Amuse-bouche Food of love: Valentine’s Day memories

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There’s a special romance that occurs at the intersection of food and memory. When we look back at our most important moments in life, it’s the sensory recollections — a dripping bite of a ripe peach or a bracing sip of an especially dry martini — that convey the sweetness of a particular occasion.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, two Amuse-bouche writers share very different stories of how one meal came to define their love. After all, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “if one has not dined well.” My husband and I have no particular Valentine’s Day ritual — sometimes we eat in, sometimes we eat out. More often these days, we just forget the whole thing. But we never forget how a breakfast at Café Pasqual’s in late January 1998 changed our lives and paved the way for a move to Santa Fe.

It was a cold and snowy winter, much like this one. I had been housesitting on Camino del Monte Sol since just before Thanksgiving, watching the snow pile up on adobe walls and the ice thicken on streets and walkways.

I had been thinking about moving to Santa Fe and wanted to see what the city was like in wintertime. My husband, who was not really keen to trade his oceanbound home state of Rhode Island for the mountains and deserts of Northern New Mexico, came for a oneweek visit in mid-January. The weather and altitude did nothing to change his mind about moving here.

On the Sunday before his scheduled Monday-morning departure, we joined an old friend for breakfast at Café Pasqual’s. Sitting on the raised dais, with a brilliant sun streaming through the geranium-filled windows, we talked of things we had not had a chance to see or do during his short, storm-filled visit. “Why don’t you stay a few days longer,” my wily friend suggested. “What difference would it make if you went back to New England on Wednesday instead of Monday?”

On the way home, my husband, who rarely does anything spontaneously, stopped at a payphone at La Fonda (this was in pre-internet, pre-cellphone days), called the airline, and changed his flight.

On Wednesday morning, we took him to the Plaza to catch the airport shuttle. A few hours later, he was back, his flight canceled due to the weather. Another day in Santa Fe. He went back to the airport on Thursday, only to return once again, this time because his plane had to be taken out of service. On Friday, he called the airline to be sure his flight would be leaving — only to discover he had been rebooked for Saturday rather than Friday. Yet another day in Santa Fe.

“I Got You, Babe” wasn’t streaming in the background, but a daily visit by a carpenter hired to repair a door added to the Groundhog Day vibe: He arrived at the same time every morning just as my husband was preparing to leave, then returned over and over again to do more work on a door that would not stay fixed.

“So,” I said to the reluctant East Coast emigrant on Saturday morning, “it looks like Santa Fe will not let you go until you are willing to commit to a move here.” He laughed and did just that.

Twenty years later, we often return to Café Pasqual’s for breakfast on the anniversary of our move, a wedding anniversary, a birthday, or just because we want to acknowledge the restaurant’s place in our shared story. Nothing much has changed over the past two decades: the room still floods with morning light, the red geraniums still grace the windows, and we can still order the same corned beef hash, huevos rancheros, and bowls of cappuccino that we enjoyed on that first fateful morning. “Panza llena, corazón contento” indeed!

— Patricia West-Barker Call me a cynic, call it the death of romance, but my husband and I learned from the experience of previous failed marriages that your relationship won’t be any stronger just because you drop a bunch of cash on a prix-fixe meal in a crowded dining room on a token day designated for romance. That’s how we found ourselves wandering the aisles of Albertsons late in the afternoon of one Valentine’s Day several years ago. After a muchpublicized announcement in 2006 that Whole Foods would stop selling live lobsters, Albertsons was the last grocery store in Santa Fe that still stocked them.

Struggling to imagine a candlelit dinner with our dog and cats winding between our legs under the table — and recognizing that the formality of lobsters and champagne isn’t really our at-home style anyway — we devised our own, more casual variation: beer and lobster rolls, the star of summertime roadside shacks along the Maine coastline. We grabbed a bag of jumbo hot dog buns from the bread aisle and a six-pack of Miller High Life, the Champagne of Beers, and a new tradition was born.

Turns out Whole Foods does sell lobster — not live ones, for understandable reasons, but tails ($35.96 a