THIS WAY TO COMFORT
After giving it a go with Omira, Santa Fe restaurateur returns with The Detour Kitchen
In Santa Fe, watching restaurants come and go is a local pastime. Like spotting mushrooms in a garden, longtime residents sometimes make a game of noting places that open up shop and close down, sometimes unsurprised, sometimes lamenting their loss. When a place turns over, one always wonders who is behind it and why.
Anyone driving past the wonky corner of St. Francis Drive and Cerrillos Road (which is absolutely everyone) might have noticed the closure of Omira, located next to Susan’s Fine Wine and Spirits, and the subsequent opening of someplace called The Detour Kitchen in its stead. The name is different, and the concept is different, but the man behind the scenes there is the same: Santa Fe restaurateur Ziggy Rzig.
Omira was a Brazilian barbecue, a restaurant model that involves meat roasted on skewers and brought to the table in waves, along with an encyclopedic salad bar. Brazilian barbecues have a festival atmosphere, and diners are, in a way, encouraged to eat slightly to excess. It was an exercise in abundance, something that works in larger urban areas but struggled in Santa Fe.
“Until the last minute I didn’t want to give up Omira,” Rzig says. “I loved the place, I loved the concept. We did everything in our power to make it work.”
But Santa Fe’s largely older demographic wasn’t compatible with that level of consumption.
“People would say, ‘Well, when I was younger I used to eat a lot, but now not so much,’ ” Rzig says. “If you put in a buffet and you have 20 people come in, it doesn’t work.”
Rzig, who is originally from Tunisia, is better known in town as the owner of Pyramid Cafe, a longtime successful staple in a minimall on Cordova Road.
“I was going to UNM, going to school, supporting myself working in restaurants,” he says. “My first job was a dishwasher in a Mexican restaurant. I learned English, but nobody in the restaurant spoke English, so I realized, hah, I wasted my time, I should have learned Spanish.” (He subsequently did.) He was studying engineering, but found that restaurant life suited him better and saw himself doing that as a career. But the barrier between restaurant worker and restaurant owner can be wellnigh insurmountable.
But Rzig caught a break. A casual friendship with a regular at work became an opportunity when one party found himself with a restaurant he didn’t want, and the other, in want of a restaurant.
“I knew this older gentleman, he used to come to where I used to work at Red Lobster in Santa Fe,” says Rzig. “I was working as a bartender there. He’d come in once in a while. He was an engineer, he retired, and he bought a restaurant after retirement. He was a good man. He told me to come say hi, and I when did, I walked in just as he was closing up the shop.”
Rzig and the friend, whose name was Frank Hofstetter, had a chat and a handshake, and came to an agreement for Rzig to buy the restaurant in installments.
Fifteen years later, the arrangement has proven to be a success. He branched out to the space near Tiny’s off Early Street and St. Francis Drive four years ago, opening as the aforementioned Omira. But when the going gets tough in the restaurant trade, the tough get flexible, and Rzig cut his losses, closed Omira, rethought his concept and has reopened it as a new restaurant, The Detour Kitchen.
Comfort food never goes out of style, and The Detour Kitchen is comfort food done the Rzig way — fresh, simple and pleasantly affordable, particularly at lunch. Serving classic American cuisine that straddles the line between high-end diner and unfussy high end, The Detour Kitchen is definitely a locals-friendly spot, hidden from the scramble of downtown and the Railyard, but no more than minutes away from everything. The menu features things like fish and chips, burgers, sliders (including eggplant mini-burgers for vegetarians), tacos, etc. There is a suite of New Mexican dishes (carne adovada, enchiladas, green chile stew) and even some solid steakhouse-style meat and potatoes (prime rib or New York strip with mashed potatoes). But this is the starting menu — Rzig also plans to let the creativity of his chef, Miguel Isidro Quintana, out to play, with frequent specials and some higher-end menu items like lamb osso buco and Cornish game hen.
“I try to attract as many people as possible with something that’s familiar and slowly bring in some unfamiliar things,” he says.
The spot Rzig picked for his restaurant is, in Santa Fe terms, an odd one — that corner is hard to navigate into if you’re not a local, an unassuming minimall. As the name suggests, you have to be going there on purpose to find it. But if anybody can make the spot work for a restaurant, it’s Rzig.
“You’ve got to have the niche,” he says. “Everything has to work. Sometimes you do everything right and it doesn’t work. Some of it has to do with luck. I think a big thing is knowing what you’re doing. … I want it to be a destination. That’s my goal.”