In a development that I can only describe as surprising yet good, Albuquerque will soon be home to a new restaurant whose concept is. . .  salads.

Salad Bowl, a small franchise with only 5 locations so far across Texas and Colorado, has set their sights on many locations right here in New Mexico, with the first to be on San Mateo & Academy (is this the old Sweet Tomatoes location?  Nope, looks like a former massage therapist.)

Whoa.  In this economy, with food prices at record highs and dining options getting tighter?  I hope they do well, but in the “more is more” eating mantra I fear that many diners will check them out a few times, then retreat to Sweet Tomatoes or Souper Salad for volume.

Best of luck to Salad Bowl – I’ll be there checking out the variety!

Salad Bowl Business Information

The old standard dim sum on Lead has disappeared – Amerasia is now near the court buildings.  But the cute little building couldn’t not have a restaurant – the space is perfect and the traffic is ideal.

In comes Saffron Cafe, a new Persian restaurant hotly anticipated for many weeks.  Unfortunately for them, the excitement was high enough to cause them to run out of many of their specials during opening weekend, but give them some time as the early reports of the food quality is very promising.

This may be the last days of Garduno’s.

Tomorrow is a hearing that could shut them down completely.  They have bounced a bunch of paychecks and are stating publicly that those have all been rectified and dealt with, but this is just more bad news…

Does that mean I should go have the delicious Chile Rojo and tableside Guacamole one last time, or does it mean that the employees will be so pissy that everything will suck?

Hmph.

Albuquerque (ok, technically the greater metropolitan area) is dispensing with the name at Isleta Casino, a place with enormous venues, several restaurants (at least one of which is supposedly good), and of course tons of gambling.

What’s going there?  Hard Rock Cafe (Casino).  Yowzers.

Will the existing restaurants go away completely?  Hard to say, but hopefully I’ll find out and keep ya’ll informed.

Eater.com basically wants to get rid of a lot of the fluff out in the food blogging world by offering to pay bloggers $25 to shut down and post a (big yellow) notice why.

That notice?  Points back to Eater.com, of course.

I actually think this is brilliant on their part, both if it succeeds in closing down some of the excess blogs out there, AND as a publicity stunt.

If I had a food blog (um, I used to . . .) where I just posted my boring daily kitchen experiments, I’d consider it.  But this is FOR Albuquerque diners.  I want ya’ll to find the good spots, hear about the gossip, and spread the word about where to eat and where not to eat.

So, nice work, Eater, but you ain’t getting DukeCityFood.