Izanami

Ten Thousand Waves was never designed. Duke Klauck opened it in 1981 as eight outdoor tubs and a single massage table on twenty acres of hillside above Santa Fe, and nearly everything added since was added because a guest asked for it. People wanted massage, so there was massage. They wanted to stay the night, so there was lodging. They wanted to eat without driving back down the mountain, and in 2013 there was Izanami. It is the only restaurant in this city that its customers requested before it existed, and the only one you drive up a mountain to reach.

What Izanami Actually Cooks

The house calls it an izakaya, and the word is doing real work. An izakaya is a drinking establishment that feeds you seriously, rather than a restaurant that also pours: small plates, ordered in waves, shared across the table, with sake running underneath the whole thing. Kiko Rodriguez, who has run the kitchen since 2015, says plainly that this is not fine dining, and the cooking agrees with him. Four or five plates is a dinner.

Rodriguez came to Santa Fe from Veracruz as a teenager and cooked at the Inn of the Anasazi and at La Boca before taking this kitchen, and he has never disguised any of it. Chile turns up inside Japanese technique where it has no business being, and it works. Black sesame turns up in panna cotta. The two plates people drive back for are the pork ribs, braised in soy and then smoked, and the grilled miso bass. Nearly everything else is made here: the desserts, the ice cream, the buns, and every condiment. In season, four fifths of the produce is local and organic.

The Sake, and the Kind of Evening It Is

The sake list is why a good many people make the drive at all. Deborah Fleig is a sake sommelier and an artisanal sake importer who has spent part of every year in Japan for a quarter century. She buys the list herself, which is why the cold sake here runs longer and stranger than a city this size should be able to support. The flights change weekly. Alongside them sit Japanese whisky, Japanese craft beer, green tea from Shizuoka, and a zero-proof list written with attention rather than as an apology.

The evening is unlike any other in town for one reason: a fair number of the people eating are in bathrobes. Guests come down from the tubs in spa robes and sit at the bar in them, next to people who drove up in ordinary clothes, and nobody finds this odd after the first ten minutes. There is a bar, several small dining spaces, and an outdoor pavilion facing the mountains. In 2024, Best of Santa Fe named it the city’s best Asian restaurant.

Where It Sits

Four miles northeast of downtown, up Hyde Park Road, which is the road to the ski basin. The architecture is Japanese by way of adobe: timber, stone, running water, and low horizontal lines that settle into a hillside rather than sit on top of it, which is not the usual instinct in these foothills.

The distance is the point rather than the drawback: going to Izanami is a decision about an entire evening rather than about dinner. You can soak first and eat after, and come back down into a city that looks quite different from above than it does from the Plaza. In winter it is a mountain drive, with everything that implies.

Santa Fe eats an enormous amount of chile, for four excellent centuries of reasons. What it also does, less remarked on, is absorb whatever arrives and let it become local, and Izanami has been here long enough to qualify. If you are working out where to eat something that is not New Mexican, Leo’s cooks Thai and Malay in a former garage on Hickox Street, and Sazón opens dinner with six moles two blocks off the Plaza. Izanami belongs with those two, except that it is also the one you make an evening of getting to, which puts it in company with the opera as much as with the restaurants. For why Hyde Park Road is a different proposition in February than in July, there is The Santa Fe Year.

Common Questions

Where can you eat Japanese food in Santa Fe?

Izanami, the izakaya at Ten Thousand Waves, 21 Ten Thousand Waves Way, up Hyde Park Road. An izakaya serves small plates for sharing, with sake alongside, rather than courses.

Where can you drink sake in Santa Fe?

Izanami, at Ten Thousand Waves. The list is bought by Deborah Fleig, a sake sommelier and importer who has spent part of every year in Japan for a quarter century. The flights change weekly.