Like the official slogan of the Texas Department of Tourism, the back side of the mountains may as well be “like a whole other country” to some urban dwelling Duke City residents.  Behind the Manzano mountains there exists a rural supra-culture of people who seem more comfortable in their own skin than their urban neighbors fewer than 20 miles away, people not as weighed down by the stresses and pretensions of the dog-eat-dog world.

These folks congregate at the Ponderosa Steakhouse where Wrangler jeans, ten gallon hats, tank tops and Cowboy boots are commonplace but shorts are not; where scruffy, unkempt beards are routine and cigarette smoke billows like a blue haze over the outdoor porch.  The Ponderosa plays both types of music, Country and Western, and remains unchanged by the ravages of time.  It is a haven for the hard-working, blue-collars, many of whom are fortunate enough to work and live off the land–and what land it is.  The Tijeras area is among the state’s most scenic.

The Ponderosa Steakhouse is situated in an old log cabin whose exterior signage extols the popular libations offered at the bar.  If you’ve never been there and you’re not careful you’re bound to drive right by it.  That’s because it sits virtually at the crest of a long vertical climb, just past where the mountain flattens out into a verdant valley.  The winding highway takes you through some of the most picturesque vistas imaginable, particularly in the fall when golden leaves on the Turquoise Trail are at their peak of magnificence.

The interior of the Ponderosa is a continuation of the rustic theme.  Rough-hewn vigas on the ceiling support wagon wheel lights which provide a dimly lit ambience.  The wood planked floors are distressed and well-worn from years of being heavily trod upon.  The charred remnants of branding irons have left their impressions on the walls.  Antique brickerbrack is strewn about.

The bar is usually crowded with thirsty patrons engaged in spirited discussions.  A wood stove distributes warmth throughout the restaurant during those cold winter nights at more than 7,000 feet.  An adjacent room includes a solitary pool table.

Despite the cigarette malodor (a remnant of the days when smoking was allowed within the restaurant), the restaurant’s prevalent odor is the unmistakably distinct aroma of steaks sizzling on the grill.  You won’t find choice or prime beef at the Ponderosa.  Those cuts are too pretentious and expensive for its patrons.  In fact, the beef may well have come from a neighboring ranch where grass-fed cows graze lazily on their verdant high mountain bounty.  It’s good beef–very good beef–for which you won’t pay city prices to get country portions.

The most expensive steak on the menu is under $25 and unlike at some Duke City establishments, “a la carte” is an expensive and foreign concept.  Each steak dinner comes with a salad, baked potato or Fries, vegetables and a bread roll with butter.  You won’t leave hungry.

Salad sophisticates might marvel at the delicious simplicity of a Ponderosa salad.  It’s constructed of mostly iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes and a fleck of bell pepper here and there.  The restaurant offers about a half dozen salad dressings, all served in those little plastic tubs.  The salad dressings are thin, perhaps watered down.  Baked potatoes are served with butter and sour cream embellished with chives.  The bread roll is yeasty and soft, the type of which you might want to consume several.

The T-Bone steak is enormous and will take longer to prepare than anything on the menu.  This is a peerless cut consisting of a supple, tender filet and a robust strip separated by the T-bone.  At about a full inch thick, it is a carnivores’ favorite.  Ask for any Ponderosa steak to be grilled with salt, pepper and garlic on both sides and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by a well-seasoned, highly flavorful slab of beef.  It’s not perfect by any means.  You’ll have to trim off some fat from the sides, but you’ll get more steak than sinew, more flavor than fat.

As tender as just about any ribeye we’ve ever had, the Ponderosa’s ribeye has the juiciness (but not the bloodiness) of a rare steak even if you ask for medium well preparation.  Quite honestly, we’re often surprised at how good the steak is, enjoying it more than we have pricy steak at swanky (and very expensive) big city steakhouses.  It’s not prime or choice beef, but it’s a good choice for tasty beef at a reasonable price.

The third cut of steak on the menu is a simple sirloin.  When you order “sirloin” at a restaurant, you never quite know what you’re getting.  The bottom sirloin which is most often served at restaurants is less tender and much larger than the top sirloin.  Ponderosa offers a bottom sirloin, a good steak but not the most tender or flavorful.

While steak is certainly a highlight of the menu, other entrees are also quite enjoyable.  A steak and enchiladas plate features surprisingly good beef enchiladas with a piquant (albeit cumin enhanced) red chile you can respect.  The beef on the two rolled enchilada jewels is well seasoned and delicious.  That plate comes with a six ounce sirloin steak that isn’t quite as wonderful as the larger ribeye, but by any standards is a passable steak.

An excellent alternative if you want both steak (sirloin) and New Mexican food is the steak rellenos plate in which two cheese oozing chile rellenos, refried beans and Spanish rice leave little room on the plate for the steak, but the combination goes very well together.  The refried beans have a smoky, fried in lard taste while the Spanish rice is fairly blasé.

A jalapeno and canned tomato based salsa with crisp, low-in-salt tortilla chips are brought to your table before your meal.  The salsa isn’t especially piquant, but it’s got good thickness so it won’t run off your chips.    A spinach artichoke dip appetizer with tostados (deep fried flour tortillas) is an appetizer offering for diners who don’t want the salsa and chips.  The artichoke dip has only enough cheese to bind the mostly spinach mixture together and isn’t especially noteworthy.

New Mexican food dinners are served with sopaipillas.  On two occasions in which we’ve had them, the sopaipillas had the taste of being fried in old oil and didn’t have the cloud-like texture we were used to.  On another occasion, they were puffy perfection.

The Ponderosa made a “cameo appearance” and was one of the few saving graces of a sophomoric (sophomoronic?) 2004 movie called “Elvis has Left The Building” which was filmed mostly in the Land of Enchantment.

Despite the restaurant’s relatively few shortcomings, you’ll find yourself effusively praising a dining experience where you revert to a better, simpler time among good, honest people who really seem to have the right idea about living and dining.

Ponderosa Steakhouse
10676 State Highway 337
Tijeras, New Mexico
281-8278

LATEST VISIT: 9 July 2009
# OF VISITS: 3
RATING: 18
COST: $$$
BEST BET: Beef Enchiladas; Ribeye Steak, T-Bone Steak, Salsa and Chips

In his celebration of America’s favorite dish, filmmaker George Motz traversed the fruited plain in search of some of the country’s most unique burgers for his 54-minute film Hamburger America . An avowed burger lover, he wasn’t necessarily trying to find and rank America’s best burgers per se. Instead, he feted eight restaurants in continuous operation for 40-plus years whose menus featured burgers made from fresh meat, not frozen, for those 40 years. One of the eight restaurants featured was Santa Fe’s own Bobcat Bite.

In his GQ magazine article “The 20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die,” Alan Richman was more definitive in rating America’s best burgers. Taking the measure of 162 burgers across the country, Richman’s goal was to find “the best damned assemblage of ground beef and buns this country serves up.” He rated the Bobcat Bite the 12th best burger in America.

In 2007, the Food Network aired a program called “Top American Restaurants - Bon Appetit Picks the Best” in which the editors of Bon Apetit magazine selected the “top places in this country to enjoy the ultimate incarnations of iconic American cuisine.” Among the iconic American cuisine feted were hamburgers. This category was won by Santa Fe’s Bobcat Bite–to the surprise of absolutely no one who has ever dined at this Santa Fe area treasure.

That’s high praise indeed, but accolades are nothing new for this Lilliputian restaurant (seating for only 26 patrons) which was also featured in March, 2000 edition of New Mexico magazine and is held in high esteem by Michael and Jane Stern of Gourmet magazine and Roadfood.com.  In their terrific 2009 tome 500 Things To Eat Before It’s Too Late, the Sterns rated the Bobcat Bite number one on their list of “must-eat” green chile cheeseburgers.  They wrote, “The meat in this extraordinary GCCB is extraordinarily tasty–high-quality beef, a full inch thick complemented but not overwhelmed by chile that is more tangy than hot.”

When it comes to burgers, it’s all about the beef and that’s where Bobcat Bite has the edge over the competition. The owners still grind their beef daily on the premises, using only chuck shoulder and chuck tenders then forming the patties by hand, careful to control fat content.  The 50-year old cast iron grill is wonderfully seasoned so that each burger is prepared with remarkable consistency.

Each burger is a thick and juicy 9.5 ounce slab of beautiful beef served with an American and Swiss cheese blend, green chile, lettuce and tomato. Mustard and catsup are available on your table and you can ask for mayonnaise and sliced (or even better, grilled) onion if you’d like.  If you do opt to use a condiment on your burger, use it sparingly because it’s the beef that may bring tears of joy to your eyes.

It takes two hands to handle the gigantic green chile cheeseburger, but you could use a third hand to wipe your mouth.  I can palm a basketball easily, but as the photo below attests, my right meathook is challenged to hold the green chile cheeseburger at the Bobcat Bite.  At medium, this burger is pink through and through; it’s as juicy a burger as you’ll find anywhere (easily a five napkin burger) with beef being the prevalent flavor.  It’s an absolutely delicious beef which you can eat by itself; even mustard and ketchup might be considered desecration.

The restaurant goes through 80 pounds of green chile per week and it’s not the canned green chile variety other dining establishments serve.  That being said, the green chile doesn’t have much of, if any, bite.  It could be because it’s buried under a blanket of cheese which tops the inch-thick hamburger patty.  The lack of piquancy is the sole factor preventing an even higher rating for these treasures.

When I introduced my friend roastmaster nonpareil Bill Resnik to the Bobcat Bite, what he couldn’t get over is just how wonderful the restaurant smells. He told owner Bonnie Eckre (pictured) that she could make a million dollars if she could bottle the aroma of her sizzling burgers then suggested that aroma would make a great aftershave. It would leave men perpetually hungry.

Each burger is accompanied by potato chips, but you can request home fries (the cubed potatoes pictured below) if you’d like.

While the Bobcat’s bounteous burgers are best known, the restaurant also serves excellent steak. About the prime ribeye steak, Michael Stern says, “there is none more delicious between Amarillo and L.A.” Even better than the ribeye is the 10-ounce New York strip steak which is perfectly seasoned with salt, pepper and garlic and prepared exactly to your specifications.

Burgers and steak aren’t the restaurant’s sole entrees. The menu also serves pork chops, a grilled chicken sandwich and a few other items, but most people order the burgers or steak.

There isn’t much on the menu (a tossed salad and coleslaw) for vegetarians, but the coleslaw is as good as it comes. Instead of the overly sweet salad dressing or mayo you’ll find on most coleslaws, the Bobcat Bite uses a tart, vinegary dressing. It’s not acidic enough to pucker your lips, but it is tangy and delicious with flecks of green pepper and very finely chopped slaw.

During winter months, the Bobcat rotates–between a New Mexico style green and a Texas style red–a bowl of chile (spelled New Mexico style). The Texas style red chile includes beans, ground beef and tomato and is almost soup-like. In fact, to thicken the sauce, you can add crackers and have a very good Texas chile soup (although Texans can’t spell and would call it “chili.”)

The Bobcat Bite sits on a 100 acre ranch which used to be a working quarter horse ranch. Bobcats used to sit and perch on the restaurant’s roof and would come down from the mountains to get fed scraps tossed out the back door. No doubt that even the scraps at this wonderful little restaurant taste pretty good.

BOBCAT BITE
420 Old Las Vegas Highway
Santa Fe, NM
983-5319
Web Site
LATEST VISIT: 8 July 2009
# OF VISITS: 4
RATING: 26
COST: $$
BEST BET: Green Chile Cheeseburger, Ribeye Steak, New York Steak, Potato Salad, Coleslaw

When we get together, native New Mexicans of my generation who grew up in the state’s mountainous regions sometimes reminisce about trudging a mile or more in feet-deep snow to get to school.  We wonder how we survived the furious snowstorms which killed  reception for weeks to all four (yeah, four) Albuquerque television stations in the dark, pre-historic days before color television (not to mention, cable), the Internet and iPhones.

Mostly, we trumpet the fact that we were  weaned on chile–and not just any chile.  We grew up eating the most gastronomic distress-inducing, tongue-searing, sweat-arousing chile possible–the type of chile which embodies the axiom that with some New Mexican food, pain is a flavor.  Listen to us and we’ll  have you believe that in comparison, the  stuff served in most  New Mexican restaurants today is as wimpy as ketchup and as piquant as spaghetti sauce.

Thankfully, the Internet has provided visual–albeit Photoshop image manipulated–evidence of the incendiary stuff on which we were weaned.   A frequently forwarded image on many computers depicts a jar of Gerber Picante Sauce, but instead of the familiar cherubic baby with the tousled hair, pursed lips and smiling eyes, the red-faced baby on the manipulated image is in obvious and alarming distress.

The truth is, there are few remaining New Mexican restaurants which serve chile as piquant as our memories tell us it once was.  In fact, most of the chile served today has just slightly more piquancy than the innocuous bell pepper which on the Scoville scale is the baseline for “no heat” (this makes it doubly funny to see tourists unable to handle our chile’s “heat”).  Sometimes the red chile just sits there like some flour-thickened food coloring while the green chile would be green with envy of  the heat generated by a Greek pepperoncini.  Most restaurants acquire their chile from one of two distributors and seem, for the most part, to order and serve chile of the “mild” variety.

Expecting chile to be fairly tame in most restaurants, about the most we can hope for is chile with that unmistakable New Mexico sun-blessed flavor we’ve all come to love.  New Mexican restaurants generally do a better job in the flavor department than in the province of piquancy.  For the most part, green chile has a freshly roasted flavor while red chile can be velvety, earthy and rich.  The operative terms here are “for the most part” and “can be.”  With few exceptions (Mary & Tito’s and their amazing red chile come to mind), you never know what you’re going to get.

We frankly didn’t know quite what to expect from Quesada’s New Mexican Restaurant on San Mateo just north of Copper.  When he told me about Quesada’s, Steve Goatley described it as “a great little New Mexican cuisine restaurant” with “great food.”  He described the green chile as “being very tasty with a bit of a bite” and the carne adovada as “out of this world.”  For me, the proof is in the eating.

Quesada’s is housed in a small converted home on San Mateo just north of Copper, the same edifice which was once home to the Mediterranean Cafe, a rarity in the Duke City in that it served Tunisian and Moroccan entrees.  The restaurant has fewer than a dozen tables and the tables are of the two- to four-seat variety.  You’ll have to put two or three tables together to accommodate a larger group.  Fortunately the take-out traffic is robust because Quesada’s isn’t big enough to handle an overflow.  Parking is also a bit of a challenge, but you should be fine if you figure out how to navigate behind the restaurant.

Quesada’s is a true old-fashioned mom-and-pop restaurant.  It’s family-owned and operated by native New Mexicans.  The chef-proprietor is from Carlsbad, not exactly known as a hotbed for hot (or good) chile.  If the chile enhanced food at the restaurant is any example of the New Mexican food served in the gateway city to the world’s most accessible cave system, capsaicin craving foodies everywhere should descend upon Carlsbad like a colony of bats at a fruit-fly feast.

Before the menu is brought to your table, confusion might ensue as to whether Quesada’s is a New Mexican restaurant, a Mexican restaurant or a hybrid of the two.  On a table by the wait staff station are large jars, one filled with watermelon agua fresca ( a standard at Mexican restaurants) and one with ice tea.  A table tent lists such un-New Mexican specialties as hot and spicy barbecue ribs.  The menu, however, is mostly New Mexican: burritos, quesadillas (not a diminutive of Quesada), burgers, enchiladas, tacos, stuffed sopaipillas, combination platters, tamales, chile rellenos, flautas and more.  Everything–the salsa, aguas frescas, chile and more–is made from scratch from family recipes.

The salsa provided a precursor that we might be in for something special, something perfectly piquant and daringly delicious.  Quesada’s salsa has the type of incendiary bite that impresses itself on your taste buds, titillating them with piquancy, heat and flavor.  If Sadie’s Dining Room is the standard by which the Duke City’s hottest salsas are measured, Quesada’s may just set a new benchmark.  It’s not only piquant; it’s very flavorful, a red-orange jalapeno and tomato based sauce of medium thickness and maximum flavor.

As Steve Goatley told me, the carne adovada is indeed “out of this world.”  It’s the type of carne adovada my friend and frequent dining companion Ruben, an adovada adoring, carne connoisseur loves most (to find out how much, check out the amusing anecdote he relates in the feedback section below).  Unlike the salsa, the carne adovada doesn’t bite back.  The emphasis isn’t on piquancy, but on succulently tender pork marinated in a well-seasoned red chile.  For breakfast, it is served with two eggs and cubed, golden brown papitas.  If there’s one thing wrong with this carne adovada, it’s that there isn’t more of it.  A double-sized portion might not be enough to sate you; it’s good enough to make you weak at the knees.

Insofar as the chile, a worthy canvass for New Mexico’s favorite fruit and official state vegetable is Quesada’s enchilada plate–two or three white corn tortillas served rolled (flat upon request), topped with red or green chile (or Christmas style), cheese and that ubiquitous tomato and lettuce garnish so many people discard.  The chile is attention grabbing.  In its green chile hue, it has the tongue-tingling bite and roasted flavor of my youthful memories.  It also has a hint of sweetness that all members of the nightshade family seem to have, albeit not always discernible.  The red chile is not quite as piquant, but it’s even more flavorful–sweet and complex with a hint of earthiness.  Unlike the chile at Sadie’s which is more piquant than it is flavorful, the chile at Quesada’s is delicious first then piquant.  Ask for your enchilada plate to be topped by an egg for an additional flavor ameliorant, not that the chile needs any help.

Enchiladas are available in seemingly every variety but tofu.  There are cheese, ground beef, chicken, carne adovada and roast beef enchiladas available which you can mix and match in quantities of two or three.  The enchilada plate is served with the de rigueur beans and rice.  The beans are mashed and good.  The rice has a bit of a bite which places it in unique company considering most Spanish rice in New Mexican restaurants is bland and uninspired.

Quesada’s is one of only a few New Mexican restaurants offering buñuelos, a Mexican dessert made from fried dough.  In taste and texture, buñuelos resemble sopaipillas, but are flattened like Navajo tacos (which are also on the menu).  They are sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and are a good way to mollify any heat remaining on your taste buds and tongue.  Also quite good is the watermelon agua fresca, as refreshing and delicious a fresh water as we’ve had in New Mexico without the cloying quality of aguas frescas made by vendors.

Some readers of this blog have figured out that one way to gauge how much I like a restaurant is how soon after my first visit I make my first return visit.  After my first visit, I started craving Quesada’s carne adovada literally as we were driving away.  Alas, a scheduled lunch with my friend Ruben four days later was not to be due to my inattention (a woeful tale of my ineptitude is wonderfully related by Ruben in the feedback section below).  It wasn’t a total loss as Ruben loved the adovada…and made sure to tell me how much.

My second visit to Quesada’s  finally occurred five days after my inaugural visit when I introduced two other friends, Mike Muller and Bill Resnik to the chile that had so captivated me.  Carne adovada quesadillas were my choice.  A flour tortilla grilled crisp and folded over with melted cheese and generously engorged with carne adovada, it was melt-in-your-mouth good, one of the best quesadillas I’ve had in the Duke City.  The carne is the color of a magnificent sunset, the result of being marinated for hours in chile so good I could drink a vat of it.  The chile used on the carne adovada isn’t nearly as piquant as the chile served on other entrees.  In fact, it’s not a piquant chile, but it is so utterly delicious that you’ll fall in love.

Not only does Quesada’s trigger memories of the chile of my youth, it elicited the promise of new memories at what promises to be one of my favorite New Mexican restaurants.

Quesada’s New Mexican Restaurant
513 San Mateo, N.E.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
(505) 232-0554
LATEST VISIT: 2 July 2009
1st VISIT:  26 June 2009
# OF VISITS: 2
RATING: 24
COST: $ - $$
BEST BET: Carne Adovada, Enchiladas, Aguas Frescas