Southwestern cuisine got stylish in Santa Fe, starting in the 1970s when chef Mark Miller opened the Coyote Cafe, which offered contemporary takes on traditional dishes. Decades later, the Coyote Cafe continues to thrive… along with many relatively new restaurants that take advantage of native ingredients to create stylish variations of the classics. Santacafe is one of the best, seasoning local tradition with an Asian touch. On and around the Plaza at the heart of town, you will find Roque’s Carnitas selling a magnificent tortilla roll-up of char-cooked beef and peppers; the old Five & Dime, the lunch counter of which is alleged to be the place cook Teresa Hernandez first conceived the Frito Pie; and the Plaza Cafe, which has town lunchroom atmosphere that defies gentrification all around it and serves a menu that combines flavors of the Southwest in general, New Mexico in particular, and a few Greek specialties, too. No visit to “The City Different” is complete without a meal (or two or three) at Pasqual’s, a favorite corner eatery for decades, where the corned beef hash is superb and the hot chocolate is radiant with Mexican seasonings.
In 1901, there were fewer than 7,000 cars on America’s roads. Just 40 years later, Duncan Hines’s guidebook Adventures in Good Eating was pinpointing hundreds of gems worthy of a detour....
Pancakes make people happy. Arriving at the table in the form of short stacks or lofty towers, or fanned out like a haul of soft gold medallions, they are...
As pilgrims on the road of reprobate gastronomy, we encounter all sorts of green chile cheeseburgers (henceforth referred to as GCCBs) at drive-ins and truck-stops throughout the Southwest. But...
The vendor wars have ended in Santa Fe. Calm reigns on the Plaza, where, seven years ago, the lady with the churros wagon so resented the competition from Speedy...
Road trip through New Mexico Take a road trip and eat your way through El Camino Real "The Royal Road" through New Mexico. In addition to spectacular natural beauty, you...
The drive along old Route 66 from the Texas Panhandle to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico is a pageant of natural splendor and...
A visit to New Mexico during the height of chile season takes us from Albuquerque, where the State Fair is underway, north to magical city of Santa Fe, then...
As breathtaking as a western sunset is, western breakfast can be every bit as beautiful. Sunrise never tasted better than it does at any one of these dozen breakfast...
Burgers in the Open Air Hamburgers are good year-round, but there’s special pleasure in having one en plein air on a summer day. Check out these baker’s-dozen Roadfood favorite restaurants serving the...
Unique Regional Dishes After 40 years and 5 million miles spent on the road looking for America's best regional food, we've assembled a list of the quintessential, must-eat food in...
Santa Fe's bounty of good food merits at least a week of eating ... or two or three weeks, or more. But let's say you have just one day...
Why is brunch so wonderful? One, it almost always includes adult beverages. Two, it's far more bountiful than either breakfast or lunch. Three, there's no hurry to eat it:...
There are few pleasures in life more sensuously delicious than sinking teeth into a perfectly ripe peach to let its juicy, sugared sunshine flood over taste buds. Because their...
We Americans love our hamburgers, at home and on the road. From mischievous fried sliders to majestic beef pillows oozing juice over coals, burgers are a birthright coast to...
Fritos were created in San Antonio in 1932, but it took some thirty years before the Frito pie was born. Teresa Hernandez, working behind the Woolworth's lunch counter in...
Granola first was invented in the 1860s (not the 1960s) and eaten by health nuts of the day. It was a severe dish made from nothing but double-baked sheets...
Sopaipillas are are made from dough that is rolled out very thin, cut into small sections, then tossed into boiling oil, preferably lard. The lard makes the pieces of...
At their best, made from roasted chilies that still have muscular vegetable walls, stuffed with cream-rich molten cheese and haloed in a coat of featherweight batter fried to a...
Although it isn't shaped like one, this is our kind of food pyramid, containing protein in the form of meat and cheese, vegetables (green chile and maybe onions, too),...
