Food bazaar, restaurant being developed
Chomp! to replace Talin Market while nearby DeSoto restaurant to honor memory of former car dealership
Think of a mini version of Boston’s Faneuil Hall or Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market. Developer Ken Joseph is bringing something similar —although on a much smaller scale — to the former Cerrillos Road site of Healy Matthews stationery store and, more recently, Talin Market, which closed in January.
In July, he is planning to open Chomp!, a high-end food bazaar where chefs such as State Capital Kitchen’s Mark Connell will sell homemade pasta. New Mexico Hard Cider and Santa Fe Honey Salon have also signed leases.
Ultimately, there could be up to 21 kiosks in the 5,000-square-feet building offering everything from nuts to cheese, produce, ice cream, soups and wraps, pastries, dry goods, and maybe even a fresh fish counter and deli. Customers will be able to enjoy their purchases at home or at tables set up at one end of the building. And there will be a door directly into Ohori’s coffee shop, which is already a tenant.
All the food will be prepared off site, although Joseph said that one day he would like to put in a demo kitchen. And he is partnering with Carmen Rodriguez, the executive chef of the YouthWorks’ culinary program, to offer leaseholders a way to cut labor costs by employing students to run kiosks under supervision.
Chomp! is just one of the changes under way at the Luna building, a complex of two buildings separated by a courtyard at 505 Cerrillos Road. The second building already houses two law firms, Escape Santa Fe — an escape room — Old Wood Floors, a tap room, Salon Pura Vida and Jackrabbit Systems, a software company. This is where Joseph is building a new 7,000-square-feet restaurant, also expected to open this summer. It will be called DeSoto, in memory of the auto dealership that once occupied both buildings.
The restaurant space was a movie theater in the 1950s and more recently Club Luna. Joseph has restored the ground floor space to the way it looked when it was a car dealership, with large windows looking out on Cerrillos Road. It will seat 180 inside and 16 on a patio.
Richard LaVallee and Mary Moegenberg of hospitality consultants M2X will be operate the restaurant. Joseph said they were responsible for turning around El Monte Sagrado, the luxury Taos resort. DeSoto’s chef is Robert Hesse, originally of Brooklyn, N.Y., who was a consultant for British chef Gordon Ramsay and has appeared on televised cooking shows such as Chopped, Beat Bobby Flay and Hell’s Kitchen. He is working on a menu that Joseph described as “Americana with an urban edge” and “elevated rustic food,” including vegetarian and healthy choices to satisfy the Santa Fe palate. Entrees, which might “lean a little Italian,” will be reasonably priced, as will drinks, he said.
“There will be no $15 martinis here,” Joseph said.
There will be a blackboard for guest muralists, and the décor includes projection of old movies, a paean to the building’s previous incantation.
The restaurant will have an upstairs bar and pizza oven for preparing late-night snacks. Joseph is expecting music and dancing to be a staple at both the restaurant and across the courtyard at Chomp!, although he is deliberately not positioning the space as a stand-alone dance club, a concept that has failed in Santa Fe.
Although he is not imagining anything quite as “wild” as Club Luna, “I don’t think Santa Fe has nearly enough fun,” Joseph said. And this place is personally special to him. As he recalled, “I had a lot of fun here in the ’90s and these walls have some naughty stories.”
Crews are installing rooftop equipment and screening, and will move on to wiring light fixtures, sealing floors and completing specialty finishes. The restaurant should open this summer.
Aside from the time in college, Joseph has lived in Santa Fe since he was 12. His father was also a developer who built an office complex for some attorney friends after moving here from Chicago.
Joseph’s other commercial projects include the Pecos Trail Office Compound, the Office Court on St. Michael’s Drive and the 4001 Office Court near Santa Fe Place mall. He did a similar kind of development in Denver and was the first chairman of the board of the Monte Del Sol Charter School. He bought the Luna property in 2010 with a college roommate with the idea of designing a project that could create community.