Just a few tidbits for y’all.

Los Cuates, one of the stalwarts in our NM food scene, is expanding to a new location in Santa Fe – good for them!  They’ll be inside the newly renovated Santa Fe Lodge hotel with a grand opening scheduled for early May.  Another local opening will be at the Sunport, taking over the Garduno’s spot after winning the bid over El Pinto.  The “Twins” will soon be quadruplets!

Next month was the deadline for a bunch of local restaurants to install really crazy expensive new sprinkler systems, and no one is happy about it – not the restauranteurs nor the city officials who will have to enforce the law, so they granted another 90 day extension to the businesses.  I’ll be on the look out for closings over the summer due to small establishments not being able to pony up the $100K to update their systems.  Ouch.

Really good restaurants often do well, that’s what I love to see.  Here’s my quote of the week:  “Recession? What recession?” – Christophe Descarpentries, one of the owners of P’tit Louis Bistro, with one downtown location and another opening up in Nob Hill.  Well deserved, guys!

One of the heroes of my early days as a foodie here in Albuquerque is leaving town for family reasons – Chef Sam Etheridge, with a storied history in landmarks like Portabello, Bien Shur, Kanome, Ambrozia, and Nob Hill Bar & Grill had a decade to make you all happy with duck tacos, lobster corndogs, amazing Sunday brunches and the weirdest food innovations this town has seen in years, many of which are now standard menu items at your favorite restaurants.  He spent the last several years as a writer for the Local IQ, tending to his cooking and his family.  I wish him the best.

I Love Sushi has been on the “short list” of favorite Albuquerque sushi joints for years. They are friendly, easy to find, and the sushi is both decent-to-good and inexpensive.

Even the Alibi has been showering the love on them recently, which made me think I need to get back there for some house-cured saba. Yum.

Visiting their website I noticed it was vastly different than before, and upon first look it is pretty. Clean and brightly colored with menu navigation peppered throughout the flowering branches.

BUT. It is flash.  Complete with things that spin and optional sound effects.  Ick.  Truly pretty on the surface with all the depth of a mirage, unfortunately.

What does that mean? It means there is virtually no TEXT on the website. This is death for anyone needing to pull up the site on a smartphone or computer with slow internet. It also means searching for the site online could be dicey, as the search engines tend to utilize text content when building their pool of information.  This could be bad for SEO and people just being able to find the restaurant at all.

I recommend, for their sake, at least one of these changes:

1. Put the address and phone number in plain text on every single page.
2. Keep the same pretty scheme, but lose the flash in favor of a text-based navigation system, including the contents of the menu.

Just called Noda’s Japanese Cuisine to see about some post New Year raw fish and heard a voice message telling me they were closing “for relocation” as of December 18th.

Wha….?

No more info was given, and a “thanks for your patronage” closing made me very, very worried.

Noda’s is one of those restaurants I talk up quite a bit and visit far less often than I’d like. I hope that my inaction is not a contributor to their current woes. Or that this is all just worrying in vain and they have a huge shiny new space on the ready to welcome old and new eaters alike.

Thanks to a (finally) nudging forward economy, people are opening their wallets just a little bit more, and that’s benefiting some restaurants – if they’ve managed to stay open so far. Holiday eating-out traffic is probably merely stable this year, but the seasonal uptick is still occurring, especially with things like celebratory meals and gift certificate purchases. All good!

Cecilia’s downtown (a gem worth seeking out, even after the fame of Guy Fieri’s show) is cranking out hundreds of tamales for holiday orders, and Buffett’s Candies is doing well because everyone loves sugar.

Economists talk about the “lipstick index”, meaning that lipstick sales do well in recessions because it is a small luxury that won’t be done without even when times are tight.

In the food business, you might call it the “chocolate factor” – everyone loves sweets and chocolates, candies, and other confections are a cheap way to have a little treat and remind yourself that the world has not gone entirely into the crapper.  And thusly Buffett’s does well, Van Rixel Brothers is cranking along with awards all over the place, and the same goes for Cocopotamus – they’ve been featured in HUGE publications like Martha Stewart and other girly-type magazines as a healthy indulgence, and Theobroma is still one of the local torchbearers of chocolate.

All hail the locally-owned producers of deliciousness!

Just released: New Mexico Culinary Treasures Trail, a list of tried-and-true spots all over the vast state.

Who knows what kind of things the state of New Mexico is up to, what with the upheaval and changeover in the executive office, and who knows if the Rail Runner will survive the likely gutting of the state budget, but, hey – at least someone is getting paid to point out the best Green Chile Cheeseburgers in the state!

OK, OK, I shouldn’t be so cranky – I just let the potential death of Rail Runner get me down again. Anything that promotes the patronage of small businesses is good, especially restaurants which sustain us, give us a place to meet with family, and fill us with a sense of community in ways that you just won’t get from indifferent chain owners.

The Culinary Treasures Trail does just that – it only highlights spots in business for over 40 years, and chose those based on tons of feedback and a research team that has a good deal of experience eating all over the state. I even got to throw my 7 cents in (when I’m offered 2 cents, I’ll typically spout a bit more…).

Local highlights include Grandma Warner’s K&I Diner, the Dog House, and (duh) Mary & Tito’s. A few that I haven’t visited in awhile popped up and made me interested in re-visiting those classics. Murphy’s Mule Barn wins with their hubcap-sized chicken fried steak, Mannie’s has the unforgettable waitress Laverne and fantastic pancakes, and Sadie’s for anything and everything with chile.