The Betterday offers comfort food for all, from meat lovers to vegans
Betterday coffee shop adds a restaurant and bar to its Solana Center empire, featuring barbecue favorites but also vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free items
Tom Frost began his Casa Solana miniempire with the Betterday coffee shop, a hipster-licious hidey-hole serving Stumptown coffee from Portland, Ore., and breakfast burritos with a cult following. Now he’s expanded by a factor of 10, taking over the space next door that previously held the Real Butcher Shop and turning it into a full-fledged barbecue restaurant and bar — also called, for simplicity’s sake, The Betterday.
When he opened the coffee shop, Frost had been living in Santa Fe for about six years and was the front-of-house manager for Second Street Brewery in the Railyard. He met his wife and business partner, Lori Frost, when she came to work for him at the coffee shop.
“It was an amazing partnership that started right away, where you like all the same things and hate all the same things,” Lori Frost says.
The Betterday restaurant is, essentially, a farm-to-table barbecue joint with an emphasis on comfort food and home cooking, and a determination to make absolutely everything from scratch and accommodate everyone who wants to eat there. The menu is a classic choose-yourown-adventure barbecue slate, where for $15 you pick a main and then pick a couple of sides, anchored by smoked brisket and pulled pork, both local, or a quarter smoked organic chicken.
“When you have a product like that, it’s expensive, because it’s such high quality and because it’s local, so we asked ourselves, ‘How do you make a simple preparation to keep the cost as low as possible?’ ” Tom Frost says. “Barbecue. Meat in its purest form.”
“It’s barbecue-centric, but it’s hard to describe us as just barbecue because we’re vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free also,” he says. “We’re conscious of dietary restrictions and the needs of our community, so we wanted to do a barbecue-style menu because of its accessibility and flexibility, where you can pick a main and pick a side, but we’re not quite ‘barbecue’ because you can go 100 percent vegan.” Chef Andy Exell started working there almost immediately after moving to the city from Chicago, and has a background in, among other things, cooking at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, giving him a lot of experience with dietary restrictions and food allergies.
“The [hospital] was one of the few in conjunction with Partnership for a Healthy America, so everything was below a certain amount of sodium, certain amount of sugar; everything was made from scratch as much as possible, whole grains, stuff like that. So when Tom told me the concept of this restaurant was everything from scratch, locally sourced as much as possible, I was already on board with that,” Exell says.
You can, for example, replace the brisket or pulled pork main course with fried green tomatoes (organic heirloom tomatoes battered and deep fried), or stuffed cabbage with quinoa, corn, pinto beans and seasonal vegetables. You also pick your sauce (barbecue, New Mexico white sauce, spicy vinegar or vegan barbecue) and side dishes like potato salad, collards, quinoa tabbouleh salad, french fries or fried pickles. Something for everybody.
“Really what we wanted to do was make an accessible restaurant,” Tom Frost says.
“A lot of it was inspired by our favorite things,” adds Lori Frost. “Tom Frost is like a force in a way, where you have a good idea and he says, ‘All right, let’s actually do it.’ … The whole restaurant came out of a conversation one day about, ‘Why can’t we eat cheeseburgers every day?’ ”
You can do that at Betterday, if you like. They have a whole suite of burgers, like the “Chile Burger” (your classic green chile cheeseburger), the “BBQ Beef Sammy” topped with barbecue sauce, homemade coleslaw and pickles, a “Buttermilk Fried Chicken Sandwich” and even a fried green tomato sandwich with green chile mayo. And if you want a bowl of chili, try the “Texas Chili” and cornbread or the bowl of beans, red chile and cornbread on a cold day. The Betterday’s salads are farm-fresh, such as the kale and grapefruit with toasted almonds or the beet and goat cheese.
“We went farmer-direct and built relationships with them, and they’ll let us know what’s coming and we’ll adjust our menu,” Lori Frost says. “You don’t see a lot of ‘organic’ or ‘local’ printed on the menu — it’s up to the staff to educate people, we’re not trying to cram a lifestyle down your throat. We just want you to come in and gorge yourself on some beef and go home and actually feel good later.”
And everything on the menu is made from scratch, down to the ketchup, mayo and mustard. This is part of Exell and the Frosts’ dedication to keeping things like corn syrup off the menu, even to the point of making their own grenadine for the bar. They even maintain their own buttermilk culture for the buttermilk cornbread and buttermilk chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.
When Frost opened the coffee shop, it was partially to fill a glaring need (“I just thought that neighborhood needed a coffee shop,” he says). Now, thanks to the Frosts and Exell, Casa Solana finally has its very own neighborhood bar. The Betterday has nine microbrews on tap and a curated selection of wines, as well as some fun cocktails that reflect the Frosts’ weekend drinking experiments.
“It’s all beers we like to drink,” says Lori Frost,
which, along with selections like Deschutes Black Butte Porter and Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock, oddly includes Modelo in a can served with a salt rim.
“This is one of our lowbrow drinking hobby developments where we thought, ‘We need to give this to the world,’ ” she says.
“For the wine, we started with a lot of cool climate viticulture,” Lori Frost adds. “We’re sourcing some of the best wine we can get our hands on and making them as affordable as possible.”
And at The Betterday, you can have that most rare of experiences: a glass of sparkling wine with your plate of pulled pork.