Day 2 in Santa Fe brought the need for elastic-waist pants. From morning until night, the day was devoted to food and drink. Am I complaining? Heck no! Have I gained five pounds since I got here? Heck ya!
I enjoyed delicious huevos rancheros at Hotel Santa Fe where I met well-known and well-loved Santa Fe chef Matt Yohalem who talked to me and the group I was with about how wonderful it is to have a year-round farmer’s market in Santa Fe that is ever-growing. Drawn in by his enthusiasm for eating local, we eagerly followed him down the street to the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market located by the Railyard district, an up-and-coming, chic, redevelopment with galleries, shops, restaurants, a park and soon a movie theater.
Matt knows the growers and has a good sense for what they’ll have each week. He knows who he’ll go to for eggs, who he’ll go to for lettuces and so on. He’s never completely sure what he’ll wind up with but he knows it will be fresh. As he told us, grocery store eggs can be 6 weeks old but at the farmer’s market they are maybe 6 HOURS old. Matt did a lot of shopping while we were there.
While Matt went back to his restaurant to plan out what he was going to make with everything he bought, we went on a Culinary Walking Tour put together by the Santa Fe School of Cooking. Our very passionate guide, Lois Ellen Frank, took us to three of Santa Fe’s most popular restaurants, La Boca, the restaurant at the Inn of the Anasazi and Il Piatto Italian Kitchen. When you go to Santa Fe, be sure to schedule one of these walking tours from the Santa Fe School of Cooking. It’s a great way to sample multiple restaurants, meet the chefs, get foodie insight and walk off a couple of calories between stops.
At Il Piatto, Chef Matt made us delicious things with the items he had bought at the Farmer’s Market.
Somehow, I managed to be hungry again a few hours later. My stomach was, unfortunately, learning to expand (thanks to those elastic-wasted eating pants) to accommodate all of the good food I was eating. Not coincidentally, my rear end and thighs were expanding too.
To ease into the night’s eating frenzy, er, I mean dinner, I got a lesson in mixology from Chris “The Barman” at Secreto, the bar at the St. Francis Hotel. Chris is a high-energy guy who crafts cocktails with the same care and deliberateness that the chefs do with their food. Here he is demonstrating the importance of shaking a drink with verve.
I moved on to the Inn at Loretto for a luxurious dinner. There, I had the most tender short ribs ever with scallops. See their pretty patio?
A dessert flight at La Posada de Santa Fe, known as the “arts hotel” because of its curated art collection and history of being something of an artists’ salon, topped off the evening.
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