Food & Wine: How the Wild Flavors of the Desert Define New Mexico Cuisine
Across Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos, a new generation of chefs and bartenders is drawing on heirloom crops, Indigenous ingredients, and wild botanicals to tell a fuller story of the state’s cuisine.
SANTA FE
Shared Plates at Paloma. Credit: Photo by Dillon Sachs
Just over an hour and a half south, chefs are arriving at similar conclusions through very different cuisines. At Leo’s, chef Stella Achenbach and owners Jonathan Boyd and Zakary Pelaccio look to Malaysia and Thailand through a New Mexican lens. Pelaccio describes the compact restaurant’s vibrant cooking as having a “rigorous and proud focus on product and raw materials,” including full-flavor high-alpine pastured lamb, which Achenbach folds into a spiced lamb shoulder dish, dosed with tamarind, and a Thai chili yogurt. He adds that the restaurant, opened in August 2025, is still new and that he and the team will be leaning even more into local ingredients in the future.
A quick drive east, chef Fernando Olea has spent a decade at Sazón bridging the culinary traditions of Mexico and New Mexico through his “New World Cuisine.” Local ingredients appear alongside Mexican techniques, most notably in his signature New Mexican mole, built from red chile pods, apricots, piñon nuts, and pecans. Just a few streets away, Marja Martin looks to Mexico through the lens of northern New Mexico at Paloma, her colorful, farm-fueled restaurant, where the cooking is among Santa Fe’s most vibrant. The Three Sisters Short Rib Barbacoa combines Native-raised beef with pinto beans, chicos (fire-roasted, dried corn), chile pasado (sun-dried green chile), and nixtamalized pumpkin. Behind the bar, beverage director Carley Callis turns regional ingredients into inspiring drinks, from a sungold tomato tepache to the herbaceous nonalcoholic Mineragua Oscura, which layers citrusy pipicha, peppery pápalo, Mexican mint marigold, sunrise hyssop, perilla, and minty huacatay with a bittersweet syrup made from oxidized “black citrus” — upcycled citrus peels transformed over six weeks, much like black garlic — plus lime, and sparkling mineral water.
The philosophy extends to Santa Fe’s resort dining, too. Since opening in July 2021, SkyFire, the signature restaurant at Bishop’s Lodge, Auberge Collection has showcased the region’s ingredients through wood-fire cooking in dishes like nixtamal oatmeal with local heirloom corn, pepitas, and Mezcal-soaked raisins; and an elk T-bone. - Kat Odell