The hot dog is the lowest form of sausage. So one has to ask, is it a back-handed compliment to suggest that Santa Fe turns out a better Chicago Dog than Chicago itself?

The dark, chilly days of winter and the often attendant desire to remain inside belong to those of us who know that settling in with a good book or staying in bed are the best plans. Of course, those leisurely, lingering activities come with a de facto pit stop: the indulgent break for needed sustenance, the winter snack.

A lot of people are up in arms, having recently realized, through Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, that factory-farmed meat is the nastiest possible activity. But hough Safran Foer himself is a committed vegetarian, he’s too well-informed to paint all meat production and eating with the same brush.

The elegant little building, situated at the corner of Alameda and Galisteo streets, once contained the fledgling promise of the Mediterranean Café. It has spent the last several years drooping from a gem into a degenerate gangster bar and then a rug shop and, finally, a sad, empty building in need of genuine metamorphosis. The building was a cockroach, but it woke up recently to find it had transformed into Louie’s Corner Café.

Hand me a sealed plastic bag of so-called “food” on an airplane and my instinct instinct is to say, “If any portion of the high cost of my airplane ticket is justified by the expense of this nasty little sack of over-processed by-products, please give me the home address of your CEO because I desperately want to wake him in the night by ramming these airplane-shaped graham crackers down his throat.”

Remember when La Plazuela restaurant—the house eatery for La Fonda hotel—was like an all-terrain skate bowl? Stepping from the lobby into the dining room was like entering a lopsided universe of chunky stone that drained toward a rocky vortex at the center. Not only was sure footing unlikely, but tables, plates and drinks listed with the tilt of the bowl. It was like eating in a dramatic, frozen ocean.

Red patio umbrellas face yellow patio umbrellas across Old Santa Fe Trail and on opposite sides of the Santa Fe River. The colorful umbrellas on sturdy, upright poles are not exactly flags flying from pikes, but I nonetheless think of them as signs of the clash between two new restaurants: a brasserie versus bistro brawl.

Martín Rios—steeped in Southwestern tradition, trained in French technique, given to Asian flair, as capable with pastry and dessert as he is with entrées ranging from Old World to New, and generally global in his grokking of gastronomy—has finally opened a restaurant of his own that feels capable of containing his range.

One of these years, I am going to rock the Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta. I am going to hit the tastings, the luncheons, the tours—you name it and I will be there, and whatever is being served will be in my mouth. But not this year. Fortunately, there was the “Harvest Wine Dinner” at Joe’s.

In Santa Fe, where the locavore scene has been spreading like monkeys without a chaperone for several years, touting ingredients as “local” no longer cuts it: You’ve got to name specific farmers. Is it farmwashing? Neighborwashing? Of just the beginning of a good thing?