Amuse-bouche
The Kitchen at Plants of the Southwest
IFyou’re traveling south on the old Camino Real just past the entrance to the village of Agua Fría, you’ll see a turquoise sign with a moon and a coyote on it. Beyond it lies Plants of the Southwest. Take a right and dip down onto the immediately otherworldly dirt road. A couple more signs warn you of the rules within the new realm you’ve entered, one of cash only and no dogs allowed. Park in the gravel lot, crunch down a path through the cacti and geraniums for sale, and find your way to a stand-alone adobe building lined with windows. You are now at The Kitchen, Santa Fe’s little-known all-vegetarian lunch restaurant, which is perhaps the most closely guarded secret spot in town.
Outside, a whiteboard gives you three to four menu options for your $14.75 prix-fixe lunch. If it’s your first time, and especially if you’re a carnivore, you may worry about portion size, or whether the food is really any good, and what you’re doing so far down Agua Fría for lunch anyway. Relax. Have a seat at a blond-wood table. Check out the capable Olive Tyrrell, the chef bustling around in the open kitchen, reminding you of the hippie mama you never had (or who you long to become). Marvel at the hobbity gnarled-wood vigas overhead; bask in the abundant sunlight streaming through the large picture windows. Let Lily Martin, your cheery and efficient server, pour you some iced tea — lemon ginger? Rooibos? Hibiscus? Listen as she describes the menu in more detail. Choose whatever sounds best (this may be more difficult than you think). It will be fantastic.
Since a couple vegetarian-friendly cafés with locally sourced ingredients, tasty tea, and eminently Instagrammable food have opened closer to downtown, it’s easy to forget — if you ever knew — that The Kitchen has been doing the farm-to-table boutique café thing since 2009, when the space changed over from the Teahouse. But five days a week from April to November, Tyrrell works away the morning in this space, examining her haul of locally sourced dairy and produce — this year, from Leaf, Petal & Pod Farm and Española’s Santa Cruz Farm — and designing and executing a small menu from it.
She does not put a foot wrong. Each meal feels like an intimate affair at your culinary wizard friend’s house, beginning with an impossibly fresh salad to accompany the cold-brewed iced tea options of the
day (Ohori’s coffee is also available). One Friday afternoon, it was a glass of auburn rooibos tea, along with a salad of mixed greens, slivered cucumber, shaved Brussels sprouts, Tucumcari feta, and pepitas, all tossed in a turmeric citronette with a careful dose of tahini and cracked pepper. On a blustery Tuesday, half-moon radishes and matchstick carrots topped a tangle of purple and green lettuces, dusted again with feta and drizzled with a lemon-ginger dressing that was complemented by our iced lemon-ginger tea, which had a pleasantly medicinal bite. In each salad, nutty arugula and peppery mustard greens stood out, tasting as if the bright leaves had been plucked from a field that morning.
The menu is often Mediterranean, with the frequent appearance of frittatas, tarts, tartines, and soups, but some Southwest flavor creeps in, too. One day we passed up a comforting-sounding tomato soup with farro, white beans, and Swiss chard, paired with cheddar toast, in favor of sharing a filopastry pie with spinach, chard, bright green peas, and feta. The ephemeral radiance of spring seemed to be nestled inside the carefully arranged layers of browned pastry — every forkful was buttery, sharp, nutty, and green all at once. We also split a pair of crisp tostadas with velvety braised red beans, sweet and piquant orange Fresno sauce, crumbles of feta, and a scattering of cilantro and pepitas. Each dish is carefully and gorgeously plated — check out @thepswkitchen on Instagram for drool-inducing photos — and though the meals are simply prepared, the flavor combinations are far beyond what you might dream up in your own kitchen.
Take an egg salad tartine, for instance, on a crusty slice of farm bread with a drizzle of honey-Dijon dressing, sliced radishes, and parsley. How great can egg salad be?, I wondered. Then I took a bite, and was spirited away in a fit of synesthesia to a soft-focus savory-custardy wonderland, colored bright yellow and polka-dotted with greenery. In less psychedelic terms, egg salad can be pretty damn great at The Kitchen, seemingly more scrambled than hard-boiled, the yellows and whites perfectly tumbled together over their crunchy base. A frittata of creamy potatoes, fresh herbs, and sharp cheddar, smeared with spicy vermilion harissa, proved an almost meaty and certainly more than substantial lunch. I haven’t been able to save room for dessert so far, but I know I’ve missed out: Recently Instagrammed offerings include chocolate olive-oil cake with ganache and whipped cream and a stunning upsidedown polenta cake with blood orange and tangerine slices abstractly arranged on top, then crowned with a sprig of mint.
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Thoreau preached, “I say, let your affairs be as two or three.” I’d be happy to never again peruse a larger menu if it meant I were guaranteed food this good, and at this point, I’d even let Lily choose my entreé for me at The Kitchen, such is the consistent quality of Tyrrell’s creations. She cooks until the menu runs out, so reservations and early arrivals are advised. It may be tempting to want to keep the off-the-beatenpath secret of The Kitchen all to yourself once you’ve visited, but after nine years, this cat should be well out of the bag by now. So head down Agua Fría way— and enjoy.