Explore Santa Fe: Archives



After sixteen years at his downtown Santa Fe location, Julian’s Wayne Gustavson is still making changes. The sixty-four year old culinary veteran shows me the room he remodeled for the restaurant’s new lunch service. “One reason we held off on lunch so long is that it was so dark, it didn’t feel lunchy. I wanted to lighten it up.” The dark-timbered spaces that have given Julian’s its romantic quality are still there, but he brightened up the lunch room by adding windows and a new faux-paint finish. With the old brick floors, it’s reminiscent of Tuscany. Two small terraces, one looking down on Shelby Street and the other an enclosed nook tucked away near the rear, add t...



An invaluable antidote to the dark forces who want to deprive us of the good stuff and an acknowledgment of the pleasures of a few simple, good things. Anthony Boudrain, author of Kitchen Confidential

Realizing she’d become bored with restaurants, Toronto-based writer Gina Mallet set about to explore food and ways of enjoying it that “touched the emotions.” The slow food movement, star chefs, and voluminous numbers of cookbooks notwithstanding, she views cooking as an art on the wane. She blames the death of taste on fast food, solitary eating, demands of the marketplace, complacency of consumers, changes in production of meats, f...



A brief history of the fine dining restaurants and bars, if you will. More often than not, a patron might easily drink a martini or two before eating, dare I say, somewhat bland 1970’s continental style food such as onion soup or frog’s legs. The next few decades of eating saw an increased focus on the quality and flavor combinations of food, a revolution led quietly at first by the likes of such chefs as Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck and the incomparable Julia Child. Lo and behold, chefs became rock stars and from their culinary wombs sprung a very distinctive population of foodies who follow and swoon like groupies at the taste of Thomas Keller’s salt-cured foie gras or Suzanne...



It’s Traditional, Versatile and Goes with Everything!

We’ve reached the middle of summer, when the sun is at its zenith and only a fool would be tempted to spend time over a hot stove. When the mercury starts to simmer in its glass cylinder it’s time to head for the back yard grill or better yet, the refrigerated dining rooms of neighborhood restaurants. Chips and salsa, burgers and brats, rice vermicelli bowls and spring rolls, tandoori and tabbouleh: this is hot weather food and it demands to be washed down with cold beer.

Yes, it’s possible to find a grassy Sauvignon Blanc that won’t clash too badly with a cilantro and chile-laden chicken salad, but why b...



Lunch on Santacafé’s courtyard patio, beneath the cool white canopy, is the quintessential summer’s day experience, with all the understated elegance of a Merchant-Ivory movie set. Flanked by graceful, massive-limbed apricot trees planted over a century ago, the patio’s a busy place, waitstaff hurrying to and fro amidst the cacophony of conversation punctuated by birdsong.

But it’s the food, ultimately, that draws us here. Plates trailing sumptuous aromas pass by as we bask in our own selections: a shared plate of tenderly delicious shrimp and spinach dumplings with tahini sauce (a signature item that shouldn’t be missed), followed by a baby spinach niçoise salad,...