La Reina

In 1936 a twelve-unit motor court opened on Cerrillos Road to catch the traffic coming through Santa Fe on Route 66. In 1937 the New Mexico legislature moved the highway designation onto a bypass, and Santa Fe stopped being on Route 66 at all. The motel stayed. It is still there, ninety years later, and there is now a mezcal bar in the part of it that used to serve breakfast.

1936

El Rey Court was built the way most things in this city were built, in the adobe vocabulary of low ranges and flat roofs, which is worth noticing because motor courts elsewhere in America were built in whatever style would read fastest at forty miles an hour. This one obeyed the town instead of the road. That turned out to be the right bet, since the road left within the year and the town did not.

It has grown from twelve units to eighty-six across nine decades, and it changed hands in 2016 to owners who renovated it in 2018. That renovation is where La Reina comes from.

The Breakfast Counter

The bar occupies what had been the motel’s breakfast space, which is a genuinely good use for it. Breakfast space in a mid-century motel is the one part of the building designed for people to sit in without having paid for a bed, and La Reina has kept that logic exactly. The house calls itself a local watering hole, and it means it: you do not need to be staying here, and most of the people in it are not.

There are two patios, seating indoors, and a fireplace, which between them cover the whole of the calendar at this altitude. Live music is a standing part of the week rather than an occasional event, and it runs to blues, alternative folk, and the kind of country that is specific to this part of the Southwest. Check what is on before you go.

Agave

The programme is mezcal and tequila first, which is rarer here than the geography would lead you to expect. Santa Fe is six hundred miles from the Mexican border and its bars have historically reached for whiskey, for gin, or for a margarita built to be sold rather than considered. La Reina reversed the order. Agave is the subject and everything else is context.

The house drink is built on hibiscus, on agua de jamaica specifically, with reposado, mezcal, and a chile liqueur behind it. It is red, it is not sweet in the way it looks like it will be, and it is the clearest single statement the bar makes about itself: this is Mexican in its reference points rather than Southwestern, and the distinction matters more than a hundred miles of desert suggests it should.

Two Miles Out Cerrillos Road

Be clear about where this is, because the guides are not. La Reina is not downtown and it is not in the Railyard, whose southern boundary is Cerrillos Road. It is roughly two miles further out along that road, in the commercial strip, well past the point where the city stops looking like the postcards. Meow Wolf is a few minutes away in the same general direction.

Which is the point. A great deal of what is currently interesting in this city has happened out here, on the flat southwestern side, in buildings nobody photographs, at addresses a visitor reaches only on purpose. The Plaza has Tonic and Farm Shop Norte. The Railyard has As Above, So Below. The south side has Santa Fe Spirits and this, and a reader who never leaves the historic district will meet exactly half of the city’s drinking.

Go in September, when the patios are still warm at nine and the fire is already lit by midnight, and the year is doing both things at once.

Common Questions

Where is La Reina in Santa Fe?

At 1862 Cerrillos Road, inside El Rey Court, roughly two miles southwest of the Plaza. It is not in the Railyard, despite being frequently listed that way. Cerrillos Road is the Railyard’s southern edge and La Reina is well beyond it.

Do you have to be a hotel guest to drink at La Reina?

No. The bar describes itself as a local watering hole and is open to anyone. Most of the people in it are not staying at the hotel.