Market Steer Steakhouse

A market steer is not a menu word. It is a 4-H and Future Farmers of America term for an animal raised, shown, and sold for beef, and Kathleen Crook took it from her own years in those programs. The restaurant’s logo is her father’s cattle brand, a seven joined to an open A, the mark he still puts on livestock in Artesia. Both decisions preceded the first steak. The American steakhouse is a city invention, worked out in the nineteenth century downstream of the railroads and the packing houses. New Mexico’s claim on beef runs through ranch country instead, and this restaurant tells you which of the two it belongs to before you sit down.

The Chef Came Off a Ranch

Crook grew up in Artesia, in the southeast corner of the state, where her parents still run beef cattle. She started barrel racing at nine and took a Women’s Professional Rodeo Association championship buckle at the Santa Fe Stampede in 1995. She roped through three years of college rodeo, which the house’s own history says she finished as a world champion breakaway roper. In 2003 she sold her ranch equipment to pay for the Scottsdale Culinary Institute, cooked in Dallas, and in 2010 opened Steakhouse No. 316 in Aspen. She came back to New Mexico in 2018 and opened Market Steer with Kristina Goode, her wife and the general manager, off the lobby of the Hotel St. Francis on Don Gaspar.

In 2025 the James Beard Foundation named her to its TasteTwenty class for 2025 and 2026, twenty chefs chosen to represent their cities at the Foundation’s Taste America events. That is a national selection rather than a Beard award or a nomination for one, and the distinction is worth keeping straight: no Santa Fe chef has taken a regional Best Chef award since Sazón‘s Fernando Olea in 2022.

One Lap Around the Plaza

Crook and Goode bought 213 Washington Avenue in March 2023 and reopened there in mid-July 2024, after about a hundred days of construction. The reason was autonomy. They had outgrown the arrangement with the hotel, Goode told the Santa Fe New Mexican, and wanted a space they controlled.

The address has a plain working history: built in 1951, Dee’s Donuts from 1976 to 1996, then the Spanish restaurant El Mesón from 1997 until late 2021. It is not an old adobe house of the sort Canyon Road trades in, and the renovation did not pretend otherwise. William Kleinschmidt took the architecture and Thom Ortiz the interior, the kitchen was opened to view, and a chandelier of roughly six hundred pieces, horsehair among them, hangs over the dining. The move took Market Steer across the Plaza, from Don Gaspar on the south side to Washington on the north.

The Tack Room

On a ranch the tack room is where the working equipment lives: saddles, bridles, ropes, the things that get used rather than displayed. The bar here earns the name, because what is in it is Crook’s own. Trophies, blue ribbons, and belt buckles, some set into shadow boxes beneath the coffee tables. Chesterfield sofas in denim, a Pendleton banquette. It keeps a short menu of its own, and it has become one of the busier places downtown to meet somebody without committing to a whole evening.

The onion rings arrive skewered on a steel branding iron carrying the 7A. It reads as a joke and it is also the argument: the mark on the sign comes to the table on the object it was made for. The cooking here is precise and the manner around it is not, which is a harder combination to hold than either one alone.

For the rest of the fine dining conversation in this city, The Compound and Geronimo are both up Canyon Road in old houses, and Coyote Cafe is the other serious downtown address. The Santa Fe Year covers which weeks are worth planning around.

Common Questions

Is this the same restaurant that was in the Hotel St. Francis?

Yes. Market Steer opened off the hotel lobby on Don Gaspar in 2018 and moved to 213 Washington Avenue in July 2024, into a building they bought. Same owners, same name, a larger space with an open kitchen and a bar.

Are there Market Steer locations outside Santa Fe?

No. Santa Fe is the only one. Kathleen Crook ran Steakhouse No. 316 in Aspen before returning to New Mexico in 2018, a separate and earlier restaurant.