified tacking an extra couple of dollars on the entrée was still imported. In Louisiana, Cajuns shoveling down crawfish and boudin and tasso and crabs the way they always had were blissfully unaware that, through no fault of their own, they would someday become associated on New York menus with burnt fish. Chez Panisse had just barely opened its doors in Berkeley. If a restaurant in New York had included the word California in its name, the public would have expected a drive-in with blond carhops. Imagine the impact on this scene if someone had opened a Northern New Mexican restaurant called Taos County.
That’s right: The name of the restaurant was to be Taos County. That would set it apart from Mexican restaurants—although in 1971, long before New York finally got a serious wave of immigration from the area around Puebla, there weren’t that many Mexican restaurants in Manhattan to set it apart from. The name hinted at the décor. I’m pretty sure, though, that my original vision of the décor has become adulterated over the years by images that I acquired later: What I see now when I think of Taos County looks uncomfortably like one of those exquisitely restored adobe houses inhabited by the remittance men, or maybe a little like an advertisement for Ralph Lauren Southwest Home Furnishings.
On the walls, there are huge photographs of Indian pueblos and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the adobe churches in villages like Truchas and Las Trampas—villages that, years before anyone in the East had thought of writing the Declaration of Independence, had been founded by Spanish-speaking pobladores, or settlers, who must have turned their attention almost immediately to figuring out creative ways to use blue corn. (The cuisine that emerged from the blending of Spanish and Indian traditions is sometimes said to have been based on “corn, beans, squash, and chile—and not all that much squash.”) The floors of Taos County, as I can still see them, have stunning rugs from Chimayó, woven by descendants of the people who brought weaving to the Navajo. In the niches of the walls and in glass cases are Pueblo artifacts and maybe a few santos. The furniture is the color of Northern New Mexican buttes, unless those things are mesas.
That’s not exactly the look of restaurants in Northern New Mexico that are likely to have a decent bowl of posole. They tend toward rough wood and exposed beams. In fact, the possibility once occurred to me that posole wouldn’t come out right in a restaurant whose beams are covered, in the way that mayonnaise is said not to thicken properly if there’s a thunderstorm approaching. Whatever the design of Taos County was, I remember being confident that it would knock the critics dead, even before they had a chance to bite into a sopaipilla or taste a blue corn tamale covered with green chile. At least that’s what I kept telling an acquaintance of mine I’ll call Irwin—the person I was hoping to persuade to launch Taos County. No, I wasn’t going to do the restaurant myself. I’m more of an idea man. I just wanted a place to eat.
Irwin, who left the city years ago, was then in real estate. He had acquired control of a building he was turning into co-op apartments and he was trying to decide what sort of restaurant he wanted in the commercial space on the ground floor. Taos County, I kept telling him. Nobody in New York had tasted posole. Nobody had tasted sopaipillas. Nobody was familiar with the pure pleasure that a chile fancier in Santa Fe gets from settling in at the counter—yes, in that era before sushi bars had made counter-eating respectable in upmarket New York restaurants, Taos County was going to have a counter where you could eat like a gent, the way Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood or Tadich Grill in San Francisco had counters where you could eat like a gent—and saying, “Give me a bowl of green” or “I’ll have the enchilada with red.”
I think Irwin, who was not a traveler, had New Mexican food mixed up in his mind with Tex-Mex food. I tried to explain to him that even though New Mexican cooking included some of the dishes Americans were used to finding in Mexican restaurants—tamales, for instance, and chiles rellenos, and enchiladas—even those dishes had a different taste than the Tex-Mex equivalents, particularly if they were turned out by a cook who had the touch with a green or a red. Once New Yorkers tasted the difference, I told Irwin, he’d have to hire large men with electric cattle prods to control the crowds clamoring to get in. As I remember how all of this turned out, Irwin opened a steak joint in the building instead.
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.
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.