Spanish Market takes over the Plaza this weekend and organizers "guesstimate" about 45,000 people, including locals and out-of-towners, will visit the market over the weekend. You can be sure of a heavy concentration of fanny packs and a painful lack of parking downtown. On the bright side, there are some interesting food events planned to coincide with the market. So if you're not heading for the hills, you might want to capitalize ***image2***on Spanish Fever.
Up on Canyon Road, El Farol is offering a prix-fixe wine-paired tasting menu Saturday and Sunday. The three-course menu includes shrimp steamed in lemon-saffron broth, slow roasted pork with Manchego cheese, polenta and green olive fig tapenade and organic basil ice cream with a piñon biscochito. It's $65 per person and you'd better make a reservation. On Saturday morning, Chef James Campbell Caruso is teaching a Spanish cooking class at the Santa Fe School of Cooking. He'll teach you how to make that green olive and fig tapenade along with roasted pork tenderloin with Port syrup and Idiazabal cheese; strawberries with Basque sweet cream natillas and a few more things. That's $70, but you do get to eat everything.
El Nido restaurant in Tesuque is offering a batch of Spanish-themed specials from Friday through Sunday. JD Damron y Valdes de Martinez, El Nido's longtime chef, has special recipes from various regions of Spain, including shrimp in a spicy avocado cocktail sauce, rib-eye steak with a Chimayó chile crust and braised lamb shank in a fennel, plum tomato and red wine sauce.
Within walking distance of the Plaza, members of the Basque Club of Santa Fe (Who knew, right? I hear they just formed it this year.) will be meeting at the Spanish Table for a paella cooking demonstration. The demo is free so you can save your money for a paelleria (paella pan) or a Basque Club T-shirt. You'll be the only one on your block with that fashion accessory, I guarantee it. The action starts Saturday morning at 11 am-the same time as James Campbell Caruso's class, so you'll have to pick one or the other.
Speaking of local luminaries, I had lunch the other day with Cheryl and Bill Jamison, Santa Fe residents and authors of a long list of cookbooks, including
Smoke & Spice: Cooking with Smoke, The Real Way to Barbecue
and
Good Times, Good Grilling
, which came out this spring. We met at Charlie's Ribs, a little barbecue joint tucked away in the Santa Fe Premium Outlets. It's a strange place for a restaurant, but then again, all those people who work at Nine West have to eat lunch somewhere.
I thought it would be interesting to get the experts' opinion on Charlie's, which, in retrospect, was an idea somewhere between brilliant and idiotic. On the one hand, very few people know as much about barbecue as these two. On the other hand, I really need to stop subjecting nice people to lunch at restaurants I've never been to before.
Looking over the menu, it occurred to us that the dining area was missing something. You know that certain something that barbecue restaurants all have? It's the pervasive aroma of wood smoke, the kind of smell you can never quite wash out of your clothes. This place smelled clean, fresh, like…an outlet mall. Cheryl asked our waiter, "Where do you do your smoking?" He jerked his thumb towards the outlet mall's courtyard. Bill, Cheryl and I all looked at each other imagining the same thing: It's early in the morning and Charlie is wheeling his matte black cooker/smoker through the atrium doors, being careful not to smash the smokestack into the lighted exit sign. "That's where you smoke your meat?" an incredulous Cheryl asked. "Oh!" the waiter says, "I thought you meant 'where can you smoke?'"
Generally speaking, hell, specifically speaking, a barbecue place where they think of cigarettes before charcoal briquettes is less than ideal. The waiter confirmed for us that they simply don't smoke the meat at Charlie's. Wha?!
We dug in. Nope, no smoke flavor. The food sure looked good, though; shiny lacquered meat, perky cornbread muffins, coleslaw tinged pleasantly purple by shredded red cabbage. But there was something missing. Without being cooked over smoking wood, meat just tastes grilled (or baked). Think of the difference between a pork chop and pulled pork. It's a totally different thing, right? Even without the sauce, you can identify meat that's been properly barbecued by its smoky aroma.
The folks at Charlie's are really nice, the food is beautifully presented and I'm sure they're doing the best they can in the limited environment of an outlet mall food court. But as a barbecue joint it's ultimately disappointing.
El Farol
808 Canyon Road
983-9912
11 am-4 pm and 5-10 pm daily
Santa Fe School of Cooking
116 W. San Francisco St.
983-4511
www.santafeschoolofcooking.com
El Nido Restaurant
Located at County Road 591 and Bishops Lodge Road in Tesuque
988-4340
5:30-9:30 pm Tuesday-Sunday
The Spanish Table
109 N. Guadalupe St.
986-0243
10 am-6 pm Monday-Saturday, 11 am-5 pm Sunday
Charlie's Ribs
8380 Cerrillos Road, in the Santa Fe Premium Outlets
473-3530
11 am-8:30 pm Monday-Friday, 11 am-6 pm Saturday-Sunday
Tell me where to eat! I need your input. Send all of your tips, gripes and raves to food@sfreporter.com.
