One must be resigned these days to encountering Taco Bell. The fast-food chain is a ubiquitous presence on the social-media frontier, not to mention on nearly 6,000 street corners in the US. But I find myself reluctant to encounter Taco Bell at the corner of Cerrillos Road and Alta Vista Street.

Domestic abusers apologize for their behavior, and they often mean it. But that doesn’t stop them from doing it again. It’s the same with drunk drivers and other drug addicts. Why would we expect it to be any different for corporations—in particular for corporate “farms” with a history of health and safety violations?

A bored chef is a boring chef. Nobody wants to go out to eat with the image in his or her mind of a tired stove jockey—a resentful grunt in a dirty apron endlessly churning out cookie-cutter meals and pushing steaks off the line with stamped and approved regularity like auto parts on a conveyor belt.

The gaudiest expressions of Santa Fe style are far from unique to Santa Fe. Much of the Southwest—along the trail of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, in particular—still bears the hallmarks of a fantasy created for tourists largely by hotel magnate and evil marketing genius Fred Harvey.

To see Callie’s Galley motoring down the road or parked at one of its several regular locations is to have a comedic encounter with an archetypal beast.

Even descending the stairs from the expansive view at Koi’s third-story, downtown Santa Fe perch to find that one’s bicycle has been stolen cannot ruin the sly exuberance one feels after a meal at Joel Coleman’s new eatery.

The roomy and welcoming nature of Pizzeria da Lino is belied by a cramped storefront entrance on N. Guadalupe Street and a parking situation more suited to flocks of Italian scooters than oversized American cars. Once inside, however, there’s an intimate bar and multiple rooms full of well-spaced tables. The outdoor courtyard is one of the more relaxing and friendly courtyards in town.

It doesn’t take much in Santa Fe to turn drought into abundance. Fans of affordable, flavorful Vietnamese food who have filled from the tap at Lan’s Vietnamese Cuisine and Saigon Café can now add Pho Kim to the once half-empty cup that may soon runneth over.

I don’t know why we’re fighting a multi-fronted war on terror if it isn’t to preserve the God-given right to finish up a hard day’s work and crack open a cold one. In fact, the only thing more American than fighting to feed the military industrial complex may be our propensity for self-medicating.

For some long-ago birthday—one of those foggy, early-20s episodes in innocent debauchery—I conned my grandmother into paying for me and all my friends to have dinner in the private wine cellar at the Inn of the Anasazi.