Pam Grout's Blog, page 7

It’s not surprising that Maggie Gyllenhaal and Neil Patrick Harris would bring their kids to Los Poblanos Historic Inn and Organic Farm, the Albuquerque inn that Bon Appetit just chose as one of the top ten best hotels for food lovers.

Harris, of course, grew up in Albuquerque and while he once told a reporter he’d never dream of staying anywhere except with his parents at the home he was raised in, he and partner David Burtka now have two-year-old twins. Enough said. Besides, it’s never too early to teach Gideon and Harper, the twins who were born October 2010, where their food comes from, a lesson about which Los Poblanos is avidly passionate.

The 25-acre organic farm, not only grows 60 percent (90 percent during growing season) of the hotel’s meticulously-prepared food, but it has chickens, cows, honeybees and giant purple-blue lavender fields.

As for Gyllenhaal, she hopes to instill the same field to fork-style knowledge into her New York brood, offering them a chance to gather eggs and milk goats. And, besides, she and her brother Jake have a thing for exquisite food. The duo, along with their mom, appeared on two episodes of Molto Maria, an Italian cooking show on the Food Network.

San Ysidro, the patron saint of farmers, has been watching over the growing of food at Los Poblanos for some 81 years. In 1932, Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms, a former Congresswoman from Illinois, and her husband, Albert Simms, a congressman from New Mexico, started an experimental farm on 800 acres that stretched to the Sandia Mountains. They started New Mexico’s first dairy, experimented with sugar beets and other crops and built a greenhouse for new varieties of roses and chrysanthemums.

They also commissioned famous Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem to renovate their ranch house and design a 15,000-square-foot cultural center for political and community events.

La Quinta, as they called the cultural center with its carved doors and mantels by Gustave Baumann, tinwork by Robert Woodman, ironwork by Walter Gilbert and fresco by Peter Hurd, still hosts meetings and weddings and still serves as the cultural heart for this inspiring farm that, needless to say, holds a prominent spot on the National Historic Register. Since 1976, when it was purchased by Penny and Armin Rembe, who raised their four children on the property, it has been lovingly overseen by three generations of the Rembe family.

As I drove up the cottonwood-lined lane leading to Los Poblanos’ hacienda-style courtyard and sun-drenched dining room, past the expansive lavender fields, strolling peacocks, kitchen gardens and pond with lotus blossoms—I could feel the extraordinary energy of this landmark New Mexico ranch.

As I feasted on the locally-sourced cuisine, melons from nearby fields and eggs from hens that strut through the property, I felt as if I’d entered a different time, a different place with no clue that I was in the desert or a short four miles from one of the largest cities in the Southwest. Executive chef Jonathan Perno, a New Mexico native who trained in France, London and San Francisco, makes good use of the farm’s heritage, heirloom and native crops, incorporating things like tepary beans, chiles, cardoons, figs, parsley root, jujube dates and epazote into what he calls “Rio Grande Valley cuisine.”

And while scheduling didn’t permit taking one of the many workshops offered at Los Poblanos (things like aromatherapy, botanical art, field sketching, wine tasting, barn animals 101), I learned a lot just walking around the gardens, being inspired by the ecological consciousness subtly perpetuated by the living museum’s water conservation programs and use of natural biodegradable cleaning products.

As Kenyan manager Nancy Kinyanjui said, “We don’t want to hit people over the head with it, but we hope they recognize our commitment to sustainability and possibly take a little green consciousness home with them.”

The inn’s 20 suites and rooms have adobe kiva fireplaces, hand-hewn ceiling beams, hardwood floors, folk paintings, painted viga ceilings and, of course, the farm’s signature lavender spa amenities. Breakfast, also made with ingredients from the property’s organic farm, is included.

Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Cultural Center, 4803 Rio Grande NW, 505-344-9297.

It has been two months, three days and 16 hours since I took part in a Culinary Connectors tour in Denver, Colorado, and I still wake up in a fevered sweat dreaming about Max MacKissock’s smoked beets with grain, sorrel and yogurt. He’s the chef (or Cuisine Bean, as the Bean Team calls him) at The Squeaky Bean, one of three restaurants featured the night I took Culinary Connector’s “Top Restaurant” tour.

I have Becky Creighton to thank (or perhaps to curse, since, as I said, I’ve been unable to think of much else) for introducing me to MacKissock, currently on a Food and Wine list of the country’s top new chefs.

Creighton is the owner/creator of this three-hour tour, one of several she offers through the company she started five years ago, and not only did I get the opportunity to swoon over MacKissock’s fresh, innovative dishes that treat plants (Squeaky Bean owns six garden beds and an organic farm called the Bean Acre) like movie stars, but I got to meet him and his crazy partner, Johnny Ballen, who produced a hilarious video spoof of what they called “the bionic restaurant” that sprang back to life in June 2012.

The Squeaky Bean, that took root in 2009 in Denver’s Highland neighborhood in a ridiculously teensy space, was never hurting for fans or customers. But it occurred to the partners that if MacKissock was able to work that kind of magic in that handkerchief size of a kitchen, just think what might be possible in a former saddlery building in LoDo with three times the space.

Let’s just say Annie Sullivan** has nothing on MacKissock. And getting to meet him and the other star chefs on Creighton’s culinary tours was a highlight of my trip to Denver, like meeting the reclusive artist who painted your favorite painting. Or running into Brad Pitt in an elevator.

Creighton, who worked in tech for 10 years before shooting off in a completely different tangent, was burnt out, fed up and “hated going to my job every morning.” She went to Sedona with a journal (don’t we all?) and with a glass of wine in hand, set out to design a job she would love.

“Ninety-nine percent of what I wrote related to food, wine and people,” she says which is exactly what Culinary Connectors is all about—connecting people with the chefs and the food they’re experiencing.

The fact the food scene in Denver was about to explode, something she was told by Lon Symensma, the lemongrass-loving superstar who ran the kitchen at New York’s Buddakan before choosing Denver as the spot for his own restaurant, didn’t hurt the success of her pioneer entrepreneurial effort.

“Denver has long been known as a craft beer town,” Creighton said. “But its adventurous, young population is now being recognized as well for pushing the culinary envelope. There’s so much creativity here. Denver wouldn’t dream of becoming another Portland or another New York. The food scene here definitely calls its own shots.”

Besides the Squeaky Bean, which I’m happy to report still maintains its Farrah Fawcett memorial (wasn’t fair, Ballen said, that she died the same day as Michael Jackson) and added a Roger Ebert memorial (with two candles up), we visited Symensma’s ChoLon, a contemporary Asian (well, duh?) bistro that showcases the culinary luminary’s rampant imagination, and The Kitchen, the Denver version, that like its Boulder elder sibling, believes in creating community through food. I particularly loved their commitment to the environment including composting, wind power and the recycling of used cooking oil to power one of the server’s car.

I could go on and on about Denver’s provocative and inventive food scene, but hey, my stomach will only stretch so far.

Although Creighton didn’t play matchmaker at these restaurants (she does, but not on the particular night I imbibed), I also loved, loved, loved TAG and Root Down.

Get in touch:

The Squeaky Bean, still dedicated to irreverence and fun with its vintage cookbook menus, bills clipped to seed packets, wine poured from lab beakers, cocktails categorized by movie titles and a lit-up bingo board, is at 15th and Wynkoop, 303.623.2665, http://www.thesqueakybean.net.

ChoLon, named after the largest Chinese market in Saigon, is at 1555 Blake Street, 303.353.5223, http://www.cholon.com.

The Kitchen, a spinoff of the popular Boulder concept that was started nearly 10 years ago when Kimbal Musk and Jen Lewin’s black lab jumped in Hugo Matheson’s lap, is at 1530 16th Street (Entrance on Wazee Street), 303.623.3127, http://www.thekitchencommunity.com.

TAG, created by Chef Troy Guard who says he goes to bed thinking about food and wakes up thinking about it, is 1441 Larimer St, 303.996.9985, http://www.tag-restaurant.com.

Root Down, whose bottomless blood orange mimosas during Sunday brunch will leave you grinningly blissful, is at 600 W. 33rd, 303.993.4200, http://www.rootdowndenver.com.



Culinary Connectors, whose Becky Creighton grew up with loud Lebanese family members eating lots of food, can be reached at Box 271441, Littleton, CO, 303.495.5487, http://www.culinaryconnectors.com

**She’s the Miracle Worker who taught deaf and dumb Helen Keller to read and write

One of my life’s missions is to celebrate the extraordinary. As a travel writer, I sniff out the rare and unique, the truly special things that give a town, a country or a region its one-of-a-kind fingerprint.

Bill Gates, who started that little company of his in a garage in Albuquerque, abandoned this city with 310 yearly days of sunshine for Seattle that’s lucky to get 60 days of blue skies, but as Apple has proven, he doesn’t know everything.

Here are the top five things you can only find in Albuquerque:

1. Businesses who ask, “What would Walter White do?” New Mexico was the first state in the country to offer a film tax rebate. Consequently, its biggest city has played a starring role in many of the last decade’s films, including 2012′s $1.5 billion-grossing Avengers and the about to-be-released Lone Ranger. But the production that has brought the most fame to Albuquerque is the AMC hit, Breaking Bad, which has spawned dozens of profitable Albuquerque businesses. I was lucky enough to visit Great Face & Body that makes “Bathing Bad” bath salts, lotions and scrubs. Urban eco-shamans Keith and Andre West-Harrison, who count the show’s Giancarlo Esposito as a friend, cook up red cabbage for the organic blue meth bath salts that are selling faster than you can say Heisenberg.

Debbie Ball, owner of The Candy Lady, didn’t consider selling blue ice candy at her store until she saw Bryan Cranston offer up a bag to David Letterman. Since she’s the one who sold him that bag (the show hired her to make 100 pounds per season), she decided to capitalize, adding a whole line of Breaking Bad products, including Heisenberg’s famous porkpie hat. There’s even an Albuquerque artist who turned his struggling career around by making Pez dispensers of the show’s characters.

2. A trolley tour on an adobe trolley: Hard to find a city these days without a trolley tour, but ABQ Trolley is the only open-air trolley made from adobe. And, yes, the two Burquenos (an affectionate term for local) who own it give all the tours themselves, including a three-and-a-half hour tour of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman’s haunts. Guests on this popular, always sold-out tour see the Crossroad Motel, Saul Goodman’s law office, Tuco’s hideout and are even offered a drink at Los Pollos Hermanos which, in its civilian life, doubles as Twister’s Grill.

3. A movie theater with hundreds of lit-up buffalo skulls and swastikas. Albuquerque’s Kimo Theatre is the only theater in the world designed in the Pueblo Deco style. Built in 1927, its adobe architecture, log ceiling beams, chandeliers shaped like war drums and indigenous motifs like funeral canoes and wrought iron birds separate it from other palatial theaters of its time that tended to be decorated in Egyptian and Chinese motif. Needless to say, it’s on the National Historic Register so when it was renovated in 2001 just in time for Route 66′s 75th anniversary, the fact that the swastikas meant peace and prosperity to Hopi and Navaho cultures long before Nazi Germany adopted them gave city planners reason enough to leave them be. The interior of the Kimo (it’s an Indian word that means, “King of its Kind”) looks like the inside of a kiva, has murals depicting the Seven Cities of Cibola and is allegedly haunted by the ghost of a six-year-old boy who was killed when a lobby water heater exploded in 1951. Either way, it’s a great place to catch a Hitchcock flick, a series the Kimo happens to be running this summer.

4. A restaurant that makes salsa with the faces of Hillary Clinton, Katy Perry, Lil Wayne and Joe Biden on their labels. El Pinto, the famous 1200-seat restaurant that first coined the term “New Mexican cuisine” is run by a couple identical twin brothers who wouldn’t put anything artificial in their mouth if Breaking Bad‘s Gus Fring tried to slit their throats. They grow all their chiles to specification, fussing over them like a vintner fusses over his grapes. Jim and John Thomas have cooked on Air Force One and in the White House when George W. Bush decided to celebrate Cinco De Mayo with recipes the Thomas twins learned from their grandmother, Josephina Chavez-Griggs. Just about every actor with an agent has made it to this 12-acre property that serves 140 types of tequila and nothing that’s not organic and locally-grown.

5. Horses parked next to cars and bikes. Josh and Heather Arnold, a cute young couple who own Routes Bicycle Rentals & Tours, give brewery tours, movie tours and general Albuquerque tours on cruiser bikes. They also rent bikes to the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger who took them up on their offer five or six times during the filming of The Last Stand, his “I’ll be back” film after politics. And while bike-riding is cruiser friendly through the flat streets of Old Town and along the Paseo del Bosque trail, Josh says they occasionally encounter traffic jams with horses who are still ridden to local coffee shops from time to time. Thanks to the city’s acequias — communal irrigation systems — it’s still possible to own and ride a horse in the center of a sprawling city.

Horse photo by Bob Tilley.