The comfort-food all-stars
Jimmy D’s
IF you have ever wondered what it would be like to eat dinner inside a Roy Lichtenstein painting, Jimmy D’s — the newest addition to the ever-morphing New Mexico Fine Dining empire and recent arrival in the restaurant space at Garrett’s Desert Inn — might give you an idea.
The main dining room is like a mid-20th-century fever dream, with eye-popping black, white, yellow, and red surfaces. The walls and ceilings are strewn with album art, comic-book covers, images from newspaper cartoons (like “Blondie”), blown-up blackand-white photos from the Summer of Love, Keith Haring images, sculptural paper-lamp-like light fixtures, and yes, Lichtenstein prints. Squishy upholstered booths line a windowed wall, the soundtrack is solidly classic rock, and you can order sodas, milkshakes, and malteds from the “fountain” behind a counter lined with clear acrylic seats.
The menu is fittingly retro, too, reading a little like the comfort-food all-stars of your grandmother’s recipe card box or her Junior League cookbook. You’ll spy restaurantified versions of things like tangycreamy avocado dip ($7) served with puffy fried flour-tortilla chips and spicy salsa verde, smooth and zesty pimento cheese ($6), two iterations of meatloaf ($12 and $16), and Mama D’s chocolate layer cake ($7). You can order a grilled cheese amped up with bacon and poblano ($12) or mac and cheese augmented with chicken, bacon, and broccoli ($13). The daily “tortilla pizza” ($10), another quick-and-easy throwback, tops a large flour tortilla with a rotating roster of ingredients. It’s a nice light snack to enjoy with cocktails.
Jimmy D’s tackles every meal, every day. Breakfast features pancakes, waffles, French toast casserole, standard egg-meat-and-toast plates, and of course the New Mexico requisites, including a forearmsized breakfast burrito ($11) and rather sophisticated huevos rancheros ($10), accompanied by what may be my new favorite homefries. Whether you overindulged the night before or just need a hearty, comforting meal to remind you of the days before Twitter, the Hangover Hash ($14) could be the cure for what ails you — prime rib, pastrami, potatoes, spinach, cherry tomatoes, and eggs, all slathered with red chile and served with flour tortillas.
Perhaps in a nod to Santa Fe Bite, Jimmy D’s predecessor in this space, the menu highlights Jimmy’s Burger ($14), a double-pattied situation whose ingredient list — “special sauce,” lettuce, tomato, onion, and cheese — will ring bells for anyone who was alive and aware of television and fast food in the 1970s. It’s a messy, smashed-burger-style undertaking, and the special sauce (something akin to Russian dressing) necessitates copious napkins in the very best way.
A monstrous country fried steak ($17) — with crust that’s stunningly crunchy but often crumbles off — dominates a pile of buttered curly egg noodles and timeless green beans and is slathered in a chunky mushroom-studded gravy. The kitchen cranks out an impressive plate of fried chicken, too ($15). The bird’s flavor is rich and deep, thanks to a pre-fry roasting, but a similar crust conundrum occurs here as well. The fish and chips ($14) breaks with tradition, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless. Chunks of flaky white cod sport a nubbly crust coat rather than the traditional puffy jacket of batter, and the chips are non-standard waffle-cut yam fries or some exceptional curly fries, the side that brings out the kid in all of us.
On the purportedly lighter side are a daily soup; a perfectly respectable green-chile stew ($5 and $8) loaded with shredded pork, potatoes, and corn (which adds a pleasant extra sweetness); and a handful of salads. My Caesar salad’s ($8) thick, rich dressing rendered the whole thing so filling I could barely finish it — even though I skipped the so-called croutons,