CITY GUIDES | NEW MEXICO

The Best Restaurants in Santa Fe for Tasting Menus, Mole, Tapas, and One Very Serious Steak

By Rebecca Thompson | May 5, 2026

La Boca

AUTHOR BIO: Rebecca Thompson has held many jobs over the years, from daily newspaper writer to middle-school math teacher. As a restaurant critic, she’s reviewed Michelin-starred fine-dining to gas station barbecue.

Santa Fe is one of those places where food feels inseparable from place. Chile, corn, lamb, beans, piñon, blue corn, local beef all show up here in ways that feel part of the city’s daily vocabulary. They’re passed through Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and New Mexican traditions and still visible in both the old classics and the newer restaurants led by some of the Southwest’s most thoughtful chefs.

The best restaurants in Santa Fe understand that history isn’t something to hang on the wall. It’s something to cook with, revise, argue with, and hand across the table. This list includes the old classics that still help define Santa Fe dining, along with newer restaurants led by James Beard winners, nominees, and semifinalists, all making a case for one of the most distinctive food cities in the country.

These are the best restaurants in Santa Fe.

Alkemē

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Chef-owner Hue-Chan Karels and chef Erica Tai bring a Vietnamese-leaning, pan-Asian restaurant to a city where fine dining often starts with a very different set of ingredients. The restaurant offers rotating tasting menus with meat, pescatarian, and vegetarian or vegan paths, plus à la carte options for anyone not wanting to give up full control of the night. The James Beard Foundation named Alkemē a 2024 Best New Restaurant semifinalist, which is the kind of recognition that suggests Santa Fe has room for a restaurant that doesn’t define itself by traditional local dishes.

Best for: A tasting menu with a point of view

Arroyo Vino

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Arroyo Vino works as both a restaurant and wine shop, with chef Allison Jenkins cooking a seasonal, contemporary American menu that changes with what’s available. Dishes that have been included: PEI mussels with white wine, French garlic sausage, and grilled focaccia. It’s a polished, grown-up restaurant that favors good food instead of theater.

Best for: Seasonal cooking with serious wine

Cafe Pasqual's Santa Fe New Mexico Best Restaurants

Café Pasqual’s

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Café Pasqual’s has been part of Santa Fe since 1979, and it still has the tight, bright, elbow-to-elbow energy of a place people plan their mornings around. Katharine Kagel’s restaurant won a James Beard America’s Classics Award in 1999, and the menu still pulls from New Mexico, Old Mexico, and Asia, with breakfast served all day and house-made touches like chorizo, sausage, and bread. It’s a legacy restaurant that still feels current, especially when the table has a stack of pancakes and an omelet under a blanket of green chile sauce.

Best for: Breakfast with history and actual personality

Escondido

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Escondido is the Santa Fe restaurant from chef Fernando Ruiz, whose résumé includes wins on Beat Bobby Flay, Chopped, and Guy’s Grocery Games. His menu pulls from coastal, central, and northern Mexico, with sushi-grade seafood in ceviches and aguachiles alongside chicken mole, barbacoa, al pastor, and carne asada. The dish that ties the television résumé to the actual table is Ruiz’s chile en nogada, a roasted poblano stuffed with ground pork, veal, raisins, pepitas, and piñon, finished with walnut cream sauce, queso fresco, and pomegranate seeds.

Best for: Refined Mexican cooking with a competition-chef edge

Geronimo

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Geronimo has been one of Santa Fe’s big-deal restaurants for decades, set in an old adobe house on Canyon Road with the hushed, expensive calm of a place that knows people booked it weeks ago. My favorite dish is still the Tellicherry-rubbed elk tenderloin, served with roasted garlic fork-mashed potatoes, sugar snap peas, applewood-smoked bacon, and brandied mushroom sauce. There are newer restaurants in town with more Tik-Tok attention, but chef Sllin Cruz’s restaurant remains part of the Santa Fe dining conversation because it delivers the polished special-occasion dinner people came here imagining.

Best for: A classic Santa Fe splurge

Horno

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Horno comes from chef and co-owner David Sellers, a 2023 James Beard Best Chef: Southwest semifinalist who helped found the Street Food Institute before opening this downtown restaurant with his wife, Heather. The menu has room for smoked chicken wings, miso-roasted seasonal vegetables with piñon vinaigrette, smoked pork belly chicharrón with peanut-chile sauce, squid ink spaghetti alla chitarra, and teriyaki-glazed octopus. The room is small and direct, and the cooking has that useful kind of looseness where a table can order heavily, pass plates around, and still feel like somebody serious is in charge.

Best for: Big flavors without the formal production

Joseph’s Culinary Pub

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Joseph’s Culinary Pub is the Santa Fe chapter of the Joseph’s Table story that began in Taos, led by chef Joseph Wrede, a 2008 James Beard Best Chef: Southwest nominee. Wrede’s menu has long been known for its willingness to swerve, with dishes like duck pad Thai, lamb lollipops, polenta fries, duck fat fries, and burnt caramel tamari duck fat ice cream. The “pub” in the name keeps expectations relaxed, but the food is too personal and too strange in the right ways to be treated like standard comfort cooking.

Best for: A serious chef-driven dinner that doesn’t take itself too seriously

La Boca

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

La Boca opened in 2006 from chef-owner James Campbell Caruso, an eight-time James Beard Award nominee who built one of Santa Fe’s most durable restaurants around Spanish cooking. It’s my go-to for tapas, sherry, Spanish wines, and seasonal New Mexican ingredients, with the feel of a wine bar that happens to cook better than most full restaurants. The canelones with scallops, crab, and Manchego cream gets at the concept: familiar enough to understand immediately, rich enough to slow the table down, and specific enough to make this Caruso’s version of Spain rather than a checklist.

Best for: Spanish small plates and a proper glass of sherry

Market Steer Steakhouse

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Market Steer Steakhouse comes from chef-owner Kathleen Crook, a New Mexico native and former world champion breakaway roper who returned to the state in 2018. The restaurant moved in 2024 into a larger space with co-owner and general manager Kristina Goode. The steaks include an 18-ounce Prime cowboy ribeye and 24-ounce Prime porterhouse, but the Tack Room gives the restaurant more character with caviar frito pie, confit duck wings, martinis, and lobster-topped deviled eggs.

Best for: A steakhouse with New Mexico in its bones

Restaurant Martin

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Restaurant Martin is the showcase for chef Martín Rios, a Guadalajara-born, Santa Fe-raised chef who started in restaurants as a 17-year-old dishwasher and became one of the city’s defining fine-dining names. His seasonal menus are built around locally sourced ingredients, Southwestern and Asian influences, and French technique. Some of my favorites here run from asparagus salad and duck breast to sea bass, beef tenderloin, and Colorado lamb, all with the kind of deft hand that comes from a chef who knows how to let good ingredients do a lot of the work.

Best for: Santa Fe fine dining from one of the city’s surest hands

Sazón

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Sazón is chef Fernando Olea’s Santa Fe restaurant, and the mole alone explains why he won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest in 2022. Olea, who is originally from Mexico City and has been cooking in Santa Fe since 1991, builds the menu from Old Mexico’s Indigenous and culinary traditions while using local produce and meats when possible. His New Mexican mole, created for Santa Fe’s 400th anniversary, is the dish that I dream about, especially with a mezcal cocktail on the side.

Best for: Mole, mezcal, and a dinner that’s pure Santa Fe

Zacatlán

$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

Chef Eduardo Rodriguez built Zacatlán around Mexican cooking filtered through Santa Fe ingredients. Rodriguez came to Santa Fe as a teenager in 1994, worked through notable local kitchens, and then opened a restaurant that quickly drew James Beard attention, including a 2022 Best New Restaurant semifinalist nod for Zacatlán and a 2024 Best Chef: Southwest nomination. The menu moves through Oaxacan-style moles, Yucatecan cochinita pibil, pork belly carnitas with date mole, and brunch dishes with enough color and confidence to make breakfast feel like the wrong word.

Best for: Mexican-Southwestern cooking with real ambition