We’ve arrived in Santa Fe in early autumn. The town is a-glow with golden cottonwood trees simply blazing in their coats of yellow leaves.
Santa Fe is a softness of New Mexican adobe architecture with its pleasing ochre colours and rounded contours. It is a low-rise town, nothing taller than our elegant old 5-storey
Eldorado hotel. From our rustic adobe balcony we look across a sprawl of settlement, Spanish-style churches and trees to a blue horizon of low mountains which surround Santa Fe. It’s a big sky westwards view which delivers a glorious spread of sunset colours.
Pity the hotel's Internet service is abysmal. It is really a disgrace in
2016. When I call to ask if perhaps there is a problem, the desk says their techs don’t come in to work until about midday. Huh?
This is not the first time blogging and communications generally have been hamstrung by hotels with inadequate wireless but this is absolutely the worst. Dialup would be more effective.There will be no blog posting from here.
We’ve paused for a few days here because Bruce thought it might be nice. It is. If you like to be surrounded, nay, drenched in art.
Er, yes, please.
For starters, the whole darling town is a jewellery shop.
Truly.
It is one after another after another Native American jewellery store, windows alive with the brilliant blues of turquoise and shimmers of silver.
There are so many of them, not just stretched along the main San Francisco Street shopping drag but down arcades, along the plaza
cloisters where Native American craftspeople sit on stools with their creations spread out on mats in front of them. There are really classy fashion stores, too. Very expensive designer and leather fashions. Hand-tooled and lavishly decorated fashion cowboy boots. Oh, they are spectacular, some of them with calf-high fine leather etched out like lace, some with vivid with dense Dia de los Muertos-style designs. I covet them. But, of course, I slink into the stores with folksy Santa Fe style, which emphasise a fusion between Native American and upmarket gypsy. This is the local look and one spots lots of handsome Santa Fe matrons with long grey
hair, long flowing skirts, and and a mass of stunning jewellery.
Since the nights are getting cool up here 7200ft, I tiptoe into Santa Fe chic.
I’ve been imagining the turquoise on sale in Santa Fe taken out of the silver settings and piled up. There must be a mountain of it out there - some in strands, some in fancy belts and huge rings, brooches, earrings, pendants, inlays, and carvings.
The intensity of artistry.
If it’s not jewellery shops, it’s galleries. Streets of galleries. An entire gallery district. And these are not showing banal or amateurish artists. Many of them, very many of them are breathtaking.
It is arty heaven.
Even Bruce, for whom there is a cut-off point for art indulgence, finds himself arrested and impressed and even agog at some of the brilliance, originality and technical finesse of some of the art we are
encountering.
Canyon Road is in suburban Santa Fe.
It is a colony of galleries stretched the length of a winding adobe-lined road. It is not a broad road and the pavements
are dodgy. The galleries are cheek to jowl.
One might think it is wildly competitive but the art is so diverse. There is no comparison.
Oh, if I had a spare $30,000, I’d be walking away with one of John Taraheeff’s works in the Nuart Gallery. His precise, sharp-edged super-realist figurative acrylic technique depicts strange and wondrous
surreal images of human and animals in strange, often pensive scenes.
We are both profoundly attracted to his work and delight in his show, and also the gallery which goes from room to round-edged room in an old adobe house, complete with kitchen-in-use.
Across the road I meet Joy Campbell, an Altered Books artist who deconstructs surplus books and with immense patience and hours of precision cutting and folding, creates sculptural whorls and whirls and wheels which she layers and tiers either vertically or horizontally. Incredible.
Also in the same two-storey gallery with her work is the teabag artist, Ann Laser, whole sheets of design made by used tea-bag skins and other ingenious lightly decorative works made from the tags and end cuts of tea bags.
Out there along Canyon Road are massive stone sculptures, goldsmiths, landscapists and bold contemporary artists showing works.
One reels from gallery to gallery until one succumbs to overload.
Oh, didn’t I mention Georgia O’Keeffe?
Of course we visit her gallery. It is conveniently behind the hotel.
We watch the documentary on her life
and particularly her life in New Mexico and it immediately breathes fresh air into her art, particularly that which reflects the things we are seeing around us. She captures the beauty of the cottonwood trees beautifully. It is a sleek gallery covering her work from around 1916 until her death in 1986. it includes photos of her life in New Mexico, outings with packs of friends, and work in her precious garden. Interestingly, there is a live webcam depicting that garden today. They are trying to recreate it as she had it. One can see the gardener working on and cars driving past the property.
While the arts are the strength of Santa Fe, food and hospitality is a weakness. Starving artists, perhaps, stunt the delicious excesses of the foodie revolution. It has not come here.
I don’t know where or when we have had worse food.
Oddly, the lousy food has been presented in a charm of good nature,
generosity, and best intentions.
Our hotel is very grand. It has a swimming pool on the roof, a lovely pool surrounded by adobe walling and, like our little balcony, presenting a wonderful view of the town. Vents from the kitchen send foody aromas up there, too, and one can have light meals poolside. We do. Salad and fruit in the sun.
Downstairs is a swish restaurant with very formal wait staff. It has a good wine list and a snazzy Agave Bar. But the food, rather on the expensive side, is rather on the drab side.
We have been keen to try good Mexican fusion here but epic fail is the phrase which now comes to mind. We do our research on Yelp and Google and chose The Casa Chimayo restaurant. We visit and check out its menu. So, we phone to book. They said yes, come on down. We come on down and and are very rudely told they are busy and we will have to wait for a table. Whaat?
Hunting along the main street, we find a friendly Mexican place for brunch.
The service is a bit scatty and there is a massive Mexican family in with kids ordering everything on the menu but we are hopeful of its huevos rancheros. My massive plate of food is a sort of melty-cheese slodge. The over-easy eggs are almost raw sunnyside when I dig them out. There is a tortilla underneath. The green salsa is lovely and the black beans are beaut. I try to avoid the raw egg but it has turned into a slush with the tortilla. Oh well, I have my Vegemite with me and a nice piece of toast. Aaah.
We find a half decent quesadilla at a little lunch cafe. I am not sure I would count this as cuisine. It was nice enough but needed chili.
We discover Dinner For Two, a charming little restaurant we discover by chance.
We have no reservation but are welcomed in and discover that we have found the in place for the Santa Fe establishment. And, unlike us, they are all very well dressed. We feel a bit self-conscious but are settled at a nice table in a long, thin alcove area and quickly served margaritas in fancy glasses. A classical guitarist is performing. It is charming. The menu surprises us with a $19.99 special three-course dinner menu. Wow. Soup - French onion for Bruce and truffle mushroom for me. The soups are lovely albeit mine is very rich and creamy. The bread is stunning. My main is one of my favourite dishes, veal piccate, so I am a bit surprised to find this should-be lemony, caper, zesty dish is very smooth and mild with a cream sauce. Despite lots of baby capers, it is bland. I squeeze the lime from my margarita over it, and it helps. Bruce has a mad bean compote dish, a solid vegetarian dinner. I am over-creamed by dessert time so I choose the prickly pear sorbet which is very sweet. Bruce has an espresso icecream which makes him swoon. Dinner For Two is a family restaurant with a baker dad and chef son, I gather. It is really lovely and I felt so sad that I could not rave about it.
Monday night in Santa Fe is a pretty much a complete zero. It is chef’s night off and a lot of places are closed, so the few places that are open are full and there are waiting times.
We walk the town trying one after another and decide to come back to our own hotel only to find that the restaurant is closed. This is a big hotel. But it does have room service and food at the bar. Flustered guests are the ones who tell us this. They are leaving and looking for other places. Luckily, the concierge, Alda, is still on duty and she offers to find us a place to eat. She books us in to Terra Cotta just down the road and shows us the way.
Terra Cotta is charming.
It is a wine bar restaurant and it has the most astounding wine list. We are welcomed and given a lovely table, iced water and good wine. It, too, has a $20 three-course dinner menu. We choose salad for a starter. I choose paprika chicken with ribbon noodles and veg for a main and Bruce chooses panko dusted pork schnitzel on red cabbage. His dish is better than mine. My chicken is tough, gnarly, overcooked and on some sort of mess of pasta and al dente vegetables, adorned with a scatter of parsley and a trail of pink paprika sauce. It is as flavourless as it was ugly. Bruce shares some of his pork. Dessert. His pecan pie with salted caramel ice cream was nice. My frangiapani pear cake is dry and stodgy. So it is a low cal night for me.
The Santa Fe diet by default.
Next day we find the Plaza Cafe on the square. It is crowded with what looks like locals. It is staffed by Mexicans. The menu is Mexican. I plump for cashew mole chicken, pronounced Mollay. Winner. At last. A deep chocolately spicy sauce over beans, rice and shredded chicken. Oh yes. And it comes with sopapillas which are like
puffy fried dough. Have them plain with the mole and then squeeze them sweet with honey, which is there in a large bottle on the table, and one has dessert. Just like that. No extra charge. It is a bit of a breakthrough moment for me. I resolve to cook mole dishes in Australia.
The town is very quiet. By night it is just stray tourists wandering and wondering. A busking jazzgroup is playing in the town square when we wander up. Few cars. Nah, it is a sleepy homebody town by night.
And, it eventuates, it is preparing to go into hibernation. On November 1 every year, it pretty much shuts up shop until Thanksgiving.
The high altitude town which uses chillies as its symbol, is about to get cold.
We have just made it.
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