Tesuque Village Market

A village that is not a town has to keep its public life somewhere. Tesuque has about eleven hundred people spread across a valley of orchards, small farms, and long driveways, and it has no plaza and no commercial street to speak of. What it has instead is one building at the crossing of Tesuque Village Road and Bishop’s Lodge Road, which sells groceries, pours drinks, bakes, cooks, and functions as the post office for everything that is not mail. Buildings like this used to be ordinary in northern New Mexico. Most of them are gone, and the ones that survived did so by becoming restaurants.

Tesuque Is a Village, and It Is Not Santa Fe

It is a separate place with its own name, a few miles north of the Plaza up Bishop’s Lodge Road, sitting a little under seven thousand feet in the valley the Tesuque River cuts on its way toward the Rio Grande. It is also not Tesuque Pueblo, which is a sovereign Native nation nearby, one of the Eight Northern Pueblos, and an entirely different entity. The two share a name and are confused constantly in print, including by people who ought to know better.

So this is a drive. A short one, ten minutes or so in ordinary traffic and nothing like the run up to Rancho de Chimayó, but a drive, on a road that is genuinely dark at night. People who live in town come up here on purpose, which is the right way to think about the place.

What the Building Used to Be

A gas station, and a chicken coop, through the fifties and sixties. Then Art’s Meat Market and Deli, whose slogan, preserved by the current owners with evident affection, was “Nobody Beats Art’s Meat.” By the end of the eighties it had become the market as it now operates. Michael Stein and his partners bought it in 2006 and took on the recipes along with the building, the baked goods included, which tells you what kind of transaction it was.

What stands there is a low roadhouse in the pueblo style with wooden floors that announce every step, a porch, and a patio with fireplaces for the months when sitting outside in northern New Mexico is otherwise a poor idea. On the outside wall there is a large mural of a Native figure in red.

Store, Bar, Bakery, Restaurant

All four at once, which is what makes the place hard to describe and easy to use. There is a bakery case and a coffee line in the morning, shelves of provisions, a bar with people at it in the afternoon, and a kitchen running from breakfast through dinner. The cooking is New Mexican in its bones and unbothered about staying strictly so: red chile posole with pork, fish tacos, Frito pie, and wood-fired pizza in the evening. The cinnamon rolls have their own constituency.

It is not a destination restaurant and does not behave like one. That is the whole appeal. Nobody in the valley is dressing for it, and the tables hold people who came for dinner next to people who came in for milk and stayed.

If you are going further north, Rancho de Chimayó is the longer version of the same proposition and worth a whole afternoon. Izanami, up at Ten Thousand Waves, is the other meal in the hills that is not in town. Back down in the city, The Shed is the fixed point for red chile and Leo’s cooks Thai and Malay in a converted garage. The village of Tesuque has its own entry here, and a longer guide to the valley for anyone who ends up on that porch thinking about staying. As for when to come, The Santa Fe Year covers the calendar.

Common Questions

How far is Tesuque Village Market from Santa Fe?

It is not in Santa Fe. It is in the village of Tesuque, a few miles north of the Plaza on Bishop’s Lodge Road, roughly ten minutes in ordinary traffic. Short, but a drive rather than a walk.

Is Tesuque Village Market a store or a restaurant?

Both, and a bar and a bakery as well, all under one roof and one owner. You can buy provisions, sit down to dinner, or take a cinnamon roll out to the porch.