Loyal Hound owners expand to Eldorad with Arable
You know what they say: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And if it’s working really well, do it again. And if you already have a bona fide following, do it again in Eldorado.
Arable, which had its soft opening about a month ago, is Restaurant 2.0 for Renée Fox and Dave Readyhough, owners-masterminds of beloved Santa Fe gastropub Loyal Hound. For those who love Loyal Hound, Arable is like the spinoff they always wished for. Different menu items, same warm, delicious, gravy-drizzled feeling.
“We have a lot of people who go to Loyal Hound who live out here,” Readyhough says. “We see them at lunchtime and then we see them for dinner at Arable.” For those who live the 15 or so miles away, having two of their three meals a day provided by Readyhough and Fox is a dream situation. “People live out here, and they’ll invite friends from in town to come out for dinner, instead of them coming in,” he adds.
The couple were approached by the landlord of Eldorado’s Agora (translation: the place where all the stuff is in Eldorado) to fill and transform the space vacated by Chez Dré. The couple weren’t planning on opening a second place at all (except maybe a food truck), but anyone who’s a fan of Loyal Hound will appreciate, well, more of it. It is a bit of a balancing act for Readyhough and Fox, who don’t even live in Eldorado themselves (although Readyhough did live there years ago when he was an elementary school teacher). Eldorado, the bedroom community southeast of Santa Fe, sometimes feels worlds away to people who have no reason to go there. It boasts a couple of pizza places, a coffee cart and its own grocery store but, apart from a few places situated in between it and Santa Fe (Cafe Fina, for example), has never really had a culinary destination of its own.
“Loyal Hound is a gastropub and [Arable] is a farm-to-table restaurant,” Fox says. “Not that it’s greatly different, either in price or concept, but it’s a different style.” The vibe is the same, living room-comfortable but still polished, with all the careful attention to hospitable details, from silverware to glassware on up, that you’d expect from Fox
and Readyhough. Both have worked, managed or served at some of Santa Fe’s best restaurants; Readyhough opened the Bull Ring and Rio Chama, and managed Rio Chama for 14 years.
The food is basically the same at both restaurants in most tangible ways. Both feature upscale comfort food made with Readyhough and Fox’s obsessive attention to ingredients. Fox, who hails from the Midwest, has a degree in culinary arts from Chicago and has worked both back and front of house in some of Santa Fe’s signature restaurants, including Geronimo, O’Keeffe Cafe and La Casa Sena.
“We gravitate toward that comfort food, so people always ask us if we’re from the South,” says Readyhough, who is from Virginia. “It’s just the food we like, homemade comfort food.”
“These menus are modern takes on the food I grew up eating,” Fox says. “For me, it’s just homemade food.”
It’s worth the short drive (and it is a
lovely drive, by the way) to have dinner in Eldorado. The menu at Arable is approachably small (and subject to lots of seasonal changes) and will be comfortably familiar to anyone who is a Loyal Hound devotee — Fox and Readyhough have replicated the farmto-table, know-your-cow, fresh organic everything ethos, just with different menu items (there are no repeats, in case you were wondering).
Some items are reminiscent of their Santa Fe restaurant: Small plates, which start at $3, include poutine, but Arable’s iteration is crafted with house-made tater tots, green chile-roasted vegetable gravy and Old Windmill Dairy cheddar curds — a very different animal. You can also get a country paté plate, barbecue pork nachos with house-braised pork, and even baby octopus on light mixed greens and baby potatoes. The curried chicken hand pie is made with classic butter pie dough and filled with roasted, shredded chicken, coconut
milk, fresh ginger, jalapeño and curry paste.
There are dinner-size sandwiches, which start at $12, like the “Knife & Fork Grilled Cheese” with green chile, peach butter and caramelized onion jam, an Old World-sounding chicken schnitzel sandwich on a pretzel (!) with cider mayonnaise, and of course, a gastropub-style burger with green chile peach butter and house-smoked pork belly on an English muffin.
For main courses, expect meat-andpotatoes things like a grass-fed ribeye steak or a grilled pork chop. The meat speaks for itself — Readyhough and Fox care as much about the quality of the ingredients as they do the preparation, and at Arable, as at Loyal Hound, much of what they serve doesn’t need very much in the way of getting dressed to wow them at the ball.
“We try to balance the texures and the flavors, and the salt and the sweet,” Fox says. “You’ll see that across our
menu. There’s sweet elements in the savory items and savory items in the sweet food. That’s a balance for us.”
Currently, Arable is open only for dinner on weekdays but also serves brunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends with additional menu items that fit as much on the lunch side of the portmanteau as breakfast, like the buttermilk biscuits that come with an utterly drinkable coffee-laced mushroom cream gravy and crispy onion strings (pro tip, get it topped with bacon and egg), steak and eggs (I love the smell of ribeye in the morning) and a smothered breakfast burrito filled with house-made tater tots and local bacon. And from the people who brought you Santa Fe’s best beignets, there is a pecan sticky bun with fresh berries or dark chocolate olive oil cake. There’s also a caramel ginger Belgian waffle, the sweet version of the cult favorite waffles at Loyal Hound.
“We became famous for waffles at Loyal Hound,” Fox says. “But this is a sweet waffle instead of a savory waffle. It’s organic buttermilk, organic butter, organic eggs, the same recipe without the chives, topped with homemade ice cream, homemade sea salt caramel and fresh, crunchy, shaved apple on top.”
Fox is a certified sommelier, and aside from the curated beers and bottled wines, Arable features seven carefully selected wines and one cider from all over the country on tap, which according to Readyhough is the city’s biggest selection of tapped wines. But you should expect nothing less from two people who met, after all, over beer and wine — Fox worked for Fiasco Fine Wine when Readyhough worked at the Sleeping Dog Tavern, and they met over his twice-a-week liquor order.
“He said I was stalking him because I was doing my job,” Fox says.
“She seduced me,” Readyhough says. “When someone comes up once or twice a week with beer and wine in hand, you’ve got to fall in love with them.”