Escapes WEEKENDER
LEFT James Beard Award– winning chef Fernando Olea serves up modern Mexican cuisine at Sazón. The restaurant’s walls are adorned with works from some of Mexico’s finest artists, with many pieces available to purchase. BELOW Chef Olea’s Dulce Sinfonía is his signature dessert. The full ingredient list is a restaurant secret, but diners can expect high notes of caramel and low notes of fruit in an avocado-based ice cream.
the Museum of International Folk Art—the largest collection of global folk art in the world—before rambling through the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. For fans of contemporary work, SITE is an artist-led space that curates rotating exhibits. And if you want to get weird, there’s Meow Wolf, an interactive experience that bends and blows the mind with 70 rooms of immersive art. But an Artist Date is about more than looking at others’ works, as Cameron would remind you. It’s about pleasure and play. As you plan your excursion, she admonishes, “Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty.” If music is what moves you, the Santa Fe Opera offers open-air performances set against a mountain backdrop. Or maybe flipping through novels and magazines at the locally owned indie bookstore Collected Works will inspire you. Perhaps the earthy flavors of New Mexican dishes are the keys to unlocking your previously untapped artistic genius. Anything’s possible. Santa Fe’s food scene blends Mexican and indigenous Pueblo cuisine, resulting in dishes like carne adovada and enchiladas drowned in the ubiquitous green chile sauce. (A New Mexican senator is currently lobbying to make roasted green chiles the state’s official scent.) For classic New Mexican fare, try La Choza or its sister restaurant, The Shed. James Beard Award–winning chef Fernando Olea is behind Sazón, which serves dishes based on indigenous
Mexican tradition. In between meals, sip a cortado at Iconik Coffee’s Lupe location. The cafe’s white stucco courtyard and jumble of potted plants invite whatever doodling, reading, or composing that you’re inclined to do. In the evenings, order a mezcal negroni at La Reina or a smoked- sage margarita at Secreto Lounge, a cozy bar tucked into the historic Hotel St. Francis. Above all, let the landscape work its magic on you. Hiking Atalaya Trail above the city, you might just feel like sitting down to sketch the expanse spread beneath you. Even those who don’t identify as creative may be surprised to find themselves reaching for a camera in Santa Fe, hoping to capture the way the shadows move across adobe walls and pink clouds pile up over the Sangre de Cristo range in the evening. Writing about the New Mexican landscape, O’Keeffe said, simply: “It’s the most wonderful place you can imagine.” This might be hyperbole, but then again, who can argue with her paintings? You’ll have to go see for yourself.
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JULY 2023
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