Dining Santa Fe

Santa Fe is one of those cities that I think that I could spend a month in, and still not try all of the fantastic restaurants that it has to offer.  Since my sister was visiting this week and it was just the two of us in New Mexico for the first time, really, taking her out for a day in Santa Fe was non-negotiable.

We started the day off at Shoko for lunch...you can never go wrong with the sashimi and the chef's choice roll there.  As I've heard many people exclaim, including several Japanese business men, Shoko is one of the best sushi places that they've ever been to in the US.  Kinda hard to believe given our lack of ocean here, but the taste buds don't lie!

Golden Eye Snapper

Chef's choice roll

Getting ready to bite down on some Unagi!

Next on our tour de food was the Kakawa Chocolate House.  My sister, especially since she became sick last year, seems to have a never ending craving for sipping chocolate.  This provided a wonderful excuse for me to visit the Kakawa Chocolate House, an establishment that I've been meaning to visit for several years now.  They had eight varieties of sipping chocolate - four Euro-centric, and four Mexican-stylized (which tend to be a higher percentage cacao, and thus slightly more bitter...yummm).  One could almost fill up on the free samples that they were more than happy to provide, but in the end I decided to go with some of the chile chocolate. 

Following the Kakawa Chocolate House, we eventually made our way down to the Marble tap room located right off the plaza.  The beer that I had been craving, which I enjoyed a few weeks back the last time I was up that way, was a double black Belgian style ale.  Scrumpdidlyumptious!  Alas, they had already rotated it out of their selection, so I was left to choose either my default standard, an Oatmeal Stout, or break with my normal beer rule and drink something that's not opaque and black.  In the end, I settled on a double white Belgian ale, and was pleasantly surprised at how crisp it was and how it was extremely refreshing for a warm summer afternoon.  I think that I'm going to have to revisit my beer rule now...

That's my sis!

The food themed events of the day are still nowhere near over.  Eventually, after Marble, we made our way down to the Spanish Table where, much to my mock dismay, I discovered my kryptonite - salt.  Once upon a time, I was a naive Matthew, and thought that salt was salt.  Little did I know that there was a whole world of subtle (and some not so subtle sulfuric variations) tastes amongst the different varieties of salt...from the eggy taste of black Himalayan rock salt to the crisp Nectarine after taste of Korean Sea Salt.  Coming out of the Spanish Table, I feel as if I had about two pounds of salt...I had no will power to resist.

Luckily, from there, we made it to our last culinary stop of the day, the Coyote Cafe.  As I close my eyes to write this, I can still imagine how the food melted in my mouth - from the appetizer of spring rolls filled with goat cheese and papaya to the smoked haddock that my sister enjoyed to my entree of Scottish salmon and scallops over a bed of rapini, mushrooms, lobster ravioli, and a light cream sauce.  Truth be told, I wasn't wild about my salmon and scallops...the scallops were succulent, and everything you'd want in a scallop, but the flavor just didn't mesh with everything else.  The bed of vegetables and lobster ravioli, on the other hand, is something I could make a week's worth of meals out of and still not have had enough.  My sister's haddock (another good Scottish fish) was just right too.  All in all, the Coyote Cafe lived up to our expectations.

Goat cheese and papaya spring rolls.

Smoked haddock over tomato grits

Scottish salmon and scallops over a bed of rapini, mushrooms, lobster ravioli, and a light cream sauce.

Thus, as the day drew to an end, five Santa Fe gastronomical experiences had been crossed off of our list, with only about four dozen left to go...