I took so many photos on our first day in Santa Fe that I felt the need to split the day into two posts. This one covers our Friday night in downtown Santa Fe. The downtown is compact and really approachable on foot, a real surprise for a state capital.
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| Christmas Lights in the Plaza |
After getting cleaned up and dressed for dinner, we started our evening with a glass of sparkling. Rob opened a bottle of Gruet Sauvage, a cuvée that I have never tasted before. Sauvage means wild in French; I take it to mean that the base wine is fermented with natural yeast from the site, but that's just a guess. I liked the wine as well as its simple yet recognizable packaging.
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| Pregaming with Gruet Sauvage |
Many months ago Dyce booked a table at a well-respected restaurant for us and we were all looking forward to trying it. The place was beautiful and we were seated at a nice table. The evening started awkwardly with amuses being delivered before menus. We ordered appetizers to find out afterwards that one was sold out. A good server will know what is sold out or close to selling out before taking the order. The appetizers were pretty tasty and well-executed though we noted that they came out of the kitchen very quickly, almost too quickly. One was missing any visible pork belly, a featured ingredient.
After our appetizer plates were cleared, we ordered mains. These plates were on the table four minutes after we ordered them, an impossibly short time. Despite the astonishing prices of the dishes, the kitchen took little care in cooking or plating. A couple of dishes were salty beyond belief, a side was missing from one plate, and what the kitchen did to a piece of tuna was unforgivable.
I’m not mentioning the restaurant because the GM comped our entire meal (against our wishes) when we told him how poor our food was. He was gracious and appropriately apologetic.
After dinner, we needed a little cheer to help us forget dinner, so we wandered in search of a nice bar. We first stopped into the historic La Fonda, right on the plaza. While this historic Fred Harvey property is luxuriously gorgeous, the main bar was a little too yee haw for us. The gussied up line dancers in their boots and hats were not the calm scene we wanted for after dinner conversation, so we moved along.
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| Scenes from the Plaza |
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| The Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi |
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| The Loretto Chapel, Former Catholic Church |
We made our way past the beautifully up-lit Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, the current Catholic church, then by the Loretto Chapel, former Catholic church, current museum, and home of a marvelous free-standing spiral staircase, ultimately arriving at the Loretto Hotel next door. We took some time to take photos of the hotel building all lit up with holiday lights. In the holiday season, many of the prominent buildings are topped with lights that the locals call
farolitos (little lighthouses) rather than luminaria as they are called in the rest of the country.
We also shot a few photos of the lit sculptures out front of the hotel. Santa Fe has significant public art installations that are a lot of fun to see. We live in a town that values public art. Bend too has many, many works of public art, but they are by and large installed in the middle of roundabouts. This means that they are necessarily large to be seen from a distance and unapproachable, being situated in the roadways. By contrast in Santa Fe, many works of art are on a human scale and are situated right on public walkways making them easier to interact with. Neither approach is better or worse than the other; they are just different.
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