A bite of serendipity in 401
With a little luck — and Craigslist — restaurateur finds the right ingredients for his new Railyard District eatery, 401
The newly-opened restaurant features uncommon foods, plus unique spins on familiar dishes.
401 began as a gleam in Jack Shaab’s eye — the idea of a restaurant, menu undecided, name not yet determined, anchored only by a location (401 Guadalupe St., in the former Swiss Bakery space) and Shaab’s determination to open an eatery of distinction where he himself would want to eat. But it wasn’t the first such gleam — Shaab has, over the course of the past two decades, been a fairly prolific restaurateur.
“This is the sixth restaurant I’ve done in Santa Fe,” Shaab says. “The last one was about ten years ago, called Rooney’s [in the Clafoutis space].”
Shaab was one of the original founders of Santa Fe’s only other numerically named eatery, 315 (formerly Bistro 315). Aside from making it easy to tell people where your restaurant is, Shaab has another good reason for adopting the address as the name.
“In New Mexico you don’t have to have a sign permit if you use your address,” laughs Shaab.
Shaab also helmed an erstwhile Santa Fe restaurant called Spaghetti and wanted to perhaps resurrect the logo and concept, which he describes as “Italian-ish” — less red sauce, more Mediterranean flavors, fresh pasta dishes, etc. But while he had the space and the idea, he didn’t actually have a chef. So Shaab turned to the utterly minimalist, strangely low-tech, totally ubiquitous source where everyone who wants anything finds it these days: Craigslist. And he got three usable responses. The two other candidates came from farther afield (New York and the Bay Area), but Shaab dutifully tried them out before finding a chef more or less in his own backyard.
“This ad was just ‘Chef Wanted,’ ” laughs Laura Licona, now chef and partner at 401. “I never send my information blind to anybody, but I had a feeling about it and I did it. It’s all serendipitous.”
That serendipity also led to a change in the restaurant concept itself, tailored more to Licona’s culinary sensibilities.
“When I met Laura and saw how she cooks, I decided we were going to go with what she makes, her kind of food,” Shaab says. “So we decided to call it 401.”
Licona describes herself as a “native Nuevo Mexicana” and is an anthropologist with doctorate work in the field of environmental anthropology and food anthropology. She has a French training certificate from Le Cordon Bleu, and has traveled extensively, sometimes living in remote jungle villages, in the service of understanding people’s relationships to their food and their environment. Plus, Licona grew up in a rural home in Nambé and has a particularly hands-on, ground-level relationship to her own meals.
“We still acquire most of our own food,” says Licona of her family. “We just got an elk this past summer. I started doing butchery very young. … I’m into the old peasant notion of respecting every part of the animal.”
The restaurant’s menu looks, at first, like a familiar fine-dining menu, with steak frites, lamb shanks and pork loin main courses, a smattering of pasta dishes, and of course, a house-made charcuterie plate. But much of the food itself, while reassuringly familiar, is all presented with Licona’s unique sensibility.
“Everything stems from me wanting to take the natural beauty of each ingredient and letting it express itself,” Licona says. “Everything that exists by itself is so gorgeous, and I think there are ways you apply heat and you apply cooking to food that makes it hold hands with other things, and ways that make it fight, and I’ve spent a lot of time asking food what it wants to give.”
The menu also includes items such as steak tartare served with an array of housemade garnishes and cold foie gras torchon.
“A torchon is where you take a lobe of foie gras, take it apart, soak it in a little bit of cognac, poach it, roll it cold, let it hang for a couple of days in cheesecloth, and slice it,” explains Licona.
But though Licona is keen to introduce people to foods they may not be terribly familiar with, she doesn’t want to shock anyone right out of the gate.
“It’s important to do color and texture compatibility for people so that even if it looks like something you’ve had, it dances in a different way,” she says.
The menu at 401 will change frequently and with the seasons (Licona does her best to buy local produce, with weekly trips to the farmers market). It does include some staples and anchor dishes (like the steak frites and the lamb chops), but what Licona really wants is for people to get used to sharing their food with each other.
“We’re trying to help people move into a way of eating food that’s more communityoriented and communal, so sharing,” Licona says. “We’re trying to get away from that old stuffy fine-dining aspect of appetizer, entree, dessert. For me, it’s really hard when there are four people at a table and they get the same entree. I think, why would you do such a thing? Let’s put it all in the middle and share it.”
The restaurant, which currently only serves dinner, has only been open a month, but according to Shaab, 401 already has a stream of regulars (he does, after all, have a long history of feeding the people of Santa Fe, and the mailing list to match). Starting Thursday, Aug. 11, 401 will have jazz by the Ron Helman trio with an accompanying wine pairing dinner. Eventually, Shaab and Licona would like to add a garden in the back patio where people can sit among the silently growing produce for the restaurant (Licona wants a goat, too, but that might be a bit of a tall order in a restaurant). But Licona intends to make the menu even more adventurous as she gets Santa Fe diners to trust her. For example, many of the dishes at 401 come, somewhat oddly, with potato chips — Licona considers them a gateway to her more esoteric offerings.
“I want people to eat those so they’ll taste my lotus chips and sunchoke chips and all the other chips that I want to bring them,” she explains. “I’m not going to do anything that’s just ‘meh.’ That’s never going to happen.”