Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [211]
Bobcat Bite is itself an extremely enchanting place, offering lovely rib-eye steaks in addition to the legendary burgers. It is a close-quarters roadside diner packed with customers through the dinner hour, with a sign-up board outside for those willing to wait. Inside there are about a half dozen seats at the counter and five or six tables and not much room to move around. Throughout the mealtime, there is a considerable amount of shuffling sideways at the counter seats so parties of two can sit together.
Since it opened in the middle of the last century, Bobcat Bite has maintained a country coziness that makes newcomers and old friends always feel at home. For us, the experience of eating here has a strong nostalgic air, as though we’ve somehow stepped into a shipshape roadside diner in the mid-1950s. In its modest way, it is a beautiful place with clean varnished wood tables and counter and pictures of bobcats and other wildlife on the walls.
Chope’s
Route 28
505–233–3420
La Mesa, NM
LD | $
Cecilia Benavides, whose father, Chope, was born and raised in the building that is now the family restaurant, and whose grandmother started selling enchiladas to La Mesa farmers in 1915, buys her year’s supply of New Mexico chiles—about three tons—during the autumn harvest from a farmer who, she says, “knows what we like—not too hot, not too mild. He plants it, grows it, picks it, then takes it to a man outside Las Cruces who roasts it.”
The Mesilla Valley’s long greens are best savored in Chope’s relleños. Stuffed with mild cheese, battered and crisp-fried, the fleshy walls of the pod have a strapping vegetable punch. As for red chiles, their ultimate taste is in the purée that is made in the kitchen each Monday. Cecilia told us that starting with commercial powdered chile inevitably makes a bitter brew. She de-stems, de-seeds, soaks, and blends whole red ones to create a cream-thick opaque vermilion liquid with flavor as clear as fruit nectar, and fairly hot—the kind of lip-searing hot that any restaurant outside New Mexico would warn customers about. But in this area, it’s normal. The really hot stuff on the table is green salsa, made entirely from Mesilla Valley jalapeños. Chope’s will oblige those who insist on maximum heat by offering special four-alarm chile in a bowl or on enchiladas. The chile-centric menu also includes gorditas, tacos, plates of chile con carne, tamales, and green chile-draped cheeseburgers.
Located among verdant fields of pepper plants and vast precision-planted orchards of pecan trees, Chope’s is a bar and a restaurant with a deservedly high reputation among planters, horticulturalists, and all aficionados of the state vegetable of New Mexico.
Duran Central Pharmacy
1815 Central Ave. NW
505–247–4141
Albuquerque, NM
BL | $
One of our favorite views in the scenery-rich Southwest is from a stool at the lunch counter in Duran Central Pharmacy. To the right is the kitchen, where you can view one of the staff using a dowel to roll out rounds of dough into broad flour tortillas that are perfect tan circles. Straight ahead is the grill where they are cooked. To see them puff up from the heat and blister golden-brown, then to smell the warm bready aroma fill the air, is to know for certain that good food is on its way.
These superlative tortillas, available plain or glistening with butter, come on the side of most lunches, including the wondrous Thursday-only carne adovada (chile-marinated pork). They are used to wrap hamburgers and as the base of quesadillas. We like them best as a dunk for Duran’s exemplary red or green chile, which is available either plain (nothing but chiles and spice) or loaded with your choice of ground beef, beans, potatoes, or chicken. The green is hugely flavorful, hot and satisfying with an earthy character;