Ex-cops serving affordable New Mexican fare
At Santafamous Street Eats, where chile is king and always fresh, former police officers deliver cheap, fresh New Mexican fare
It’s a gift to be simple. Or rather, it’s a gift to be able to do something simple well, to take a short list of humble ingredients and make it sing in a way that needs no truffle oil or foie gras or elk tenderloin. But faced with a menu of the kind of local staples you find everywhere — burritos, frito pies, hot dogs — it’s hard to know whether what you’re going to get is warmed over cafeteria food or an exercise in sublime minimalism.
Santafamous Street Eats, one of a crop of new food trucks popping up all over town, is the latter.
Santafamous Street Eats is owned and operated by Joseph Baca and Andrea Dobyns, and opened in mid-May. It is the first food business for the couple; Dobyns is a former police officer who’s now a real estate broker and gymnastics instructor, and Baca, the chef, is a retired Santa Fe cop and corrections officer who has found, in food, a lifelong love turned into a day job.
“I’m a chubby kid who’s always loved to eat,” laughs Baca. “That’s my background in food. I’ve always loved food.”
Baca, who is not actually chubby, honed his craft cooking dinner for his family and making food for his colleagues and buddies.
“I always wanted to do this — it was a joke with my friends,” he says. “They would say, ‘Dude, you’re always making weird stuff, but it’s delicious. … You should open a food truck. I would buy this from you.’ ”
The Santafamous truck stands out in a parking lot: a bright red trailer with a distinctively Santa Fe logo of a red chile ristra inside a heart inside a zia sun. Baca and Dobyns, who are both New Mexico natives (Andrea is from Santa Fe, and Baca is originally from Estancia) wanted something extremely local.
“I used to tell Andrea, ‘You’re famous. Everybody knows you,’ ” Baca says. “She would say, ‘I’m Santafamous.’ ”
The menu is deceptively simple — breakfast burritos, frito pies, even a bowl of simple beans and chile — and might be the most reasonably priced food truck in town, with almost all items between $5 and $6 for generous portions.
“We wanted to keep things low,” Dobyns says. “We want to make a living, but if I’m going to spend a lot, I want to be served in a restaurant.”
“A bowl of beans and chile shouldn’t cost you $12,” adds Baca. “Our goal was that you could have lunch for three for $20.”
But New Mexican food is not a complicated cuisine. The ingredients are not expensive, and the ingredient list is never long. The flavor is all in the method, in the patience it takes to marinate meat or stew fresh chile. Using the same ingredients, two cooks can end up with widely varying results. Baca puts a premium on freshness, making everything from scratch, cooking up beans and fresh batches of both red and green chile every day.
“I still make my chile and everything the way my grandma made it, and how her mom made it, so people come and say, ‘Gosh, your stuff is legit,’ ” Baca says.
“Here in New Mexico, if you have good food, if you have great chile, it’s going to elevate your food to a whole other level. … We used to judge all the restaurants by their red chile. I think a lot of people just make a roux and put red chile powder. But we still use fresh pods every day.”
You can (and should) get practically everything on the menu topped with red chile, including tater tots (the only thing Baca doesn’t make from scratch) topped with red chile and cheese, which sounds like something on a grade school cafeteria menu but becomes a bowl of utterly satisfying, belly-warming New Mexico love. On Thursdays, you can get chicharrones (although fair warning, they usually sell out by noon), and sometimes they have fresh ice cream sandwiches made with coffee ice cream and Dobyn’s homemade biscochitos.
Baca’s tacos, however, are a little different. Deciding he needed a distinctive dish to put his truck on the map, he developed a recipe for “smoked tacos” that combines the heady umami of smoked pork with the classic food truck taco. Baca marinates pork ribeye in his secret barbecue sauce for 24 hours and then smokes it for six more hours, slices it, adds a bit of red chile-infused olive oil, and then grills it on his flattop, topping it with a little cheddar cheese and fresh cabbage slaw.
He also has other kinds of barbecue tacos frequently on the specials menu, tacos made with pork shoulder that he rubs with spices and smokes for 14 hours until the meat falls apart, topped with barbecue sauce, green chile, cheese and “a little lettuce so you think you’re eating something semihealthy,” he says. You can also get that as a pulled pork sandwich, topped with red chile and cheese to make it a little more New Mexico.
And sometimes there are — as Baca’s friends said — some “weird” items, like his eggrolls made with Spanish chorizo, green chile and sautéed cabbage, or his Waffle Cristo sandwich: a traditional Monte Cristo made with honey ham, Swiss and pepper jack cheeses sandwiched between two fresh, green chile-laced waffles with a little spicy mustard, jelly and a dusting of powdered sugar, served with a fresh raspberry and red chile sauce.
“I love the Monte Cristo,” Baca says. “I had one when I was 18 years old, and I thought, ‘What is this? Who would think to fry this sandwich and dip it in this amazing sauce?’ ”
Santafamous Street Eats is open from about 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and usually parks on the corner of Old Santa Fe Trail and Paseo de Peralta, in the empty lot across the street from Kaune’s Neighborhood Market that is becoming Santa Fe’s de facto food truck gathering spot, anchored by Santafamous Street Eats, Andale tacos, and Tacos y Masss. Last Saturday, Santafamous organized a food truck gathering, inviting six other fairly new food trucks to the party.
“People ask why Santa Fe doesn’t have a spot where people come and all the food trucks gather for an afternoon,” says Dobyns. “Other cities do; Albuquerque does. So I thought, why don’t we host our own event?”
On that spot, Santafamous is perfectly placed to provide breakfast burritos to downtown employees, state employees, tourists — basically anybody who wants a little Santa Fe home cooking on the go. They also do events and catering, and if you want something custom-made, like chicharrón breakfast burritos, just call and order a day in advance. Baca will happily make it for you.
“I love feeding people,” Baca says. “As much as I love food and I love cooking, I love having someone experience food that’s different or delicious.”