One of the things I like to do when I travel is eat new things. Food is an expression of the local character and culture of an area. Take the Southwest for example where green chile is King, Queen, President, Prime Minister, and all the rest. A ubiquitous food that transcends garnish or topping, green chile is integral to Southwest cuisine, just as a chocolate mole is characteristic of Mexican cooking a thousand miles south of Santa Fe. Similar foods and cultures, but the foods couldn’t be any more different.
One of my favorite stops has been Sparky’s in Hatch, NM. Driving down the main drag of Hatch, it is nearly impossible to miss, with its collection of crazy Americana icons all over the outside of the building. Inside you can have green chile in just about everything. This is the epicenter of green chile, the Hatch Valley of New Mexico, where it is grown, packaged, frozen, and distrubuted. At Sparky’s you can find green chile in the lemonade, the milk shakes, the barbecue sauce, green chile stew, chopped and piled onto your burger. The air is alive with the scent of it. Everywhere. Once you get past the newbie burn on your taste buds, you’ll start to crave this stuff.
Yesterday I met with some friends who were in Denver and hoped to give them a good introduction to some food that was distinctly Colorado fare. Our Mexican food is good (it’s no Santa Fe) but it’s not shabby. An iconic Mexican eatery in Denver, Benny’s, is still locked up due to COVID—unfortunately, this can be said of a lot of places, and I have my doubts many of them will ever recover. Welcome to the new era of the mass produced restaurant chain, since who else could survive? Another iconic Mexican restaurant is Casa Bonita. I spared my friends the introduction to this place. Nobody needs to fly all the way out from Kansas City, home of BBQ to eat Swanson TV dinners as they watch high school kids jump off cliffs into a pool every fifteen minutes. The only thing edible there are the sopapillas. Which are delicious, but not worth the hoardes of kids chucking crayons at each other at birthday parties, bonking your head on Black Bart’s Cave, or the aftermath of gastrointestinal destruction which will follow after reconstituted refried beans, microwave rice, and almost tasteless enchiladas.
So, after being turned away at Benny’s I suggested BeauJo’s in Arvada. Home of the Mountain Pies. The mountain pie is distinguished by a thick, yeasty crust that encapsulates the rest of the pizza like a halo of bready goodness. Once you plow through the cheese and sauce and toppings such as mushrooms, basil, pepperoni, sausage…jeez, pretty much this and anything else you can think of to put on a pizza, what you have left is essentially a bread stick to slather with honey and continue to eat. My only complaint about BeauJo’s is for some reason they started putting the mushrooms and other toppings underneath the cheese, which leaves you with nearly raw, crunchy mushrooms. This is a departure from how I remember them being back in the flagship restaurant in Idaho Springs, about half an hour west of Denver on I-70. I hope it was a good introduction to something uniquely Colorado for my friends. My son and I had eaten at the Ft. Collins location just a few weeks before, so it was still fresh in my mind.
As I made the three hour drive home from Denver last night, I got a little hungry, even after five slices of pizza. Knowing I would be getting in too late to want to cook. Unfortunately, this is where eating your way across America has its drawbacks. How do you chase a meal like BeauJo’s or Sparky’s when you are just burning fuel and miles? Last night, I chased it with Wendy’s chicken nuggets, fries, and a lemonade in Silverthorne, CO. I let my dog eat most of the fries and nearly half of the nuggets. No. Just NO. Especially if you get that fishy aftertaste and realize there is absolutely no reason for that to have happened.
I would have preferred a cheese enchilada at Casa Bonita.
Some people eat to live and others live to eat, so they say. I did like the lemonade however. It would have been better with some vodka and some live music on a hot summer day. Road trips have their ups and downs with food, and not everyone can stop at a sit down place for every meal, much less afford to do that. There’s a reason hotels have elipticals and treadmills for their guests. If you had to live on road food alone, you would gain a lot of weight. This is why they have bar stools at truck stop counters. I have been on road trips before where I got so sick of eating fast food or even restaurant food that what I really wanted with a decent sandwich, salad, bowl of soup, or anything that didn’t come with Coke or Pepsi.
Last night, I rolled in to town at about 9pm. By Midnight, still amped up from the road, I ate a bowl of ramen noodles, dressed up with some red pepper flakes and extra virgin olive oil, before heading to bed.