Coyote Cafe and Rooftop Cantina, Santa Fe, Since 1987

Two of the kitchens that define fine dining on Canyon Road came out of a building on Water Street. Mark Kiffin spent eight years working for Mark Miller here before he bought The Compound in 2000 and took a James Beard award five years later. Eric DiStefano cooked at Geronimo for twenty years and co-owned this restaurant at the same time. Coyote Cafe opened in 1987, which makes it young by the standards of this city, and it has shaped what the ambitious kitchens here do more than anything older than it has.

What Miller Did in 1987

Mark Miller had studied anthropology at Berkeley, cooked at Chez Panisse under Alice Waters, and opened the Fourth Street Grill before he came to New Mexico. What he did here was treat chile, corn, and the rest of the regional pantry as ingredients with a history and a technique attached rather than as local color. The cookbook that followed in 1989 sold in the hundreds of thousands and carried the idea well past the state line. Modern Southwestern cooking is the name that stuck, and Miller is the person generally credited with it.

The reach was not only local. Coyote Cafe put an outpost in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, with Kiffin running it, and Miller opened Red Sage in Washington in 1991. Three cookbooks came out of the partnership. The map of who cooks what in Santa Fe today still shows the decade when the way into a serious kitchen in this city ran through this one.

One Address, Two Different Evenings

Two names sit on this address and they get confused constantly, so the difference is worth stating plainly. Coyote Cafe is the dining space at 132 West Water Street. The Rooftop Cantina is the open air terrace directly above it, under the same ownership and in the same building. They are not two restaurants and they are not the same evening. Downstairs is a booked, seated dinner. Upstairs is where you go without having decided anything, for a drink and a plate of something, above the street with the light going off the mountains. A roof at seven thousand feet keeps its own calendar, so the terrace is a warm weather proposition and the dining downstairs is not. A third space in the building, the Coyote Den, is kept back for private events, which is the sort of detail that turns one restaurant into three names on the internet.

Who Owns It Now

Miller sold in the late 2000s, to a group that included DiStefano and Quinn Stephenson, who had come to work here as a bartender in 1999 and was running the restaurant as general manager by 2003. Stephenson bought the remaining shares over the following decade and has been sole owner since 2017. He has since bought Santacafé as well. That is worth saying because a founder’s name outlives his involvement: the restaurant carries Miller’s idea and has not been his business since the 2000s.

A block off the Plaza, on a street most visitors cross without noticing, which is a fair description of the restaurant’s position generally. Plaza Cafe Downtown is a few minutes north and has been open since 1905, so between them they cover the distance from what downtown Santa Fe was to what it decided to become. For the older argument all of this is built on, The Shed is the address. The Santa Fe Year says when the terrace is worth planning around.