Dining for Dollars

Contrasts and Connections on San G Day

Lunch on the Pueblo, Dinner at El Monte Sagrado

October 16, 2008

One of Pueblo Country’s sweetest experiences is being invited to a family home for a Feast Day meal, and in Taos you also have the contrasting experience of high-end dining rooms like El Monte Sagrado’s De La Tierra. On San Geronimo Day, pesky diners Donna and Steve were lucky to have both kinds of eating experiences. That is what makes Taos’s cultural soul so broad and deep.

At noon on San G Day, Donna and I eagerly drove to the Pueblo, having been invited to Jerrie Track’s house for a noon meal. Jerrie teaches the making of Pueblo ceramic cookware, and we have known her daughter, Bernadette, for many years through her ceramic masks, political campaigns, and UNM-Taos work. In the back yard of Jerrie’s comfy house a half mile out Pasture Rd., about twenty people were gathered on a variety of chairs in a 50-foot circle of big stones surrounding a tall tree, and more folks were ferrying food between the kitchen and dining room table, led by Jerrie’s granddaughters. The dining room table was filled with platters of turkey and dressing and ham, and bowls of green chile with beef, red chile with pork, potato salad, fruit salad with walnuts and raisins, horno bread, and chocolate cake.

The day was beautiful, and cool enough that we were a bit chilly in the shade of the tree, but the chile and friendly talk warmed us. Like all Pueblo Feast Day meals, the main ingredient was ineffable generosity and good humor. As we sipped lemonade and topped the meal off with chocolate cake, we could see another ten cars and trucks parked across the field to the west at Jerrie’s sister’s house, Juanita DuBray. She’s sculptor John Suazo’s mom, and he has his studio there, where he made the sandstone Pueblo family that graces the Fall Arts poster this year. We enjoyed this lunch feast immensely in the quiet peace that pervades Pueblo lands. We left fortified in stomach and heart.

That night, tackling a very tough assignment for the Fly, we had dinner at the elegant De La Tierra dining room at El Monte Sagrado. After its multi-million-dollar expansion, the setting at El Monte is the most posh north of Pojoaque Pueblo’s Cities of Gold/Buffalo Thunder Resort. El Monte sits in the most sculptured landscape in Taos. Behind the new suite of banquet rooms, a gas bonfire feathers up through a three-foot pile of molded steel organic-looking shapes. In the huge adjacent window, we were startled by the floating beauty of a flowery frieze painted on the ceiling, reflecting toward us off the brilliantly polished open top of a black full-length grand piano. A hundred yards away, at the end of a dark lawn separating the two new wings of rooms, stood a full-sized elk sculpture bathed in a spotlight. Towering cottonwoods stand sentinel.

In De La Tierra, they were expecting only about five tables of guests for dinner. The chairs are high-backed and cushy enough to lean your head back on, with your elbows on the soft armrests. San Geronimo Day lingered with us, as our attentive waiter for the evening was Taos Pueblo member Jesse Winters, who has worked in the restaurant for four years. We ordered an appetizer of satay chicken and beef. The peanut sauce had permeated the bed of slaw under the skewers, making a nice combo of cool crunchy and warm nutty flavor. Donna ordered pork tenderloin and I, the beef tenderloin. Hers turned out to be six slices of pork about 3/8� thick arrayed on a bed of sautéed pearl onions, chopped green beans, and red pepper slices, which were crisp and delectable. On top was a swirl of angel-hair fried potatoes. The pork had a nice subtle adobo coating, and could have been a bit more moist.

My filet mignon was beautifully served: the base layer was two enchiladas made of mashed potatoes wrapped in bright red tortillas of a terrific sweet corn flavor. Laid across these pontoons were four spears of asparagus, crunchy and tasty, and riding on top was my filet, a tender and delicious piece of beef. I asked for it to be cooked “on the medium side of medium rare,� probably a distinction that irritates many cooks, and it came just medium, the surface lightly charred, a tad dry like the pork, but it was good. The tangy potato enchiladas really stole the show.

We ordered glasses of the house Anaconda wines, from California wineries, and liked our Cabernet and Pinot Noir, $7 each. There is a long list of more distinguished wines as well, and of course full service from the bar. We miss Dexter, though, the great bartender now living close to his wife’s family in western Oregon.

Our bill came to $70, not the most expensive dinner for two in town, and we thought a fair price for a very fine meal. Our sweet maitre’d, Mercedes Valdez, explained that the new chef was still working with the former chef’s menu, and that a new menu would be rolled out soon.

We chatted with the manager about some messy chairs the day shift had not cleaned, and the odd design choices in the women’s bathrooms. Donna, being an architectural designer, found it quite awkward that as she approached the women’s vanity, the automatic water faucets—both of them—came on, but the soap and the towels were located behind her on a separate table, causing wasted water as she made two 180-degree turns across the door-to-stall traffic to complete her washing and drying. In the Anaconda Bar’s women’s room, the lights weren’t working, and a lamp had been placed on the table behind patrons’ backs, powered by a cord taped down the wall and across the floor from an outlet by the sink. The door to one of the two stalls had a bent hinge and wouldn’t close. There wasn’t enough light for women to touch up their makeup, an important function of a bar restroom, and when you lean forward to see your face, you trigger the automatic water spigots and get splashed. Very odd, in a “spa� that trumpets its green engineering.