Despite some rumors that have been flying around, Blue Cactus Grill on Coors is indeed still slinging meals through their kitchen doors, and have even recently expanded to do catering and baking.

They made an appearance at today’s Chef Knockout at the Albuquerque Convention Center, serving up not savory items but an assortment of teeny cupcakes in pretty good flavors like lemon and mocha. But the variety that caught my ear and then my tastebuds was the Sopaipilla Cupcake – a mellow white cake with just a hint of whatever flavor it is that you get when you deep fry bread dough. The kicker is a buttery honey frosting and a drizzle of extra honey right over the top.

Brilliant.

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.

Was it the group I just saw, checking out with about 11 raggedly looking upper-class snowboarder types all milling around the registers with clearly nothing better to do like take a seat and get generally out of the way of all of the other transactions that are on the cusp of occuring if only their warm bodies would cease to obstruct the flow of foot traffic?

Possibly.