Old Palace Restaurant to be turned into a new steakhouse
Eatery, owned and operated by Texan, plans to open in April
Surf-and-turf fine dining is getting ready to take over the former Palace Restaurant & Saloon space that sat empty last year at Palace and Grant avenues.
Prominent Santa Fe restaurateur Charles Dale is briefly stepping out of retirement to establish the look, feel and menu of Palace Prime Steakhouse for first-time restaurateur Randy Edwards, an oil field remediation and reclamation industry executive of Irving, Texas.
Palace Prime Steakhouse could open by the end of April, Dale said. An interior demolition permit was issued Jan. 6.
Steakhouse might be alone in the name but Dale stressed seafood will be prominent on the menu.
“I think that is an area that is underrepresented here,” he said. “We are flying in seafood from both coasts, Maine especially, Florida and Hawaii, salmon from the Pacific Northwest.”
Dale brought in Fernando Ruiz as executive chef. Ruiz recently was executive chef at The Lodge and Ranch at Chama and
before that at Santacafé after starting as a sous-chef at Rio Chama. He also won the Food Network competition cooking shows Guy’s Grocery Games, Chopped and Beat Bobby Flay.
Dale made his name in Santa Fe by establishing Bouche Bistro in 2012 and then entering into a consulting contract with New Mexico Fine Dining LLC to establish Trattoria A Mano, Lucky Goat, now-closed Maize, now-closed Jimmy D’s and the pending reopening of Bobcat Bite. He arrived in New Mexico in 2008 to be executive chef at Terra at Rancho Encantado before Four Seasons acquired it.
Dale stepped aside from New Mexico Fine Dining in May to get away from day-to-day restaurant operations to focus more on New Mexico Fresh Foods, where he is an investor and on the executive committee. He said at that time he might be willing to work as a “free agent” to establish a vision for other restaurants and “the month after they open hand over the keys.”
The Palace has had various iterations since starting in 1850 as The Palace Saloon. For nearly 20 years until 2003, The Palace was owned by Lino Pertusini, who today owns downtown Santa Fe’s Osteria d’Assisi and Pizzeria da Lino.
in 2011 reported Pertusini sold the restaurant to Jean DeNoyer, who six months later sold it to a group including nightclub owner Cliff Skoglund. Señor Lucky’s was at the Palace until closing in 2007, which left the property vacant until the Palace Restaurant & Saloon opened in 2011.
The Palace Restaurant abruptly shut down Dec. 1, 2018, after building owner Billy D. Harris Jr. placed a lien on the restaurant property. Harris had the space up for lease since August 2018. He declined to discuss the lien.
Harris said he been working behind the scene ever since.
“As soon as I knew my prior tenant was on the way out, I started the process of getting someone else,” said Harris, who also owns and is broker at The Harris Group, an Albuquerque real estate firm. “We’ve had an agreement with [Edwards] since February last year. A lot of people want to run restaurants. There are not a lot that really can.”
Palace Prime Steakhouse owner Edwards is CEO of Wildcatter Cos., which includes Wildcatter Energy Services. The Irving, Texas, company focuses on innovative solutions for water reuse and recycling, remediation and reclamation in oil fields. Edwards was an active developer in resort markets such as Telluride and Dallas. He was not available for an interview.
Dale brought in architect Eric Enfield, owner of Architectural Alliance in Santa Fe and his interior design and lighting team from Bouche Bistro, interior stylist Keith Johnston and lighting designer Michael Cornelius.
“The dining room will have a little more refined elegance,” Dale said. “We will have booths on two walls instead of one wall. There will be red on the ceiling. We have an old picture of the Palace. We want to match that color, the look in the ’70s.”