Dining for Dollars: El Monte, Joseph's Table, Lambert's, Downtown Bistro

Low-Cost Bar Food at High-End Taos Restaurants

November 15, 2006

Horse Fly wondered: can two budget-conscious folks get some swanky bang for their buck at our town’s upper-crust restaurants by eating at the bar?

Sí, se puede! Yes indeed, you can, on a budget of $25 for two, excluding alcohol (or even including it, at one of our bar visits.) This Pesky Diner went to El Monte Sagrado, Joseph’s Table, Lambert’s, and Downtown Bistro, accompanied by his wife, Donna LeFurgey, and we found a whole ecology of bartenders and servers sympathetic to our quest (they themselves being in our economic class). The food was absolutely delicious and imaginative. And to top it off, high-end bar-hopping offers architectural eye-candy and lots of ambiente (ambiance, folks.)

My wife and I have gone to El Monte Sagrado to watch an occasional NCAA or NBA basketball playoff game in the last couple of years. Taoseños are no doubt familiar with the drama of Tom Worrell’s Dharma Properties and of room rates and staff turnover at El Monte. Last week, however, we found a highly competent new staff running the bar, so we settled in for bar-dinner in the most visually stimulating environment in town. The Anaconda Bar gets its name from the golden-scaled, three-foot-diameter snake circling the bar overhead. It erupts from the floor, does two 360s to gain height, then parallels the curving bar before disappearing into the ceiling. Local plasterer Peter Sharfin (among others), son of dentist Dr. Sharfin, helped construct the reptile. Reef fish—electric-blue, purple, clown-striped, and silver—glide around in the well-lit 7’ x 5’ x 3’ fish tank, and a gangsta eel with underslung jaw glares from a hole.

The surprise was that the Anaconda has the most affordable bar food, of excellent quality. Donna had a lobster quesadilla for $13, which had a generous amount of lobster with delicate flavor. I had the burger, since the Cowboys were playing the Giants on the three wide-screens (horrible game!). The burger was crusty on the outside and pink in the middle and included hand-cut fries. For only $7, that made it the cheapest bar burger in our high-end sample.

In past visits we’ve had the Anaconda’s Taos Tumbleweed Salad (romaine, tomato, avocado, bacon, chopped egg, and “hair potatoes�—the winner for weird menu names); the chicken and chorizo Tortilla Soup; the Caesar Salad with herb-grilled chicken, chile-dusted shrimp, or tofu; and the flash-fried Blue Corn Calamari with pineapple salsa. You can combine two or three of these selections various ways and escape at $25 (without booze.)

The new bar staff is led by manager Steve Zell, recently from California, and new bartenders Dexter Reid of Long Island and local Janet Cunico, whose parents operated the Sleeping Boy lounge at Cruz Alta and Paseo del Pueblo Sur for years. Rushon Perera, the ponytailed Sri Lankan who brought $20,000 from a Taos fundraiser to his island after the tsunami hit, remains a friendly face at the bar. All are great conversationalists. Cushioned alcoves accommodate and insulate small groups from the crowd.

The Pesky Diners found equally delicious and affordable bar food at Lambert’s, the intimate restaurant at the other end of the size scale from El Monte. We called ahead to ask about the bar-food menu, and when we arrived, bartender Debbie had made us a list of combinations we could get for our $25 limit. I had a chicken stew on puff pastry: delicious and filling, with peas, carrots, and a hint of green chile. The puff pastry was about the size of a big sopaipilla, but with the texture of a light croissant. Donna had a filling lamb stew that came with a scoop of smooth but firm mashed potatoes which had just a hint of garlic and cream. A diner next to us, who didn’t want potatoes, got a scoop of pasta with his lamb. As Debbie said, the lamb was “really autumnal,� in a rich dark gravy—perfect for a cold night. We still had room under our bill cap to add a New Mexico beefsteak tomato salad for $5.50.

Also on Debbie’s affordable list: corn chowder, grilled radicchio, Zeke’s spicy gazpacho, spinach salad, lamb taquitos, roma and artichoke salad, an artisan cheese plate, and a quarter pound of rock shrimp. Rock on! You could also cherry-pick the dinner menu and get real Dungeness crab taquitos with poblano avocado salad ($11) or a tomato stuffed with piñon nuts and goat cheese ($9).

Lambert’s has such an intimate atmosphere because Zeke and Tina Lambert remodeled the Randalls’ 1940 home 18 years ago, on the north side of Randall Lumber. The bar is a perfect cozy hangout. A stainless-steel bar runs concave in the far corner, and somebody had arranged the liquor bottles, lit by indirect lighting, in clean combinations. The bar also serves a small anteroom that seats eight on stuffed chairs and loveseats. Zeke’s personal wine list is carefully selected for variety, with glasses from $5 to $11 and bottles from $16 to $175, when you call off your limit.

Another great orchestration of ambiance and affordable bar food is Joseph’s Table, now settled into its “urban� feel in the back of La Fonda Hotel’s lobby on the south side of the Plaza. Sidling up to the long, black-painted oak bar in Joseph’s, and seeing your reflection in the four-foot-diameter gilt mirror behind the bar, you could hallucinate that you’re in Lo-Do, Denver’s trendy, remodeled red-brick-warehouse district near Coor’s Field. Patrick, owner of World Cup coffee, collaborated with Joseph in painting and decorating this former Hunan Chinese place.

Donna and I came in on Hallowe’en night and found a party beginning to fill up a long line of tables pushed together in the bar’s “well� section, a few feet below the barstools and separated by a railing. The party grew to 20 locals, all in snappy costumes, toasting the night. Serving this happy crowd was young Fitz Whaley, son of an ink-stained journalist, with his father’s voice and wit. Donna said, “I’ve been watching him. He’s good. I waited tables a long time, and he’s got the moves down.� Our bartender was also in costume as “Sadie,� a tarty barmaid with long curly blond wig and strapless black dress. She’s really Amber Starr, a pal of Anna Eyre’s (who edits the UNM-Taos literary magazine, “The Howl�). Amber came to Taos two years ago from the Bay Area.

Joseph’s rivals Lambert’s and the Anaconda for affordable bar menu delights. Their hamburger ($12) is organic buffalo, served with a few lattice-cut sweet-potato chips and a cute little hotter-than-hell jalapeño relleno. Since I’m a type-2 diabetic needing regular protein, I had the burger while Donna had thick potato-leek soup with sautéed onion strips as garnish ($6), and we split an order of polenta fries with grilled radicchio (a tart purpley cabbage we didn’t have at Safeway when I was a kid). The polenta fries ($6) were light, spiced with parmesan and parsley, perhaps, and covered with a splash of gorgonzola crème sauce that balanced out the radicchio. You can also get an order of their Duck Fat Fries (potatoes) for $4.

Just a half-block north of Lambert’s, across from Smith’s, is Downtown Bistro. Marco and Laura’s place has a wine and beer bar only, and it was full when we went, so we ate at a nearby table. It’s the only smoking-allowed bar in this episode of Dining for Dollars, which was quite noticeable, with two cigar-smokers at the bar. There is no bar food—you order off the restaurant menu, which, overall, is the priciest of the four restaurants we visited. If you want to stay under the $25 cap, you’re limited to one appetizer and one of their three low-end entrees from $15 to $17.

We chose the half-roasted chicken with vegetables and mashed spuds ($15), plus a warm spinach salad with sautéed red onion, bacon, dried cherries, goat cheese, and red-wine vinaigrette. Our server, the wry and sparkling Juliet, also does shifts at Bravo, and was one of the stars in the public speaking course I taught at UNM-Taos this summer. She’s a single mom with three kids chasing a nursing degree for a better tomorrow.

The chicken, which we ordered at 9 p.m., was understandably a touch dry at that hour, but with a nice herbed skin. Ms. Donna’s salad was scrumptious and well-balanced. Desserts are all $6.50, including Laura’s mom’s famous chocolate cake.

So: the Pesky Diners for Dollars encourage you to go out of your usual restaurant routines and belly up to these aesthetically-pleasing bars in some of Taos’s high-end eateries. For a switch, you could even eat turkey sandwiches at home and go out for two glasses of low-end but well-chosen wine, share-a-dessert, and have two coffees-with-shots for your $25 limit. (German accent:) We have ways to live it up, aqui en Taos.