Tortillas To Go

The roads in Southern New Mexico can be pretty lonely. When Las Cruces, population 82,671, is the big city that doesn’t leave many people for the small towns. My family was recently traveling cross country and found ourselves in need of some evening nourishment in the small town of Alamogordo (here’s your trivia for the day: the English translation would is

Sadie’s

Mexican food equals Southwest food equals New Mexican food, right? That’s what I always thought so I found it strange that when my wife, Bethany, asked one of her Albuquerque co-workers for a good cheap place to eat. The co-worker mentioned both Mexican and New Mexican restaurants. We decided to try “New Mexican” cuisine and ended up at Sadie’s on Albuquerque’s very own Route 66. I want you to think Ted Drew’s but as a New Mexican restaurant.

Our first sign that this was going to be good was that the place was packed on a Sunday night. While we did have to wait about 20 minutes for a table, the time was well spent enjoying the Southwestern décor and, more importantly, picking out our dinner, while trying to figure out what was so “New Mexican” about the food. We ordered some burritos for only $5.89 and settled down with our chips and salsa. Nothing was out of the ordinary, yet. Then the burritos came to our table. First, they were big enough to fill up a guy whose last food had been a sandwich on the windswept northern plains of Texas. Secondly, they had a peculiar green salsa on them. Turns out this salsa is what makes Sadie’s famous and what makes New Mexican food “New” instead of just Mexican. The salsa was the most potent, both in flavor and heat, that we had ever had! After downing a glass of water and a basket of chips I regained my composure and enjoyed the rest of my delicious, if not slightly spicy, New Mexican dinner.