Over the weekend, we attended a comedy show with our editor featuring the insanely funny Rory Scovel (look him up if you haven’t seen him) at Quezada’s Comedy Club in Bernalillo. Setting aside how Albuquerque-born Marc Marron showed up unexpectedly to do a mini-set, which ruled, the night was super-duper fun and Scovel was brilliant—but we mainly want to offer some advice to the club/restaurant, as its food situation is trés bizarre.
Some facts first!
- You might remember Stephen Michael Quezada as Gomez, aka Gomey, from Breaking Bad. He was damn fine in the role, and we salute him for it. He’s also been a comic and worked for Bernalillo County as a commissioner or something (we didn’t look it up, even though we could have easily done that).
- He, by which we mean probably admin people, opened up Quezada Comedy Club & Cantina inside the Santa Ana Star Casino in Bernalillo in December 2003.
- The club, as it were, had previously been a multi-tiered black box theater sort of thing. Now it’s a tabled affair with carpet and a stage and the tables and the carpet and also the stage.
- Attached just outside the main stage room is a cantina—think bar food and a number of items called, like, “Gomey nachos” or something. Throughout the space you’ll find photos of Quezada hanging out with the likes of Bryan Cranston and then a sort of Chili’s-esque bunch of posters and metal signs and ephemera.
- Quezada’s gets some pretty good shows. Scovel, for example, has numerous specials and has been in movies and such; Anchorman alum David Koechner is slated to standup there later this year; we once saw comic/actor Joel McHale perform there, though that was prior to the Quezada branding.
Which brings us back around to our trip to see Scovel. The “& Cantina” part of the name led us to believe there’d be food, and while there certainly was, we found the whole setup challenging. Here’s how it worked:
- The smart show up well before the show to eat out in the bar area.
- Why? Because even though you can take food into the stage area, they don’t allow real plates or glass.
- What do you do about that? Well, it’s easy: You simply go into the stage area and get yourself a table. You don’t get to choose the table, or, at least, we were not given a choice. At that point, your table is reserved, which is a good thing because you need to go back out front to the cantina if you’d like food or drink.
- The security guard tells you that you can order to-go food and booze in plastic cups, so you stand in a line behind 20 of the most ill-prepared people in the world. Friends, every bar in the entire fucking world has a burger, nachos, maybe a house salad and chicken fingies. There is no plane of existence wherein you need to stand in a line and ponder that reality.
- But they do, so you’re there in the line for, like, 25 minutes while some yahoo in front of you is like, “Oh, wow, they have a burger with green chile!”
- Eventually you order, and then you wait. It doesn’t take long, but the people with whom you’re attending the show are all like, “HOW LONG WILL THIS TAKE?” and you’re like, “I DO NOT KNOW! I DO NOT WORK HERE! I HAVE THE SAME AMOUNT OF INFORMATION THAT YOU DO!”
- Eventually, you do get back into the stage area, where all the carpeting and seating in the world can’t make you feel better about the back and forth weirdness you just endured.
- The smashburger with bacon and green chile and all the burger stuff turns out to be pretty damn good. It’s not actually a smash burger, though, but that’s OK, because you’re not about to call up Stephen Michael Quezada to be like, “Gomey, I thought you could tell your kitchen what a smash burger actually is.” In the kitchen’s defense, it was cooked perfectly and the fries were also much better than you’d expect.
- You spend some time thinking about how this place must generate a lot of to-go container waste, but also you aren’t really up-to-date on the laws in Bernalillo, so maybe there’s some casino thing about glass in performance areas.
- The people you’re with remind you that there are likely hundreds of performance spaces and food-servin’ movie theaters that worked out how to do this stuff.
- You laugh and laugh and laugh.
Look, we don’t expect the moon when it comes to bar food in a Bernalillo casino, but there’s gotta be a better way to do this stuff. We frankly felt terrible for the staff, because everyone was really impatient and they’re probably sick to death of explaining the setup to folks. The bottom line is that no restaurant should require a multi-point plan spread across two rooms that results in a mountain of trash. We want to come back, Gomey—can you help?
This guy, if you’re still wondering.
Also
- Well, it’s been a whirl of wind out there when it comes to SNAP benefits, with the feds basically being a bunch of complete assholes about it amidst the shutdown, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham saying the state was going to help for a bit, a judge then telling the feds they needed to not let people starve to death, a wild Trump interview on 60 Minutes and, now, a world wherein people act like restaurants stepping up to offer free sporadic meals to kids is a feel-good story. Let us be clear, it is cool that restaurants do this, and it feels especially cool in a city like Santa Fe where community is a big deal. That they have to become the good samaritans in this way—that they have to feed the community because the systems we have in place won’t do what they’re designed to do is…we just stepped aside to swear a bunch. We can’t do an entire list of every restaurant in Santa Fe offering this stuff, because a lot changes moment-to-moment. We do know Yin Yang Chinese Restaurant was offering something, as was Café Castro and Tomasita’s/Atrisco (that last pair might be offering food to federal workers period, and not just the kiddos, but again, stuff is changing minute to minute). The best thing you can do for the revolution is turn and go back to looking up restaurants on social media to see if they’re offering anything. We hate Facebook, too, but you can sometimes glean good info. Also, we just came back to this item to add that the Burrito Co. and Fusion Tacos are doing stuff for the kids right now. Free stuff. Keep in mind that any of this can change at any second. OK? OK.
- This aforementioned item feels bad to us, particularly since we’re food secure, though we know and love some people on SNAP, and even if we didn’t, we’re talking about human beings who should not starve to death when we have enough food. First off, if you’re good with this SNAP stuff, we’d like you to move on from The Fork, because we don’t value your readership if you’re that kind of piece of shit. Second-of-ly, we’d urge anyone in Santa Fe who is able to donate to places like The Food Depot or the Reunity Resources farm. In both cases, donating money is likely to have a bigger impact thanks to these orgs’ partnerships that allow them to stretch money further. In Reunity Resources’ case, they have that cool fridge at the edge of the drive where hungry folks can grab a little something, not judgment. As always, do what you can if you can, and visit those websites to learn more about how it all works.
- Thanksgiving is coming, and if you can stomach the idea of eating a millionaire meal in a hotel restaurant rather than giving those bucks to a nonprofit, you’ll find lots of local eateries stay open on that day and offer up special menus. Like the SNAP helper restaurants, we can’t possibly begin to find every single one, but here’s a good way to work it out: If it’s a hotel restaurant or fine dining, it’s probably got something going on. Outside of that, you’ll just have to pick up your phone and call whatever place you like to see if they’re doing something. And before you get sanctimonious about people working on holidays, please note that your old pal The Fork loved working on holidays, because it often meant more money in tips and also maybe some of us didn’t raleigh spending those days with family. Maybe it was really hard for us and we needed to have a project. Maybe not everyone sees everything the way you do. And before anyone tells us we’re being sanctimonious about donations and people who eat in restaurants, just remember that people can be more than one thing, and we know we’re obnoxious. What’s your excuse?
- We are clearly on one for this edition of The Fork, and we’re sorry. We’re just seeing a lot of suffering right now, and it’s infuriating.
- OK, so there was another whirl of wind out there in social media land, as opening-this-week bar/restaurant Gatsby’s (a name that still feels gross to us) announced its menu and pricing structure ahead of it’s Nov. 6 first-day-of-service in the Railyard within the space that formerly housed Opuntia. Well, the internets didn’t much like the pricing, with many a Santa Fean taking to Facebooks to be like, “I don’t much like it.” In response, the owners announced a happy hour and re-kajiggered pricing. You can see the full menu here, but know that not every restaurant is going to be cheap, and that’s OK.
- SFR’s regular food writer had a pretty solid experience at Lago Café in June. That’s our town’s only Cuban restaurant, just so’s you know. Now, in November, we understand the restaurant is expanding its menu and operating hours to include Monday and…menu items. We want to go to there, they said Liz Lemon-like, and we’re just psyched that such a place exists.
Yeah!
More Tidbits
- In pizza news, some Italian pizza guide has deemed such-and-such NYC pizza as the best in all the land, but CNN-dot-com reports that that same guide has noted Los Angeles is doing pretty well in the pizza game. Yeah, Naples, Italia’s aptly named 50 Top Pizza is all about New York’s L’industrie Pizzeria, but there are apparently good pizzas in other parts of America, too. Maybe not in Santa Fe, but other parts!
- Speaking of that SNAP stuff, grocery delivery app Instacart announced a discount on groceries on Oct. 31. You can read about that deal here. As we say, this stuff is changing a lot right now, so please do your due diligence in making sure whatever offers you might see are still valid.
- To wit, after we started writing this edition of The Fork, we learned that SNAP benefits will indeed go out—but at a reduced rate, and likely delayed. Trump doesn’t care if you die even at all. NPR has more.
In Summation
We were serious when we said you should donate to The Food Depot, Santa Fe’s most beloved food bank. We’ve asked our readers to do this a number of times over the years, and we’re asking again. We’re only asking if you’re able, and we’re only asking because otherwise people can and do die. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about any of this, either. And let us also reiterate that food banks will often put out a call for particular foods, but that it’s always better to give money than to try and go shopping for them. Click this link if you would like to donate or learn more. We wish we could do this in the old days when we’d offer up gift certificates to a random donor, but we sadly cannot in this instance. Do it for the feel-goods. Do it and don’t tell anybody. Just…if you can help people and don’t, that’s sad.
Quezada’d but good,
The Fork
