Barry Fields

It’s easy to miss the small “HOPS” sign to the side of the road through Embudo, and the driveway to Todd Bates’ and Stiv Johnson’s Tucker Farms isn’t marked. The Rio Grande canyon widens here into a fertile valley surrounded by rugged hills, and from Bates’ house you can catch a glimpse of the river. Growing hops, the ingredient that gives beer its distinctive bitter flavors and complex aromas, is a small part of the partners’ certified organic business.

Lunch with Danny and Maria Rhodes is a simple but tasty affair: miso soup and heaps of intensely flavored oyster mushrooms on toasted Sage Bakehouse whole-wheat bread. We’re sitting at the dining table of their rented 19th century adobe house north of Española. Outside, past a stand of trees, the flat plain that Maria farms as Lady Bug Fields stretches east towards the Rio Grande. In the other direction, out of sight, are the shed and greenhouse that house Desert Fungi, Danny’s mushroom growing business. This is their seventh season at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, and fifth for their organically farmed produce.

The mushrooms have just been harvested, so they can’t get any...

Mauka’s Joel Coleman is making food so original and appealing that other Santa Fe chefs are well advised to take note. In a city where most new restaurants focus either on Southwest, American comfort, classic Continental or some combination thereof, Coleman derives his pan-Asian fusion dishes from the flavors of his Hawaiian childhood.

There are Asian restaurants, to be sure, but nothing with the scope of Coleman’s elegant vision. To sample his inventive dishes, I head to Mauka (“towards the mountains” in Hawaiian) with Ja Soon Kim, a local yoga teacher. Korean by birth, she lived for twenty-five years in Hawaii, and still prefers her native Asian foods. “In Hawaii there...

If you can’t tell a book by its cover, you can’t tell a restaurant by its name. Sleeping Dog Tavern conjures up images of a sports bar with lots of beer and standard pub fare, which pretty much describes its former incarnation. At first glance, when you descend below street level into a subterranean lounge with two televisions (down from the previous seven), it’s what you still expect. Bogey wouldn’t be out of place at the large bar in a dimly lit room with plum colored ceilings, an unobtrusive carpet, dark tables and black chairs. The “outdoor” tables in the airy San Francisco Street Mercado, surrounded by stores and walls, have little atmosphere, but in the main dining area...

New Mexican bred Gordon Tooley emanates contentment. Unlike most of the world, he doesn’t crave more. In his early twenties, while working on a 700-acre farm in Maine, where he had followed his sweetheart Margaret, he witnessed a tree grafting demonstration. “I was like, ‘That’s me!’ I wanted to have a tree farm, and to grow things that are not common.”

Not a typical life goal. “I flunked out of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College. I wasn’t a theoretical kind of person.” A hands-on person, he obtained an AA degree from Colorado Mountain College in Outdoor Studies, worked at Mesa Verde National Park, then took a job at Purgatory, where he and Margaret met...