Five gems for Restaurant Week
February in Santa Fe is, depending on who you are and what business you’re in, either a welcome respite from the hordes of tourists or a gaping dead zone during which business lulls to record lows. This is particularly true for the hospitality and restaurant industry. Whereas locals may relish the reduction in confused out-oftowners wandering blindly across the downtown streets, Santa Fe’s plethora of dining establishments are so vacant that some close for two weeks or use the downtime to do housecleaning or renovations. Restaurant Week is meant to remedy this problem with value-priced prix fixe menus, thereby creating an incentive for locals to come out of their shells and try the restaurants that they may otherwise avoid the rest of the year simply, perhaps, because they don’t want to have to find parking.
Some places offer a great deal for the price, others, less so (basic math will tell you which is which), but having a city full of restaurants on sale is a good excuse to try some places you have never ventured into, with the training wheels of a prix fixe menu to keep the check in check, and some of those “I always meant to go there” spots have created Restaurant Week menus designed to entice local diners to become regulars.
You may, for example, have never set foot in Milad Persian Bistro on Canyon Road — it’s only a couple of years old and relatively new in Santa Fe terms, but is one of the best Restaurant Week deals, with a $25 per person dinner menu that allows you to sample their range of contemporary Persian cuisine — one starter, one entrée and one dessert, as per most Restaurant Week offerings. The food at Milad commits to being pretty authentic, even at the risk of having to explain the menu, and while you can start with the relatively familiar falafel and hummus plate (although their falafel, made with beet and/or carrots, are unlike the kind most people are used to), you can instead try something more unusual (for Santa Fe, at least) like kashk e bademjan (a dish of eggplant and walnut spread with kashk, a type of Iranian whey powder) or tachin, a kind of crispy rice cake flavored with saffron layered with chicken and garnished with Iranian barberries (a sour berry sometimes included in dishes to, some say, serve as a reminder of the occasional sourness of life). For entrées, pick from fesenjan (a vegetarian stew with pomegranates and walnuts), braised chicken with carrots and dried plums, or a panseared trout stuffed with walnuts, barberries and spices, and dessert choices include a saffron rose ice cream made by La Lecheria, medjool dates stuffed with feta or walnut baklava.
Arroyo Vino, tucked away over by Las Campanas and therefore outside the “nothing more than five minutes from my house” rule by which many Santa Feans abide, is a restaurant with a cult following (and an adjoining wine shop) known for its weekly, international-themed family dinners and a dedicated farm-to-table ethos. Its Restaurant Week offerings, which for $45 per person include a sharing starter, a first course and a main course, are particularly numerous and lush — a good deal for the higher-priced tier of the Restaurant Week menus. Sharing starters include a charcuterie plate or a cheese plate (both of which can actually be dinner, in my opinion). For first courses, it offers things like parsnip risotto, fried oyster chowder or smoked beef carpaccio with egg yolk jam and fresh horseradish. Main courses are even more substantial and include roasted lamb shoulder and bean ragu with labneh (a strained Middle Eastern cheese) and fried chickpeas, braised beef short ribs with polenta, and glazed duck leg confit.
If you’ve never driven up the mountain for Santa Fe’s highestelevated restaurant, you can try Izanami at Ten Thousand Waves, which is offering three dishes for $35. You should absolutely begin your evening by taking a bath (whether at the vast communal Grand Bath or by booking a more intimate private tub) and eat afterward. The food at Izanami is
Japanese izakaya-style, meaning, essentially, upscale Japanese bar fare, and while there are some sushi offerings (one of the dishes on offer for Restaurant Week is a sashimi of the night option), you can also try its crispy roasted Brussels sprouts with pork belly, yuzu (Japanese orange) juice and candied pecans, a mixed vegetable tempura with lotus root and shiitake mushrooms, or smoked pork ribs with a sweet chile glaze and parsley peanut sauce. Or go for the real steal on the menu, a tender wagyu steak with sake braised kale and shimeji mushrooms — wagyu beef, raised domestically from Japanese breeds of cattle, is as close as you’ll get in this country to authentic Kobe beef (pretenders abound, but the stuff you get on your average bar slider is nothing like real Kobe). Your steak will not be large, but wagyu beef is so rich and tender, it’s a bit like eating butter anyway.
Osteria d’Assisi is a little more on the beaten path (it’s right downtown near the post office), but its Restaurant Week offering is a particularly good deal at $35 per person for a substantial, upscale Italian comfort food antipasti, a main course and a dessert. The antipasti offerings include a pate d’antra con mirtilli, duck pate served with crostini and black mediterranean mussels with grilled bread. For main courses, it has comfort foods: vermicelli di spinaci con pollo parmigiana (essentially chicken Parmesan
with lemon garlic spinach pasta), a sogliola alle mandorle (fresh sole with saffron risotto) or a vegetarian eggplant Parmesan dish with portobello mushrooms with marinara and pesto sauce. Desserts include a caramelized walnut and chocolate terrine, a gelato-filled profiterole and an almond lemon tart.
Finally, there is Sazón, chef Fernando Olea’s fine-dining Mexican gem that, while popular, has a menu that often causes sticker shock. In the $45 per person tier for Restaurant Week, the prix fixe structure can make the idea of having dinner there less daunting. You can begin with either a salad of mixed greens and arugula, or the more interesting sopa de frijoles negros — a rich black bean soup with bacon, sour cream and cheese. Sazón is known for its carefully crafted moles (Mexican sauces made with spices and sometimes chocolate, crushed in a stone molcajete), and main courses include both enmolada de betabeles (a corn tortilla stuffed with vegetables and served with house-made mole verde sauce) or enmolada de pato, a corn tortilla stuffed with duck, sweet potatoes and mole poblano, which is probably the best choice for the price. For dessert, choose between princesa (fresh berries in a natilla sauce over flaky pastry) or the more decadent volcan de chocolate (a house-made molten chocolate cake — the classics, it seems, live on).