Southwest Diner

Jessie, Joe and I decided to try Southwest Diner a few months ago for a Sunday brunch.  It is located in Ellendale, which is a teeny tiny municipality around the Dogtown/Maplewood area.  We were excited to try it out because we heard it had authentic New Mexican cuisine.  The restaurant itself is very small with diner style tables and chairs crammed in every possible space.  They don't take reservations, so once we got there, we had to awkwardly stand in the doorway with a crowd of people and fight to give our name to a somewhat absentee host.  We then had to wait out on the sidewalk for about 40 minutes until we finally got a table (during our wait time we were able have a lengthy discussion/debate over the great city of "Ellendale").

Bloody Mary Time!

So what exactly is New Mexican cuisine like?  SPOILER ALERT - It is spicy as hell!  Jessie and I got the New Mexican Breakfast Burrito.  We got a choice of what type of chile sauce we wanted with it, and we chose the green chile sauce over the red, thinking it was less spicy.  Big mistake!  Apparently color codes are backwards in New Mexico, because green means HOT HOT HOT!  I love spicy, so I absolutely loved it, but there is a certain limit to spiciness.  It got to the point where my mouth was too numb to taste the actual food.  Maybe less is more for this burrito.

Spicy Breakfast Burrito

Joe got Carne Adovado - red chile braised local pork shoulder, 2 eggs, home fries and tortillas.  Sounds good, right?  Well, another aspect to the New Mexican spiciness (besides the heat) is the unique spices they use.  Joe let us try some of the pork shoulder and I almost spit it out.  It was heavily seasoned with some sort of earthy (i.e. tasted like dirt) spices that completely threw me off guard.  It was almost inedible to me.  I was shocked.

Carne Adovado

The saving graces of this brunch were the Bloody Marys and the Sopapillas.  They were awesome!  The person at the table behind us even tapped me on the shoulder when the waiter brought out the Sopapillas and asked what they were so he could order them.  I would go back just for a plateful of them.

Sopapillas - Amazing!