Chef from Northern New Mexico returns home to open Drury eatery
Famed Los Angeles chef John Sedlar brings his reimagined Latin cuisine home to Eloisa Restaurant in the newly built Drury Plaza Hotel
After 40 years of gracing the palates of Los Angelinos with his culinary creativity, John Sedlar has hit all the celebrity chef benchmarks. He has been featured in such magazines as Bon Appétit and Travel + Leisure , he’s made TV appearances on the Food Network and The Today Show, he’s authored several cookbooks on Southwest cuisine and he has run several successful restaurants in Los Angeles, including the much-lauded Rivera, where he reimagined Latin food according to his perspective on Latin history.
And now, for the first time, he’s come back to Northern New Mexico, to show us all what we’ve been missing.
But Sedlar is a bona fide Santa Fean. He grew up here, tromping around the Plaza and the apricot orchards of Abiquiú as a boy, and his first job as a cook was at the venerated Bull Ring where, at the time, the menu was separated into two halves: European food and New Mexican food.
Eloisa (pronounced E-loy-sa) is Sedlar’s first New Mexico establishment and is as much an art project as it is a restaurant. Located inside the newly built Drury Plaza Hotel on the corner of Palace Avenue and Paseo de Peralta, Eloisa’s interior is airy and modern, all white brick and brushed steel, like a blank canvas against which Sedlar’s heady concoctions stand out in sharp relief.
Because for Sedlar, everything is a story. Rivera, his newest — and celebrated — L.A. restaurant, tells the story of Latin American food as it traveled from Morocco to the Southwest, dish by dish. The food at Eloisa paints an impressionistic vision of the modern Southwest, bite by bite. Every dish is compiled like a gastronomical poem, each ingredient signifying something both personal and culturally significant to Sedlar. The menu is, in a way, a culinary finger painting of Sedlar’s perspective on the history of Latin culture as much as it is a portrait of the spiritual palate of his grandmother, Eloisa Rivera of Abiquiú, for whom the restaurant is named.
“Eloisa was a very overbearing figure in our family. Very dominant,” smiles Sedlar. “She cooked traditional specialties for the seasons — but had this weird continental experience [cooking] for resorts, for the La Fonda, so she would make Hollandaise, and she would make Thousand Island … I thought she would be a good inspiration for the menu for this restaurant here. I’m really looking for, ‘What is Santa Fe.’ ”
The restaurant is not exactly part of the Drury hotel, but has a synergistic relationship with the property, serving a minimalist “breakfast with The New York Times ” to the guests every morning and offering to-go items for people to take back up to their rooms in lieu of room service.
“This restaurant was planned,” says Sedlar, of the Drury location. “I’ve been keeping my eye on it. There’s been a 40-year history of people trying to get me to open a restaurant in Santa Fe, which was a natural place for me to open. Then the Drury opened up, and I thought it made good fiscal sense to be affiliated with a five-anda-half acre property in downtown Santa Fe.”
The menu is composed of equal parts small plates — tapas-sized and meant for nibbling — and large plates if you want a full meal. Small plates include the “tortillas florales,” housemade fresh tortillas with flower petals pressed into the masa, a grilled nopal (cactus) pad with mushroom stuffing and tequila vinaigrette, and the distinctly tapas-like piquillo peppers with Spanish chorizo, garbanzo bean purée and olive oil contrasted with the Native-influenced maize budino, a flan-like pudding in a corn husk, with white and green corn, black quinoa, and red amaranth.
Also listed on the small plates menu are the pastrami tacos, served with sauerkraut, pickled serranos and ballpark mustard — a surprising combination that harkens back to Eloisa Rivera’s background cooking Southwestern and “American” food.
Large plates offer something for everybody: potato-wrapped scallops with nopal, contemporary Southwest classics like Zuni Elk with chocolate-onion-red wine sauce, and a Cowboy rib-eye steak with a shrimp-stuffed sopaipilla and chipotle béarnaise. The rich, aromatic duck confit, or duck enfrijolada, is lightened up with crisp radicchio. A dish called “Salmon Painted Desert” involves both grilled salmon and salmon mousse, the name suggesting the colors of the landscape as expressed in fish.
And at Eloisa, even the garnish has something to say. Many of the dishes include words written in spices on the actual plates, a practice Sedlar calls “spiceology.” The words have specific meaning to the dish and the spices are meant to be incorporated into the food, bite by bite. Some dishes are served on plates printed with photos of Sedlar’s relatives, including his grandmother Eloisa’s daughters and sisters, who will peek out at you from underneath the remnants of your meal. The ingredients are mostly familiar and the food appealingly approachable; though the menu is lightly peppered with words you may have to Google.
Plus, Eloisa features a brand new bar to lean on, a clean-lined stainless steel counter with a jewel-like array of bottles dominating the back wall. Mixology is as important as the food to Sedlar, who plans to start a small tequila brand specifically for the restaurant. The cocktail menu will feature signature concoctions, including a bellini with fresh apricot puree (apricot, because Sedlar spent his boyhood under Abiquiú apricot trees, you see). Or try the Doña Ahi cocktail, a divine mescal drink that perfectly encapsulates the concept of Eloisa, made with organic lemon leaves, pomegranate seeds, and a salt-and-chopped-cricket rim, drawn from and inspired by a sad and charming tale about a Oaxacan princess which, if Sedlar happens to be nearby, you may get him to tell you while you sip.
Eloisa opened for dinner on Tuesday, and is accepting reservations.