Sazón

Mole is less a recipe than a record. Spices, seeds, nuts, chocolate, and chile, each toasted and ground and then cooked down together over a day or more, and every ingredient on the list is a note about where the cook is standing. Which is why the most Santa Fe thing on the menu at Sazón is a sauce that came here from Mexico City. In 2009, for the city’s four hundredth anniversary, Fernando Olea built one out of Chimayó red chile, apricots, piñon, pecans, and white chocolate. He has served it ever since, two blocks from the Plaza the anniversary was for, and a painting on the wall sets out its ingredients, so anyone eating the sauce can also read it.

Six Moles, Before You Order Anything

The meal opens before you have chosen anything. A plate arrives carrying six small pools of mole and warm tortillas made in the kitchen, and someone walks you through them in order, from the dark and sweet toward the green and the sharp. The lineup changes from night to night. Negro, poblano, coloradito, and verde recur, some family recipes carried up from Puebla and some Olea’s own, and the New Mexican one sits among them without apology. Six moles at once is a rare thing to be handed, and it settles what the restaurant is about before the menu opens.

What follows is short and deliberate. Small tortillas carry chapulines with avocado, or huitlacoche, the corn fungus Mexico has eaten for centuries and the country north of it has not. The Sopa de Amor, a cream of poblano with lump blue crab and amaretto foam, has outlasted everything else on the menu. Chile runs from the first plate through dessert, at the level Olea argues for, which is heat that opens the palate rather than shutting it. The agave list is serious enough that Sazón works as a mezcalería and tequilería alongside the cooking.

Olea came from Mexico City to Santa Fe in 1991 and began by taking over Bert’s Burger Bowl, a green chile cheeseburger stand, where he started putting Mexican dishes on the board. A taqueria followed, then El Encanto, then Epazote, which ran the better part of fifteen years. Sazón opened on Shelby Street in 2015. In 2022 the James Beard Foundation named him Best Chef: Southwest, the first Santa Fe chef to take a regional Best Chef award since Mark Kiffin of The Compound in 2005. When fire closed the restaurant for seven months in 2019, he kept his staff on payroll.

How the Meal Goes

Low, close, and quieter than the cooking suggests. Vigas overhead, kiva fireplaces, tin star lights, and contemporary Mexican painting on the walls. Tables sit near enough that you catch what is happening at the next one. The pace is unhurried by design, and the staff can account for every sauce that reaches you, which is most of the reason to sit down. It suits a conversation that matters more than the volume.

Two Blocks From the Plaza

Shelby Street runs south off Water Street, one turn from downtown and immediately quieter than it. The address does real work. You can spend an afternoon on the Plaza, walk to dinner in five minutes, and carry on east afterward toward the Historic East Side and Canyon Road without touching a car. During Indian Market and Spanish Market, when downtown is fullest, that matters. The meal is not a stand-alone errand. It sits inside an evening that includes the rest of the city.

Santa Fe’s food conversation has run for four centuries on green chile, reasonably enough. But this has always been a city where things arrive from elsewhere and stay long enough to become local, which is a different thing from resisting change. Olea is among the plainest instances available: a Mexico City cook who has fed this town since 1991 and wrote it a sauce for its four hundredth birthday.

Two entries pair well with this one. Leo’s cooks Thai and Malay food in a former garage on Hickox Street, and Izanami sits up the mountain at Ten Thousand Waves. Together the three cover most of what Santa Fe eats that is not New Mexican. For how the year is kept here, there is The Santa Fe Year.

Common Questions

Where can you eat mole in Santa Fe?

Sazón, at 221 Shelby Street, two blocks from the Plaza. Mole is a sauce of toasted spices, seeds, nuts, chocolate, and chile, and Fernando Olea serves several at once, including one for Santa Fe’s four hundredth anniversary in 2009.

Who is Fernando Olea?

The executive chef and co-owner of Sazón in Santa Fe. Originally from Mexico City, he has cooked here since 1991. In 2022 the James Beard Foundation named him Best Chef: Southwest.