Throughout the course of human events, one will sometimes realize it’s been a hot minute since they’ve been to such-and-such restaurant. And then one starts thinking about it all the time right up until they convince a buddy to go to dinner because one is footing the bill and what the hell else are one and their buddy doing for food on a Tuesday night anyway?
So it went for a number of days recently after Rowley Farmhouse Ales (1405 Maclovia St., (505) 428-0719) chef Jeffery Kaplan reached out to remind me it’s been some time since SFR featured the Midtown eatery in our hallowed pages. If memory serves correctly, actually, the last time we checked in with Kaplan was in 2022 for the award-winning story Stop Shop and Cook (July 20, 2022), and that was three freaking years ago.
I love Rowley (or RFA if you’re nasty), too, which might have initially come down to my beer-drinkin’ days, back in the years when I prided myself on shopping local as hell and partaking in the veritable sea of locally brewed beers we have available around here. For context, RFA opened in 2016 when chemist (like, a literal chemist) John Rowley
realized he could take all that science know-how and apply it to the wonderful world of beer. Previously, he’d been a homebrewer type of guy with a penchant for funky, sour beers—according to rowleyfarmhouse.com, anyway—and after he lured Kaplan away from a cheffing job with Marriott, it was on. Kaplan is just the kind of chef you want, too, with a degree from the California Culinary Academy and, I’ve heard, another degree in hospitality.
Still, RFA remains decidedly unpretentious to this day from its adorable little spot on Maclovia Street. It is, in fact, pretty much a local’s spot; at least I assume so as I couldn’t imagine a tourist heading that far down Cerrillos and then along a residential-looking street to find the quaint covered patio and cozy indoor seating area. Honestly, RFA screams locals only, which we desperately need around here ever since La Choza’s situation turned into the waitlist-that-will-not-die (congrats to them, though, seriously).
This was particularly evident during a recent dinner experience during which the other diners included an older couple with an adorable basset hound, a quartet of diners wearing punk rock tees (shout-out to the woman wearing the Bad Cop Bad Cop tee—we saw you and your partner in the Punk Rock Museum shirt, and we think you’re cool) and a group of board game enthusiasts gathering for what I can only assume was a regular play session.
Then there’s the menu, one that feels a bit elevated from the regular brewpub fare even as it embraces classics from that realm like fish and chips and tacos and burgers. We spent a harrowing number of minutes whittling down our options, though in a way that highlighted how many enticing menu options RFA has rather than in one of those disappointing ways where nothing sounds particularly good. Shrimp and grits? Yeah, they’ve got that ($21), with wild gulf shrimp—and it’s gluten-free. Risotto ($17)? RFA has that, too and, according to the menu, its style rotates regularly. Then you’ve got your classic salads like Caesar ($14), Cobb ($18) and a goat cheese number with piñon and a whiskey-aged honey ($18), plus a number of sandwiches and enchiladas and…and…and…
In the end, though, we went with classics, including the chicken biscuit sandwich with horseradish crema and house-made pickles ($18) and the RFA burger—a beast of a burger with thick cut bacon, aged cheddar and a caramelized onion marmalade on brioche ($21). In both cases, we were duly impressed. Still, my companion said, the chicken sandwich could have featured a little more horseradish, even if the breaded chicken breast itself was tender and crispy in all the right places. The RFA burger has also become a serious contender for my favorite in the city. Don’t worry if the onion marmalade sounds odd to you—it did to me at first. But when you get the complex earthy flavors mingling with the sweet-ish notes of the caramelization process, you’ll wonder why you doubted it in the first place. Oh, baby, and that thick-cut bacon? Crisp at the edges, but chewy, too, and glorious in its added texture. For those who’ve aged to a point where you can’t eat burgers all the time, might I recommend opting for a side salad rather than the fries? The leafy greens added some much-needed roughage, and the tangy bite of the balsamic dressing worked well with the brighter notes of the onion in hte burger. RFA’s kitchen also achieved a borderline perfect medium for the patty, and even better? I did not leave feeling overfed.
We closed the evening with the pineapple upside-down cake ($10), a dessert they fire only after you’ve ordered it. The menu suggests giving it about 15 minutes for the dish to
arrive, and the wait only enhanced the flavor by the time we received it. Full disclosure, my companion eats like a raccoon most of the time, so the nuance of the crumbly cake with Amarena cherries and a piñon liquor was lost on their palate. I, however, found a delightfully subtle and not oversweet cake that I don’t often see on Santa Fe menus, and I have no complaints about the whipped cream that came on the side.
Kaplan clearly knows what he wants in finding common ground between brewery burgers and their ilk and swankier touches and flavor combinations. The entire meal clocked in at under $60 before tip, too, which included a Milk Stout Nitro from Colorado’s Left Hand Brewing for my little buddy (he said it was delicious). Someplace between the golden hour sunshine and the decidedly laid-back puro Santa Fe feel, I remembered why Rowley Farmhouse Ales keeps winning all those beer awards from outfits like the Great American Beer Festival (including a gold medal in 2022) and local anecdotal food praise. This one feels like it’s just for us, the people who actually live here. We should take advantage of that.
