Festival on wheels
Food trucks and craft beer focus of Balloon Museum event
The best way to approach Western View Diner & Steakhouse is to cruise up Central through Downtown, then Old Town, cross the Rio Grande, then continue through the pawnshops tire shops-Pentecostal church-payday loan storefronts, where you’re likely to see a movie or TV crew documenting the local color. A few blocks beyond Old Coors stand the bright lights of Western View like a neon flag. This place has served Route 66 travelers since 1937, the year the Mother Road realigned to run through the heart of Albuquerque.
Are you ready to time-travel? Then open the door and step back into the past.
The chalkboard lists daily specials: beef tips over noodles ($8) huevos rancheros, ($3.99) 8-ounce rib-eye steak with soup or salad and fries ($11.95) — mighty tasty — apricot-glazed chicken-fried chicken with fried mashed potatoes, meatloaf ($8.95), steak fingers and enchiladas. It’s pure comfort food — hearty, homemade down to the salad dressing, and affordable.
This humble place hasn’t changed in the 20 or so years I’ve been frequenting it, and there’s no plan to redecorate soon. Service is fast, and to call it friendly is an understatement. These waitresses are gifted at creating community and truly enjoy their work.
Lone diners taking a counter seat, weekly coffee klatchers, truckers just in from a long, hard drive east on Interstate 40, and locals each receive a smiling welcome. The assortment of customers makes for the best peoplewatching in town. Slide into a booth and ponder the huge menu.
Hope you’re hungry. Biscuits slathered in creamy white gravy, (the Herman’s special — with two biscuits and country gravy, two eggs and home fries — is $5.25), piquant spaghetti sauce like Grandma made, comforting green chile chicken soup, and, of course, pie, make it hard to decide. Remember triple-deckers? They’ve got them here: classic roast beef, swiss cheese, lettuce and tomato; turkey; tuna, and ham and swiss, for $7.95. Of course, breakfast is served all day, in every imaginable combination, including omelettes, hot cakes, burritos, and the house favorite Bronco Buster, a 10-ounce hamburger topped with two eggs, home fries covered with chile and melted cheese, biscuits and gravy for $9.45. I dare you to order it.
Plates designed to please kids, like tacos, chicken tenders and grilled cheese with fries are priced at $5.25. Kiddie breakfasts for those 12 and
under come for the same price.
Dessert is a story of its own, like the Bavarian cream berry pound cake, a powder sugardusted giant cream puff filled with all good things. They sell out fast.
Mind you, this food is not fancy. The cooking is from another era, perhaps the 1950s, when the idea was to feed people. People who went to work, kids who went to school, and motorists setting out across that wide, empty Western landscape where they might not find another decent meal for hundreds of miles. It’s what used to be called “good plain cooking,” when there was no fear of frying, no shame in iceberg lettuce, no meal was complete without gravy and plenty of it, there was no crime in carbs, and dessert, made with real sugar, was essential to good digestion.
For people from the farm or the ranch, people squeaking their way out of the Depression, the question at the end of the meal as you were loosening your belt a notch was, “Did you get enough to eat?” For the cook, filling you up was a point of pride. At Western View, it still is.