Wow, that took quite a while but I am building a repository of ALL the restaurant reviews I have written, starting with this year and adding more going backwards chronologically.  Eventually I’d love to include the Duke City Fix stuff, too!

Each is pdf’ed and most have website links for your ease of further research, and so far it’s just 2011 but that should give y’all a great start.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE – call first!  A few on the 2011 list are already out of business, and I’ll annotate them when I can but “let the eater beware”.

Andrea Lin’s Albuquerque Restaurant Reviews Archive

Today is National Hot Fudge Sundae Day.  The day to celebrate the meeting of gooey chewy fudge on top of melty vanilla ice cream.  (It’s also the day that bread rationing ended in Britain in 1948, but hey, tomorrow is Bagelmania day so you can get your chewy gluten fix going then, and nowadays we’ve got freakin’ ice cream!!!) How perfect is that with the crazy triple-digit temperatures, eh?

Go have yourself a wonderful huge hot fudge sundae.  Or just a little one.  Or even a teeny weeny sundae, like this cute little button here in Albuquerque at Route 66 Diner on Central.

Nurturing writing talent seems to be a habit at the Alibi – Jason Sheehan launched from there to James Beard Award stardom over at Denver’s Westword.

Now, Ari LeVeaux had several of his stories submitted and was nominated for a Food Writing award at the AltWeekly annual contest. He’s nominated in the under 50,000 circulation category. In the over 50,000 group you have to content with the likes of Jonathan Gold, and that ain’t happening.

Good luck, Ari!

Garduno's Chile Rojo - delicious red chile and steak

Garduno’s Mexican Restaurant group, of which just 2 are still in operation, was BOUGHT for $1.7 million dollars, quite a sum if you consider the troubles they’ve been through the last few years.

Many locals, however, seem to just not care about all that internal stuff – just bring the food back!  I kind of agree – the guacamole was quite tasty, the bowl of red (Chile Rojo) with beef tips is one of my favorite comfort meals of all time.

So, we’ll see what will happen under new control and new ownership – they say they’d like to continue sourcing locally, and that would be a great thing for Albuquerque and the loyal fans who no doubt will be back to order up some of that tableside guac.  (Though you can now get it made tableside at the FORMER Garduno’s on 4th, which is now El Brunos of Cuba – and it’s good there, too.)

(Yes, that’s a good thing.)  It appears that restaurants might get a handy grandfathering on the 2005 law that requires even small restaurants and nightclubs to install really super-duper sprinkler systems.  The proposal would allow capacities of under 500 to continue under the old code.

I am not advocating that buildings should be vulnerable to fire or unprotected, but when you’re talking about a lot of historic and awesome restaurants that are in older buildings, especially former homes and such, putting in a fully code-compliant sprinkler system would have put a lot of them out of business.  It’s damn expensive and no substitute for straight up common sense practiced by YOU, as should be normal practice when entering a public space:

1. Find the first and second available exits, just like they tell you when you’re in a plane.

2. Don’t panic.