What are your best memories with this place?
I think one of the biggest moments was when Eric Stefano became chef and we went from kind of a two-star hole in the wall on Canyon Road to an overnight four-star because the food changed completely. It was like night and day. He came in and all of a sudden we were doing prosciutto salad, stacked. And this is in 1996, I think. He was just such a pro coming from New York, coming from restaurant Danielle. And so we quickly had to scramble to redo the restaurant to make the restaurant worthy of that food he was putting out.
How did you bring him here?
He was working at a hotel out near Las Campanas. Some guy from New York had this really weird little hotel. It’s really high end, and he was the chef for that. I think they had five rooms or something. It was like just a sprawling hacienda, really exclusive.
And so you got this four-star review.
We didn’t start winning awards until after Eric left. I mean, Eric was nominated for James Beard once. But towards the end, before he died, he started winning a lot of boards – TripAdvisor top 10 restaurants in the country, People top 100 restaurants in the country with Mobil four-star. We got that with Eric, Mobil four-star award. We’re still the only restaurant in New Mexico with that.
So, was it sort of like a visionary concept to transform this place into a world class restaurant?
Oh yeah, there was a concerted effort. After Eric came we just said we have to invest every cent we have into the building and so we did. We started upgrading everything, you know, leather chairs, got rid of all the cheap furniture.
Because you know what we did was we would travel. We went to San Francisco, we went to French Laundry, we went to Gary Danko. Gary Danko was a big influence here because his restaurant in San Francisco is what we eventually tried to become. We went to New York, we went to LA. Sitting and eating at Spago with Wolfgang, I mean, we went everywhere and we were like, OK, we got this, and then we started changing things.
And you were part of Swig as well?
Yeah. We did Cowboy and Bar B. It was such a cool place because they came in and invested like, $5,000,000 into this building. We took that over and we weren’t successful with it. So we turned it into a nightclub, Paramount, and then changed the bar to Bar B.
And then we sold it to our partner. But that was hell. That was hell, I’ll tell you. Because we were losing so much money at this other restaurant, and we’re working both, and this restaurant was just feeding everything this restaurant would make to go into that other restaurant and it was just sickening.
After you sold, you had a big sigh of relief?
And I was so happy. But with the new landlord, we had to work a deal and the entire restaurant was leveraged, not by my doing. It took me ten years to pay off the loans, to get the restaurant we already owned back. And that was insane. Basically, it took ten years. It was rough.
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Photo Andy Johnson
