If you've ever worked at a brand new restaurant-or eaten at one-you know that the infant stage is much like that of a human baby. It's a painful thing to watch, with exhausted and stressed-out parents micromanaging everything, frequent, painful crashes into sharp-edged furniture and the puzzled/delighted faces that come from eating unfamiliar food. I had been avoiding Señor Lucky's for weeks now, to allow the place enough time to get past the baby steps, but last week I thought it was time to check it out.
Here are my first impressions of Señor Lucky's at The Palace. The only similarity between old and new is the painting of the reclining nude woman (or is it a young man?) that still hangs in the bar. Otherwise, the place looks like the cast and crew of
While You Were Out
got dispatched to Santa Fe for a Western makeover project. Whereas The Palace looked very much like a bordello that had been rented out for a quinceañera, Señor Lucky's has the feel of a very rich little boy's bedroom set up for a board meeting. Gone is the red flocked wallpaper, replaced by outtakes from a Marlboro Man photo shoot, cowhide-covered chairs and brass-studded avocado green leather booths.
The effect is not unpleasant, just a little surreal. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote of America in terms of its hyper-reality, the way in which the real is replaced by something "more authentic." One could say this is what has happened so many times now at The Palace but, to be fair, hyper-reality has been Santa Fe's custom for nearly 100 years (Kingsley Hammett's
Santa Fe: A Walk Through Time
, published by Gibbs Smith last year, is an excellent chronicle of this phenomenon).
But really, how important is the cowboy makeover of another Santa Fe restaurant? It's fun to gripe about it just like it's fun to name drop social theorists 99 percent of the population doesn't give a shit about. Señor Lucky's is owned by local guys who also run the generally excellent Swig and Geronimo. It's not like some faceless corporation razed The Palace and put up a Chili's. So big whup.
About the food: Señor Lucky's is no Geronimo. When you order a bowl of mac and cheese (while sitting under a scene from "Bonanza") it comes with green chile, grilled peppers and Parmesan, just like your 6-year-old likes it. If it were on the menu at Geronimo, it would surely come scented with nutmeg, littered with black truffle shavings and steaming beneath a wild boar chop.
Thankfully, Señor Lucky's food is easy and approachable without being boring or trite. I love chips and queso as much as the next guy and it's hard for me to imagine how one might improve on goopy cheese and deep-fried tortilla chips, but this place knows how: send out that queso with a heap of pillowy-soft grilled flatbreads. Mmmm…pillowy-soft grilled flatbreads. I wanted to shrink myself to the size of a salt shaker and curl up next to that cup of cheese, pulling a warm flatbread up to my nickel-plated chin for a toasty little nap. Absolutely delicious. Order the queso.
Other starters include a grilled quail that comes with cowboy chutney ($10.95, see paragraph three); sweet corn tortilla soup ($6) and fried calamari with chipotle aioli ($9). There are several salads listed under "The Lighter Side" section of the menu, but the greasy, deep-fried shrimp and vegetable spring rolls ($8) don't belong there. The rolls' thick wrapping soaked up too much oil and the result was tasty, but not very light.
The big plates are reasonably priced, from $10 for Lucky's pizza of the day, to baby back ribs with a guava honey glaze ($15) and lime- and garlic-marinated flank steak salad ($16). We tried the oven roasted, Negra Modelo-marinated, naturally raised half-chicken with achiote tomato sauce, bacon potato flan and calabacitas ($14), which didn't taste quite as fancy as it sounded. I went for the bacon potato flan first of course, because I am completely obsessed with bacon. Ehhh. The too-thin strips were wasted on what was really a creamy casserole of mandolined potatoes. It would have been better if the bacon were chopped and thrown into the casserole. The chicken was good, but I'm not sure it was worth all that Negra Modelo and achiote effort.
What was truly fabulous was the guava mojito; it was an exceptionally well made drink with just a splash of sweet guava juice. I highly recommend it. And the desserts are worth writing home about, although they are expensive. Try not to drool while deciding among the peanut butter cookie and grape jelly ice cream sandwich ($7), the Mexican chocolate milkshake with coconut macaroons ($7), roasted banana split with banana ice cream and Tequila chocolate sauce ($8) or duo of chocolate cake and tres leches cake ($12).
There is also a very pretty revamp of the back patio at The Palace, er, Señor Lucky's. It would be an ideal spot for a little queso, a margarita and some shared desserts.
If you've spotted anything hyper-real, or even just plain old authentic, in the food world, drop me an e-mail at food@sfreporter.com.
