If the Chocolate Maven were a person, instead of a bakery and restaurant, this is how it would go: an involuntary 72-hour psych evaluation followed by heavy medication for the foreseeable future. The place is, all political correctness aside, positively schizophrenic. But an armchair analysis of taste and smell at Chocolate Maven reveals a calculating and ingenious kind of sanity.

Economic optimists may be hallucinating out of sheer desperation, but if there’s one market that is truly bullish in bear times, it’s the supermarket. Especially niche markets: Check out Sunflower Farmers Market's big entry into Santa Fe.

These are the paths that converge at Atrisco: the fresh, local ingredients that have become synonymous with expensive “food snobbery” and the down-home, reliable menu that has always meant friends, family and fair portions for a fair price. It’s smart and important—if local food is to make a real resurgence, it has to be on a practical, as well as a gourmet, level.

By Ari LeVaux If Erica Hart could have grapes growing out of her ears, she would. As it is, she and her husband Richard, the owners and proprietors of the newly opened Vino del Corazón Wine

Peter Zimmer thinks Santa Fe’s food scene is exploding, but it’s just the beginning. He envisions more activities on farms that will further connect people with their food. He’s working with the Santa Fe Alliance to manifest things like prix-fixe farm dinners cooked by local chefs and an interactive online map with information on who sells what at which farm, who allows berry picking, who’s got beehives to look at, as well as other tips on how to “have a cool farm experience.”

A lot of restaurants with oasis-like locations under towering cottonwood trees on the banks of iconic rivers, not to mention captive audiences of rafters, thirsty tourists and hillbillies, wouldn’t bother with the quality of the food. This is America, after all, and we are stupid and fat enough to eat anything, especially when we’re miles from anywhere. Embudo Station has itself sometimes coasted on lesser fare, but no longer.

In 1918, Mose Iacino launched a family fish business in Colorado by bringing fresh seafood into Denver on railcars. The supply came from Seattle, Wash. and, in order to keep the catch fresh, new ice was added every time the train stopped on its multi-day journey.

In the two years they have toiled in the wackadoodle bistro space in the even funkier Santa Fe Village mall on Don Gaspar Avenue, Daniela and Maxime Bouneou have crafted a good-food haven amid the hus

Bud Light’s “Drinkability” ad campaign essentially means the stuff can be stomached; it also means Anheuser-Busch, like other large beer conglomerates, is scared.

Of the 210 million barrels of beer sold in the US last year, 8.5 million barrels were of domestic craft beer, a category the Brewers Association, America’s craft brewers’ trade association, describes as “small, independent, and traditional.”

Reconciling a 21st century schedule with a mesquite-mellowed meal requires a little compromise, so we arranged a consultation with Cheryl and Bill Jamison, local outdoor cooking experts and authors of such books as Smoke & Spice, Sublime Smoke and Born to Grill.