The Fork: Rec Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

Despite how we named a bunch of amazing local dishes in July as part of our own personal Best of Santa Fe (read that here), we still had a whole mess of readers reach out to ask us about recommendations for things to eat around town. These people figure that we’re always eating out, so we must know what’s good. And they’re right. We want to be clear, though, that these following dishes are in no particular order—and that we wouldn’t hate it if you sent us some photos should you go and try them/tell us what you think. In summation, we’ve got a bunch of dining recommendations for Santa Fe and for all wallets and tastes, so let’s jump in.

Breakfast

We start at breakfast not because it’s the most important meal of the day (which sounds like a ploy from big wheat/corn/cereal akin to that time the milk people told us our bones would crumble to dust if we weren’t drinking gigantic glasses of milk all the time), but because it’s the most enticing in our opinion. Oh, sure, a dinner’s nice and all, but something about breakfast feels low-pressure and extra delicious.

For our part, we have a few places we tend to frequent. Chief among them is Sagche’s Coffee House. Now, we know we’ve brought this up before, but we think it bears repeating because we want this place around for a long time. Our recs? We have two: The waffle, for which the kitchen crumbles in bits of bacon into the batter (ask for it sans-bacon, vedge-ohs) or the breakfast sandwich. We’d say get both, but no one can or should eat that much. In both cases, you’ll be stuffed most of the day, so it’s economical, too.

You can’t get wrong at The Teahouse, too (RIP owner Richard Freedman), where we cannot stress enough that you want the oatmeal.

If you’re more of a Southside person, Flying Tortilla is an excellent place for a spot of brekkie, especially for you chile fans who either don’t have the wherewithal to head downtown for Tia Sophia’s or just plain want to have breakfast later in the day. Our top rec? Chorizo breakfast tacos. So dope.

Lunch

For people who work as often as we do, lunch can mean scarfing some hastily picked-up item over your desk like an animal. Our advice to those who can, though, is to try and make the time for a midday break. Assuming we could do that, we’d likely choose from a few places to lunch it up.

Our top pick? Ramblin’ Café. It’s centrally located, they make their own chips and we’ve never once disliked something from the menu. NOT ONCE! Not only that, but if our calculations are correct, 2023 marks 20 years of business for the adorable eatery. What to eat to celebrate? The Philly chile cheese steak is no joke for lunch, but the numerous other salads and sandwiches have all kinds of appetites covered.

We also can’t rec La Plancha enough these days, especially the vegetarian tacos (that’s a photo of them at the top of this week’s Fork.) Whatever you order there, try the green rice, a combination of rice, spinach and cilantro that somehow tastes refreshing and hearty at the same time without weighing you down. The mole is totally killer, too.

We’ll round it out with a classic by reminding folks that Café Castro slays. Get the chile (the red’s our fave at Castro, but the green’s no slouch) and bask in the warm glow of the warming, glowing local love.

Dinner

While we understand not everyone who reads our newsletter can just go out galavanting through a series of increasingly expensive fine dining spots, dinner in Santa Fe has many ways to do just that. Right now it’s hard to choose, but we can’t get enough of Zacatlán, where chef Eduardo Rodriguez has steadily built an evolving and delicious menu of creative and high-quality dishes. You’ll find lots of specials, but we can say with no small amount of authority that anything pork over there is phenomenal.

Not to be predictable, but it’s almost always worth a quick dinner at Second Street Brewery’s Rufina Taproom location. Our top rec? The fish and chips—with sweet potato waffle fries, of course. People are going to tell you all kinds of crazy things in this town about who has the best fish and chips, and they’re going to be wrong unless they’re saying Second Street. Seriously. We mean that. Don’t write us to tell us shit about that, we aren’t budging.

If you head farther into the Southside, you’ll find killer dinner service at restaurants like Los Amigos (get the carne adovada) and Puerto Peñasco (get the tilapia tacos), but don’t sleep on PC’s Restaurant and Lounge. It’s been around for as long as any of us can remember, and the green chile there is still phenomenal. So get anything smothered green if you can, and watch out for the sometimes-available menudo special.

When you need lunch...

Also

-Firstly this week in local news, let’s give a shout-out to the numerous Fork readers who donated to the Maui Food Bank following the terrible wildfire situation there. Last week all we did was provide a little link, and a number of you stepped up and helped out. We love that you’ve done that, dear readers, and we’re moved just about to tears knowing that you were so willing to be that cool.

-Fifty-seven New Mexico businesses were recently awarded micro-grants in sums up to $3,000 from the Regional Development Corporation, and a whole mess of Santa Fe things are on that list, including food stuff. We’re talkin’ urban lettuce farm Lettuce Etc., fermentation biz The Pickle Jar and Wolf & Mermaid Enchanted Roasters (coffee) among others. Way to go, y’all!

-Setting aside how localharvestrestaurantcelebration.com is about the most cumbersome website address to type in the history of website addresses being typed, we wanted to let y’all know about the incoming Local Restaurant Harvest Celebration (which, again, has a website that is, and this is true, called localharvestrestaurantcelebration.com). The new three-day event from the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Institute runs Tuesday, Sept. 12-Thursday, Sept. 14 and, at least according to the website, being localharvestrestaurantcelebration.com, is about “connecting the dots between the farming and ranching community represented by the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, the abundant outstanding restaurants in Santa Fe and the dining public.” We aren’t quite sure of everything involved just yet, but if you visit localharvestrestaurantcelebration.com, you might find it’s about eating places that feature local growers and ranchers on their menus, then proceeds from that go to the institute. So just type localharvestrestaurantcelebration.com into your internet thing and go wild. Or click right here to visit localharvestrestaurantcelebration.com.

-Did you hear Ohori’s Coffee is gonna start selling brekkie b’s from Oké Owingeh Pueblo-based caterer Yapopup? You can learn more about that on the company’s Instagram, but know that there will reportedly be three versions offered: green chile SPAM, red chile bacon and (thrillingly) elote roasted corn with miso squash. Dang! We blieve this is happening now, even as we speak.

-Word on the street is that local butcher Beck & Bulow will start carrying live lobsters soon. This is great news for people who like to see their meat die, and also who like to crunch through a gigantic sea bug’s exoskeleton to eat its hands and stuff. That all sounds really brutal, but we just think lobsters are gross. Anyway, if you don’t think that, keep an eye out on the butchery for a mid-October window of availability.

...had to.

More Tidbits

-”The phrase ‘craft jerky’ seems so ripe for something,” read an email from an SFR staffer with a forward about a company that makes craft jerky. We thought long and hard about masturbation jokes, or yuks about what kinds of people are what kinds of jerks. Ultimately, though, we think some of the branding for Righteous Felon’s craft jerky is cute, so we’re not going to say something like, “jerk craftily,” or whatever. Instead we’ll tell you that people on Amazon are reportedly freaking out about its quality. Huzzah. So just, like, know that, people who want jerky.

-You know how you’ll be at home during lunchtime, staring into your fridge and cursing how you have capers, baking soda and naught else? Wellllll, Eater-dot-com’s Hillary Dixler Canavan has a pretty cool piece on how to shop for and stock a dope-ass lunch pantry. We found it illuminating. Read it here.

-Have you heard of that trend Girl Dinner? It’s basically an absurd name for snacking that once again proved Tik-Tok is stupid, but over on Popsugar-dot-com, writer Fleurine Tideman says it’s even worse than that. “As much as I love the girl-dinner trend for everyone else, I can’t partake in it myself. I can’t relate to it because of my eating disorder,” she writes. “Despite celebrities like Aimee Lou Wood and Jonathan Van Ness courageously sharing their own experiences, people still don’t realize the lasting effects of eating disorders. And for me, that manifests in not being able to spontaneously throw together a girl dinner.” Just something to think about. As always, don’t say stuff to people about their bodies and maybe just listen when someone who has struggled is generous enough to share that experience?

-Lastly this week in not just local stuff, seems someone’s suing Brita (the water filter manufacturer) for not being totally super honest about what its filters...filter. Some dude in California is behind the class action suit, which alleges them Britas don’t actually remove potentially hazardous substances from drinking water. Yikes.

A Totally Scientific Breakdown of The Fork’s Correspondence

This week in the print/online edition of SFR, our real food writer visited Dumpling Café for dumplings, duh, but other stuff, too!

Number of Letters Received

39

*Nice.

Most Helpful Tip of the Week (a barely edited letter from a reader)

“Chips? More like Shits”

*OK, reader Jake R., we’re gonna let that slide because it made us laugh for, like, 20 minutes.

Actually Helpful Tip(s)

Shout-out to Paul Rainbird for correctly being like, and we’re paraphrasing, “El Parasol’s corn chips slap so hard we all almost perished just thinking about it.”

*He’s not wrong even at all—we love those chips!

localharvestrestaurantcelebration.com,

The Fork

P.S. Why would you make your website localharvestrestaurantcelebration.com