How lucky we are to live in Santa Fe. To meander, shortly after dawn, in search of Gemini Farms produce or to hike amid vanilla-scented Ponderosa pines or to break fast on the flawless breakfast quesadilla at Pasqual’s is an act of love.

If salad is rabbit food, Vinaigrette is Watership Down, an Elysian kingdom that doesn’t begin or end with greens but, rather, exalts them.

This is real food, not surrealistic food. What a relief. For the jaded palate thwarted by too many cheap tricks pulled out of hats elsewhere in town, consider this your dual antidote and gustatory Viagra.

Last month, I was hovering in Mark Sciscenti’s workshop, spellbound and drifting off on a cloud of citrus. Pots of fat orange and lemon peels sat caramelizing over the stove, releasing wisps of scented steam that curled thickly into the air around us.

If buttering up is what you have in mind, here’s a thought: use butter. Everyone likes olive oil, and for daily cooking many of us turn to it most often. But this is about butter and the particular fruits of its labor: beurre noisette, caramel, hollandaise. Bread and butter is the ultimate pairing, like Fred and Ginger, pretzels and mustard, gin and tonic.

What makes the ultimate winter drink? Well, that’s a matter of chemistry and is as personal as a craving and as fleeting as perfection itself. Some prefer dark, complex and brooding. Others favor the sweetly distracting and the opulent.

Just what part of "staff of life" don't restaurants understand?

There is a half an hour window when the molten coral sunset bathes the bar and dining room of Terra in a burnished copper glow. Here, at Encantado, the latest jewel in a modest lineup of Auberge Resorts’ inimitable eye candy, aerodynamic meets organic in the most archetypal and ironic embodiment of the contemporary Santa Fe psyche—and perhaps its most captivating.

This week, Michelle Roetzer's culinary arts class at Santa Fe Community College hunkers down for its final showdown: an Iron Chef-style battle of the boards. The class is a motley crew, an International House of Hedonism, replete with a woman who named her dog Hobey (after the ubiquitous Hobart mixer of commercial kitchens) and a couple who met and fell in love during the course of the two-year program, and are soon getting married.

In recognition of the fact that the SFR Restaurant Guide's 40 Favorites are, in the end, a motley matter of taste, it makes sense to solicit and celebrate the opinions of others. Here, on the topic of their favorite local dishes, some of the area’s finest chefs and food authorities dish up, spill the beans and, sometimes, offer seconds.