SANTA FE CUISINE, A WORLD OF FLAVORS
At Maize, Charles Dale’s first new collaboration with Jim and Jennifer Day, menu reflects Native influence and stretches beyond
As anyone who has ever opened a restaurant knows, the endeavor is akin to building a house, getting married, having a baby and making a movie all at once. Doing it once is enough for most people. For others, opening three at once while running another is par for the course. Santa Fe master chef and restaurant impresario Charles Dale is, apparently, one of those people.
Dale, formerly of Aspen, Colo., moved to Santa Fe to head up the restaurant at Rancho Encantado before moving on to open French bistro-style mainstay Bouche on West Alameda Street. This year, Dale has embarked on an ambitious new project with Santa Fe neophytes Jim and Jennifer Day, who initially purchased the old Bobcat Bite property intending to open a restaurant.
“They realized they didn’t know anything about opening restaurants,” Dale said. They met Dale through a mutual friend, “So we made an arrangement where they would buy me out of my restaurant and I would run the rest of their restaurants,” he says. One by one, the Days acquired or rented more properties, including what was the Galisteo Bistro on Galisteo Street, the property formerly known as Georgia and Dale’s own restaurant, Bouche (which he will continue to run as normal). The new restaurants Dale will head up along with culinary director Andrew MacLauchlan, formerly of Real Food Nation.
“He brings a culinary precision to the project,” Dale says. “I enjoy working with him.”
What was Georgia is now Maize, the first of these new restaurants to open its doors. It has been in operation for about a month. The cuisine at Maize is, essentially, Dale’s creative interpretation of the local cuisine — and by local, Dale encompasses the full spectrum of cultures that have, over time, blended themselves into the local food. There is, however, a pretty heavy focus on Native foods on the menu, at least at the moment.
“The fulcrum of it is the ingredient, corn,” Dale says. “How that influenced the people here before Westerners, what’s the influence of Spanish.” Dale extends that concept further than one might imagine: “I was at a pueblo a while ago, and all the dancers were wearing shells,” he says, “and I realized the only way that happens is they were trading with maritime cultures. It allowed us a lot of freedom to play with ideas, since the concept of Maize was to be using ingredients that you would normally find in our region. Corn, chiles, beans are obvious, and also game meats and trout, but you can also stretch it to the people they would have been trading with on the Gulf Coast or Pacific Coast.”
The current iteration of the menu begins with six shareable, tapas-like items, all around $14, including duck wings, Dale’s riff on classic chicken wings, served as a confit with coriander and chile, finished with a honey chipotle glaze and served with blue cheese dip and pickled chayote squash instead of celery sticks.
“It’s got a similar texture, but it’s more in keeping with the tradition,” he says. “That’s something I’ve always loved to do, take a standard element and take a fresh look at it.”
You can also order the “Smokin’ Nachos” with black beans and pulled pork that arrives at the table in a clay pot, imbued with a smoke infusion that billows out theatrically when the lid is removed, or the “Blue Corn Blinis” with smoked trout, creme fraiche and trout caviar — a classic Franco-Russian after-theater favorite made with local ingredients. The menu also features “Tongue n’ Cheek Tacos” made with, well, the obvious ingredients, a fine-dining version of a taco truck favorite served with jalapeño crema and mango salsa. The sliders are made with bison, chipotle mayo and tomato jam, and the “Forest Mushroom Quesadilla” comes with a salsa made from tomatillos and huitlacoche, a delicious mushroom-like fungus that grows on corn.
As he does at all his previous/other properties, Dale likes to change his menu up with the seasons. The “Three Sisters Soup,” riffing on the concept of the “three sisters” of indigenous foods — corn, squash and beans — is intended to be a menu mainstay but will change completely every three or so months. It was previously a corn soup with summer squash and beans, but now that fall has reared its head, it has morphed into a butternut squash soup with a black bean swirl and freeze-dried corn.
“Next time it might be a hearty bean soup and the corn would be a purée,” Dale says. “We’ll play with it. It’s fun to do that.”
Starters also include an elk tenderloin carpaccio, cured with salt, herbs and spices, and a drizzle of local balsamic vinegar, tamales served with grilled crayfish and mole coloradito ,anda “Black Ash Tamale” served with edible ash that, as Dale puts it, “borrows from the Pueblo tradition of sacred ash.”
The entrées begin to stretch a bit farther afield, geographically, like the “Willow Basket,” which involves a banana-leaf steamed fish of the day, or the “Roasted Half Chicken” with quinoa and aji amarillo, a distinctive yellow chile native to Peru.
“We allow ourselves to go all the way through Central America and South America,” Dale says, “and the wine list reflects that with Mexican wines, American wines, South American, Central American and Spanish wines. There’s an ideology that we try to keep — everything works together, everything blends together. It’s not a restaurant where I want to have French wine. For me that doesn’t work in that context.”
And because every comfort-food joint, highend or not, needs a burger, Maize serves one with wagyu beef, green chile and cheese, which you can get with yucca fries. Or have a grownup dinner of rack of lamb with grits and roasted garlic, or adobo-grilled local pork tenderloins with Hatch chile and smoky posole broth. Dale also is enthusiastic about the cornmeal-crusted rainbow trout.
“I like trout right out of the water — it was always hard for me to figure out a way to make trout that we’d be happy with,” he says. “The skin is cooked separately from the trout so it takes on this crinkly, crispy texture, and it’s so simple but it works really well.”
The desserts are over the top — MacLauchlan is, after all, a master pastry chef — including lavender flan with caramel corn that Dale describes as “an exploration of nuts, piñon nuts, pistachio nuts and group of different sorbets that we all make in house” and one called the Forest Floor, a salted-caramel eclair and a cocoa nibs eclair that Dale says “look like logs that have fallen in the forest, and there’s chocolate bark on the plate. They’re playful. They’re fun.”
And then, once you’ve noshed your way through Maize’s menu, you can look forward to the next Dale-and-MacLauchlan-led establishment: Amaro will open in the former Galisteo Bistro location on Galisteo Street as a rustic Italian spot with handmade pastas and charcuterie, and then, in 2018, the long-empty Bobcat Bite will receive a full overhaul into a chophouse and burger palace with a glassed-in butchery, open kitchen and full bar.