Prairie Star Restaurant at Santa Ana Pueblo shows off chef Myles Lucero’s adventurous approach to New Mexican cuisine.
IT’S A MOONLESS winter evening, cold enough to have the heat cranking in the car, when I make a wrong turn in what suddenly feels like the middle of nowhere. Pausing, unsure, I exchange wide-eyed stares with a cottontail. Prairie Star Restaurant may only be five minutes from the highway, but it feels much farther, tucked into the protected open space of historic Santa Ana Pueblo and isolated from the bustle of NM 550.
Backtracking, I find the turn I’d missed. The restaurant was expertly sited more than 100 years ago, when it was built as a traditional adobe homestead. Overlooking the Río Grande bosque, not far from the painted kiva murals of Coronado Historic Site, you forget that the Albuquerque suburbs have crept all the way out here. Pulling up, a glowing luminaria-lined path leads us inside, where it’s warm and cozy, with beautiful viga-and-latilla ceilings and graceful beehive fireplaces…