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.
Many visitors arrive in New Mexico expecting to taste the state’s iconic red and green chiles. And of course, they’re there. But spend time dining across northern New Mexico and another story begins to emerge — one told through a collection of ingredients that stretches far beyond those familiar flavors.
Long before Spanish colonists arrived in the late 16th century, Indigenous Pueblo communities had cultivated corn, beans, and squash, for centuries, while gathering edible and medicinal plants from the surrounding mountains and high desert. Spanish settlers introduced sheep, cattle, wheat, chiles from Mexico, fruit orchards, and new preservation techniques, which gradually intertwined with the long-established Pueblo foodways. Nearly three centuries later, the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway in 1880 connected New Mexico to the rest of the country, ushering in new waves of settlers, immigrants, ingredients, and culinary influences.
For Matt Rembe, owner of Albuquerque’s nearly decade-old Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm, that layered history is what gives New Mexican food its distinctive character. The cuisine, he says, reflects the state’s “deep-rooted traditions and dynamic cultural mix.”…