The Shed: Red Chile Off the Santa Fe Plaza

Name: Downtown Santa Fe
Address: Santa Fe, NM, US

The Shed is named after a shed. Wood-gatherers coming down out of the mountains with fuel to sell used to tie their burros in it while they drank at the cantina next door, on the lane that is still called Burro Alley. Polly and Thornton Carswell put a restaurant in that shed in 1953. Seven years later they had outgrown it, moved half a block east of the Plaza, and kept the name, which is how a kitchen the James Beard Foundation would eventually enroll among America’s Classics came to be called after a place to leave a donkey. Santa Fe is full of names that record a working economy nobody now alive remembers. This is one of the few still attached to a going concern.

What The Shed Actually Cooks

Red chile, before anything else. It is grown on farms in Hatch under contract for this restaurant alone, it arrives whole rather than powdered, and it is ground on the premises. That is a small operational decision that turns out to explain most of the difference. Ground chile goes flat. Freshly ground chile does not.

The enchiladas are the rolled kind: blue corn tortillas, made from the corn indigenous to New Mexico, filled with cheddar and onion, covered in chile and cheese and diced onion, and briefly baked. There is carne adovada, pork held in red chile until it gives up. There is green chile stew. There is a mocha cake at the end that a good number of people order without reading anything else.

The record is worth stating plainly, because it does the work adjectives would otherwise be asked to do. The James Beard Foundation enrolled The Shed among America’s Classics in 2003, the restaurant’s fiftieth year. Readers of the Santa Fe Reporter have voted its red chile the best in the city in more than a dozen separate years. When people here argue about red chile, and they do, this is usually the fixed point the argument gets measured from.

What the Building Is

113½ East Palace Avenue, reached through a doorway that does not announce itself. The address sits inside Prince Plaza, part of what the Historic Santa Fe Foundation counts among the most significant groups of Spanish Colonial buildings in Santa Fe. Diego de Vargas granted the ground to Captain Diego Arias de Quiros after the Spanish retook the city following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. L. Bradford Prince, then chief justice of the territory and later its governor, bought this portion in 1879, and his family lived here until 1940. The Carswells arrived twenty years after that.

What that means at the table is low ceilings, walls thick enough to hold their own temperature, hand-painted decoration, and a warren of small spaces around courtyards rather than one large one. It is the plainest working demonstration in town of what adobe actually does to a building, which is to keep it cool in August and quiet in every month.

The Kind of Meal It Is

Crowded, and cheerfully so. The place fills and people wait, and the waiting happens in a courtyard, which takes most of the sting out of it. It is one of the few addresses in Santa Fe that is simultaneously a visitors’ institution and a local one, and the two populations sit next to each other without friction. Three generations of the same family have run it: Polly and Thornton, then Courtney and Linnea, now Josh and Sarah. Seventy years of one family cooking one thing is its own kind of argument.

For the same chile on the other side of the tracks, La Choza is the sister restaurant, opened by Courtney Carswell in 1983 and named, in Spanish, after this one. Two other kitchens in the region hold the same Beard citation: Cafe Pasqual’s, on the far side of the Plaza, and Rancho de Chimayó, up the high road. For what the city eats when it is not eating chile, Leo’s cooks Thai and Malay in a converted garage. Palace Avenue itself keeps going east from here, out of downtown and into the Historic East Side. And if you are eating red chile in Santa Fe in late September, you have picked the right month; The Santa Fe Year explains why.

Common Questions

Where can you eat red chile in Santa Fe?

The Shed, at 113½ East Palace Avenue, half a block off the Plaza. Its red chile is grown in Hatch under contract for the restaurant alone and ground on the premises. The James Beard Foundation enrolled it among America’s Classics in 2003.