Leo’s

The name on the door belongs to a mechanic. Leo CdeBaca ran an auto shop at 1200 Hickox Street in the 1950s, and the building has kept working ever since: decades of cars, then eight years as a furniture studio, and since August 2025 a restaurant cooking Thai and Malay food a short walk from the Railyard. The garage doors are windows now. Most of what is inside was made by hand on the premises, which is the first honest thing the place tells you about itself.

What Leo’s Actually Cooks

Thai and Malay, and the second half of that is the rarer half. Malaysian cooking has had almost no presence in Santa Fe, a city whose food conversation has run, understandably and for four centuries, on chile. Leo’s did not join that conversation. It started a second one.

The method is easy to claim and hard to sustain. Curry pastes are pounded in house. Peanut sauce is made rather than opened. Whole spices are ground instead of bought as powder, and the lamb comes from Shepherd’s Lamb up in Tierra Amarilla. The dishes that built the reputation are worth knowing by name: crab nam prik under a steamed savory custard, hand-cut rice noodles with pork and shrimp that tend to run out early, seared pork belly under a fried egg with garlicky prik phao and Thai basil, and a whole steamed dorade with chile and lime.

Zakary Pelaccio sets the direction, with Stella Achenbach as executive chef. Pelaccio built Fatty Crab and Fatty ‘Cue in New York on much this material, wrote Eat With Your Hands, and won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northeast in 2016 for Fish & Game in Hudson, before moving to New Mexico and opening the wine bar Corner Office in Taos. Jonathan Boyd owns the building. Ian Wolff runs the bar. In 2025 Esquire named Leo’s to its list of the best new restaurants in America, the only one in New Mexico.

The Kind of Evening It Is

Small, close, and loud the way a full house is loud. Boyd, who spent eight years making furniture in this building, built the tables, the chairs, and the bar stools, and his old work bench hangs on the wall above the bottles. A long communal table runs down the middle, which settles in advance the question of whether you will be talking to strangers.

It is a dinner you over-order, push into the middle, and leave later than you meant to. It is the wrong choice for a conversation that needs to be heard, and the right one for nearly everything else. The place is small and it fills, and people wait, and the waiting turns out to be part of it.

Where It Sits

Not downtown. Hickox runs through South Capitol, the flat, gridded, tree-lined part of town where a great many Santa Feans actually live, about twenty minutes on foot from the Plaza and fifteen from the farmers market. La Choza is a few blocks away. That you can walk from green chile stew to pork laab in under ten minutes is a fairly precise description of what this city is now.

Santa Fe is often called a place that resists change, which is mostly a compliment paid by people passing through. What it actually does is absorb. Leo’s is not a break in the city’s story. It is the next paragraph, written in a garage that has been useful to somebody for seventy-five years.

If you are working out where to eat here, the two entries worth reading alongside this one are Sazón, where Fernando Olea has been cooking mole two blocks off the Plaza for a decade, and Izanami, up the mountain at Ten Thousand Waves. Those three are where Santa Fe eats something other than New Mexican food. For how the year is kept here, and how it shapes the way people gather, there is The Santa Fe Year.

Common Questions

Where can you eat Malaysian food in Santa Fe?

Leo’s, at 1200 Hickox Street in the South Capitol neighborhood, cooks Thai and Malay food, with curry pastes and peanut sauce made in house. Malaysian cooking has otherwise had almost no presence in Santa Fe.

How far is Leo’s from the Santa Fe Plaza?

About twenty minutes on foot. Leo’s sits on Hickox Street in the South Capitol neighborhood, and the farmers market is about fifteen minutes away. It is a neighborhood restaurant rather than a downtown one.