Review of Cafe San Estevan in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Estevan Garcia journeyed through many kitchens before opening Cafe San Estevan 10 years ago. Growing up in Santa Fe, he worked in restaurants around town then cooked for four years at a Franciscan Brothers monastery in the Midwest. In 1979, he moved to California and, with chef John Scalar, opened St. Estephe, in its day the hottest of hot Los Angeles eateries. There, on the edge of a mall parking lot in an outlying area, he and Scalar transformed traditional Southwestern dishes into beautiful still lifes. They painted checkerboards on plates with chile purees. Nearly every plate included some example or other of edible art. I remember a dish fancifully called a Navajo basket - two kinds of fish cut into long strips and woven together.

Returning to Santa Fe, Garcia rejected visual pyrotechnics like these in favor of a simpler approach, concentrating on local produce, organic when possible. Fie shops at the farmers' market twice a week in season and drops in throughout the year. His lamb is from Shepherd's Lamb of Tierra Amarilla. Garcia employs what he calls French discipline and techniques to bring out flavors. He starts the red chile that accompanies his chicken enchiladas by roasting pods from Chimayo - he uses Hatch chiles for his green - and soaking them in a water-and-chicken-broth marinade. He slowly reduces the sauce, as if it were a French one. Garcia excels in reductions. He no longer serves lunch but now stays open seven nights a week.

This past summer, he added a cozy bar with six stools and a few tables for twosomes, a cozy little sanctuary. In the main dining room, comfortable chairs and tables arc placed far enough apart that you can hear your companions even when the restaurant is full and the noise level rises appreciably. A charming fireplace in a corner of the room burns merrily all evening long.

Garcia's menu is simplicity itself: half a dozen traditional New Mexican starters, a quartet of salads, half a dozen New Mexican entrees, and another half dozen dishes as basic as roast chicken, pork chops, and steaks. In addition to these dishes, more or less unchanged over the years, there arc generally two or three salad specials. The same number of entrée specials, including various fish preparations, appears each night. At our table, multicolored tortilla chips and salsa quickly arrived. Among the starters, guacamole comes beautifully presented, in a perfect circlet. The ripe avocado is chopped - not mashed - and served with the same multicolored tortilla chips. Another starter of mini-tamales - one with pork on a red Chimayo chile sauce, the other vegetarian with a green Hatch chile sauce - held delicate masa within, they're fun to share. The cabbage salad was a revelation. Served warm to hot, shredded red cabbage is sautéed with bacon, Roquefort and a vinaigrette. I'd say that it tastes better than it sounds, but that would be faint praise for this lively salad, which packs a ton of flavor into ounces.

A lamb shank, big and meaty with a seductive red-wine reduction, cooked for three or four hours, was one of the specials one recent evening. Roasted root vegetables - carrots and beets - were cooked lightly enough to provide some tooth resistance but long enough to bring out their sweetness. The accompanying mashed potatoes were not just a run-of-the-mill starch but for once actually tasted like potatoes. Another special, the trout, was good, a little light on flavor. A 10-ounce rib-eye steak came as ordered - rare. It was a little fatty, though not disagreeably so, very tender, and the red-wine reduction was excellent. But it did not have that beefy flavor I generally expect from rib-eye.

I found the accompanying calabacias and potatoes overcooked and tired. Given the tenderness of the meal, a change in texture would have been welcome. Perhaps I should have ordered something more interesting. I did just that on a subsequent visit, choosing the rib-eye tacos, about which I'd heard good things. Three corn tortillas filled with the same lender steak, rare as requested, came with substantial portions of guacamole, Pico DC Gallo and a third sauce, called borracho, made with beer. It's just a livelier dish. Another time, my good-size burger, rare as ordered, came with crispy French fries, a generous slice of raw onion, and three slices of ripe tomato. The meat was excellent - all in all, one of the best hamburgers in town. You can tell a lot about a restaurant by its burgers. If the kitchen treats them with care and respect, you know they'll generally treat everything that way. tres leches cake - made fresh every day and soaked in a mixture of condensed, evaporated, and whole milk - was rich and satisfying.

The wine list is substantial, with a couple of dozen reds and the same number of whites. It's not just the breadth of the list, but also the quality: David Bruce and Cloudy Bay from what the list calls the New World, which includes New Zealand, and a favorite of mine, Livio Felluga, from the Old World. There are a dozen wines by the glass and a very good draft brew called Monk's Ale, made at the Benedictine monastery in Pecos. In the bar, when the bartender didn't have the tequila I asked for, he offered me a taste of another that was one of his favorites, a Reformador reposado. Now it's one of mine, too. When I asked for sangria, a popular spicy tequila chaser, he was out of it, but put one together for me. I was particularly impressed with the wide range of prices on the menu. Although you can order free-range lamb loin or filet mignon at $29, you can also get a cheese enchilada or that hamburger for $I3. On the other hand, some of the starters and salads are pricey - one way, not uncommon, of avoiding sticker shock on the entrees.

On two of the three evenings I visited - admittedly in a slow month and on weeknights to boot - the restaurant was undeservedly quiet. Fortunately, on my third visit - a Thursday - the place was packed. Simplicity is in many ways a less forgiving approach to food than tours de force of painted cacti and complex recipes. In turning his back on dazzle to concentrate on bringing out all the natural flavors in local produce, Estevan Garcia is doing what he set out to do. Not everybody gets to do what he wants - and for 10 years, to boot. Cafe San Estevan is located at 428 Agua Fria in Santa Fe, 995-1996