Alex De Vore
At Yama’s, you can get the falafel sandwich as part of a combo with a salad and fries.
Once upon a time at a Greek Festival at the San Bernardino horse track (that’s in California), my mother instructed my brother to approach my very single lady’s man uncle as he was flirting with a woman and to loudly query, “Daddy? Can I have a hot dog? Mommy says I can have one!”
We watched from the shadows, laughing, lamb gyros in everyone’s hand.
Years later, my father, drunk on ouzo at my aunt’s wedding, stepped into the center of the circle dance, waved to the crowd, and burned that mother down. Grasping a dolma and a massive piece of baklava, I’d never seen him move so fluidly and freely.
I’d never been so glad about having just smoked weed in a parking lot.
What’s my point? I’m Greek as a sun-kissed olive tree, and I’ve learned a thing or two about the food from my family over the years (mainly how not to cook lamb), and this is why you need to believe me when I say Yamas Greek Rotisserie (2411 Cerrillos Road, (505) 930-5921) is easily one of Santa Fe’s most excellent places to eat right now, and it’s not the kind of place to wipe out your bank account.
Opened in late 2019 by longtime Santa Fe restaurant champs Jared Garcia (hey, we just talked about his music in an issue the other day; Gold Tides Strike It Rich, Dec. 15!), his brother Justin Salazar and their stepfather Daniel Razatos (formerly of the Plaza Café and Café Sonder), Yamas had an auspicious start juuuuuuust before the pandemic crept along. Still, as a family business, it’s made it through some of the worst days with a little bit of PPP assistance and a commitment to high-quality takeout (seriously, you should see how excellently the takeout is wrapped). Their other eatery, Café Sonder, however, wasn’t so lucky and closed in 2020, according to Garcia, who chalks the closure up to a rocky start and bad public health timing.
Still, he says, he can now focus entirely on Yamas, and with assistance from the whole family, including menu development from brother Nick Ratazos, a professional chef working in California, plus former Sonder and Whole Hog chef Odra Mancia. With that added focus, Yamas has become the type of local eatery loved by the puro Santa Fe set.
For this Greek Santa Fean, too, Garcia and company might be serving up the best Greek food I’ve had locally in ages. Just the other day, I sampled the falafel sandwich combo ($14.04), which comes with a small house salad and fries. Crispy around the outside edges and satisfyingly chewy inside, the combo of fresh tomato, lettuce and falafel was pitch-perfect, including the bang-up takeaway packaging. My companion tried the Mediterranean kale salad ($7.95-$12.90), one of Yamas’ staples according to Garcia, and spent days waxing about its freshness, crispness and overall taste. Even the following day, the leftovers somehow proved more flavorful and didn’t fall victim to the soggy sadness of day-old food.
“That falafel, for example, is something we worked really hard on,” Garcia tells me by phone some days later. “[My stepdad] grew up working with his father in the kitchen, and when we were designing the concept for the restaurant, we used what he had in mind from when he was growing up. The recipes are really things he grew up eating and things he made for us when [my brother and I] were kids. Even the marinades, it’s the same thing.”
I’m reticent to use the term “authentic,” especially since Garcia says they’ve been open to tweaking recipes based on diner input, but someplace between the feta on my salad and the sauce in my sandwich, I was transported back to the Greek festivals of my youth in taste and mood. At the very least, the foundation of everything on the Yamas menu is firmly planted in the motherland. Or, to put it another way, you can practically taste the combined will of the family in the food. Yamas is, after all, both the continuation of the Greeker parts of Garcia’s extended family and a restaurant willing to continually refine its offerings. It’s also a part of a subtle nationwide movement that finds restaurants opening up in residential neighborhoods rather than in flooded commercial zones.
Take, for example, Rowley Farmhouse Ales—the place slaps hard and lives in the heart of a regular old Midtown Santa Fe neighborhood; Yamas has a similar thing going inside the space that once housed Lamplighter Liquors which, according to Garcia, was very much by design.
“I just realized there was this massive neighborhood back behind us, and those people are looking for places to eat, too. I mean, I live over there, too,” he tells SFR. “I feel like that’s just the way things are going, I mean, that’s more forward-thinking than downtown where you have to pay an initial cost to go to a restaurant. I love those restaurants, nothing against them, but you have to pay for that parking meter, and I even remember working downtown and having to pay $12 a day just to go to work.”
For now, Garcia adds, he’s happy to simply try and offer the best service he can.
“We like to say service is the job, hospitality is the extra steps,” he says. “We want people to know we care about the experience, but we’ve also had a lot of support. If it weren’t for the community around us, we wouldn’t still be around.”
