Plaza Cafe Downtown: Santa Fe's Oldest Address

The Plaza has replaced almost everything on it at least once. Storefronts change trades, buildings change hands, and the square itself gets argued over in every generation. One door has held the same use since 1905. Number 54 Lincoln Avenue opened as a restaurant that year and has been one ever since, under three Greek families in succession. Whatever else the fabric of this city is made of, part of it is a lunch counter that nobody has ever managed to turn into anything else.

Three Families, One Door

Two brothers named Ipiotis opened it, Greek immigrants, on the site of an earlier place called the Star Restaurant. They sold to another Greek family, the Pomonis, who gave a job to a young man from Kefalonia named Dan Razatos when he reached Santa Fe in the early 1930s. He had been sent off the island as a boy, worked his way across as a hand on ships, and come inland by way of Denver and California. He bought the restaurant in 1947, married a local woman, Beneranda Saiz, and raised six children who all worked in it. His family has run it ever since.

The menu is the record of that. It runs New Mexican, Greek, and American diner on one page without pretending they are a single cuisine. Blue corn enchiladas under green chile, with a sopaipilla on the side, sit next to a gyro and a Greek salad, and both sit next to chicken fried steak. Nothing is fused. Three traditions are kept in the same kitchen because three sets of people wanted lunch in the same town.

The Oldest Address, and the Two Years It Was Dark

Santa Fe calls this its oldest restaurant. The claim holds up better than most claims of the kind, and it needs one qualification. What the 1905 date buys is continuity of use at one address. It does not buy continuity of service: a kitchen fire in 2010 closed the building for roughly two years, and Dan Razatos’s sons rebuilt it and reopened in 2012 with the counter put back as it was. The rival claim usually raised is El Farol on Canyon Road, in a building of 1835 that did not become a restaurant until 1963, and that closed in 2025.

What was rebuilt is worth noticing. A soda fountain counter with red stools, booths, linoleum topped tables, a neon clock, and black and white photographs of the town on the walls. It is a 1930s American diner standing steps from a plaza laid out in the seventeenth century, and it does not apologize for the mismatch either.

Where It Stands

Lincoln Avenue runs north off the west side of the square, so the door sits in the part of town that everybody crosses. That is most of why the counter works. People who work downtown eat here on an ordinary Tuesday, people who arrived last night eat here on their first morning, and the two groups end up on adjacent stools. Webster Santa Fe has occupied the half number beside it, 54½ Lincoln Avenue, since 1976.

Two other downtown breakfasts complete the triangle. Cafe Pasqual’s, two blocks off on Don Gaspar, cooks Mexico rather than New Mexico. Tia Sophia’s is two blocks west and was opened in 1975 by another Greek family, as was Tomasita’s in the Railyard the year before, which means three of the kitchens this city argues about most were started by people from the same small country. Coyote Cafe is a few blocks south on Water Street and is the other proposition, a downtown dinner invented in 1987 rather than inherited from 1905. For when chile is at its best, there is The Santa Fe Year.

Common Questions

Is the Plaza Cafe the oldest restaurant in Santa Fe?

It is the oldest address, and that is the defensible version. A restaurant has operated at 54 Lincoln Avenue since 1905, and the Razatos family has owned it since 1947. Continuous service is a separate question: fire closed it for about two years after 2010.