A little Gulf Coast authenticity spices up the Design Center.
I went to Gator Alley Cajun Café on the day Mardi Gras parades began down on the Gulf Coast. An online news story from Mobile, Alabama described a man wearing fake ta-tas on his head. In Santa Fe
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it was the first cold, cloudy day after a beautiful warm spell. So my husband, my son and I went to the newish Cajun eatery in the Design Center
while many folk down south were pulling out their masks and beads and sipping ale from balconies on Bourbon Street, counting down to Fat Tuesday. But lest our day come off as any less indulgent, you've got to understand something about the Design Center-this is not walk-by eating, it's serious-destination eating.
From what I've been able to observe, few people go to the Design Center-the big, warehouse-y arts, antique and lamp mall between Cerrillos and Sandoval-to shop. They go there to eat. Many times I've dug into a plate of food as the passageways up and down the Center have echoed empty, while the center of the Center has been packed with ravenous diners. This defacto food court features "find food," the kind that lures people to a place.
But it's not, of course, fancy. Design Center fare is what you expect to eat next to fake ficus plants and climbing vines while staring at a cloth flower. Most people go for the cheap delicious gyros and falafel of Cleopatra's, but now there's this Cajun joint next door, and some folks are starting to trickle over. There's still no escaping the cheeky décor; plastic lobsters and stuffed alligators with cowboy hats abound. You also get food that, if a bit uneven, is worth making the trek for. My husband had the crab cake Po' Boy ($6.95), a generous crab cake in a sub roll, which was flakey and fell apart just enough and made you feel good about eating fried food. I attempted a bowl of the seafood gumbo ($6.00) due
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to a boast on the menu that the chef had been perfecting the recipe for 18 years, but on finding it way too fishy, switched to the Cajun red beans and rice with Andouille sausage ($5.25). This dish made the gumbo worth the suffering. This, the quintessential New Orleans dish, was no plain ol' beans and rice but full-flavored and creamy comfort food with a hint of garlic and just enough Cajun heat to warm the back of the tongue and throat.
Tawdry, buck-naked bacchanalian indulgence like Mardi Gras? Well, that would be stretching it. But later that afternoon, the beans and rice still warmed my belly as we walked in the parade-less cold. And I was thinking that dining at the DC is kind of like living in Santa Fe. It's a place where you can get really fantastic cheap food and eat it surrounded by things you can't afford to buy. It's really not a bad deal, though…we all keep coming back.
