A Week In Santa Fe, New Mexico. January 2020.
Santa Fe. Our favorite getaway spot! Nestled up in a snowy mountain is this quirky, gorgeous, sleepy, exciting little city that’s filled to the brim with adobe architecture, incredible restaurants serving up New Mexican cuisine, museums, galleries, spas, and men in cowboy hats! Lots of cowboy hats here it’s actually kinda weird. Arriving in Santa Fe feels like taking a deep breath. Except at 7,000 feet, it actually takes a second for your lungs to adjust and get that deep breath, heh.
We came to Santa Fe to help set our intentions for 2020. It looks like the year ahead is going to have a whole lot in store for us, and I’m pretty much positive that it’ll be equal parts exciting and stressful, so taking a week to center ourselves before diving in headfirst sounded like a good idea. It was an absolute treat, and a by a combo of buying flights way in advance and waiting until Cyber Monday to book our hotel room, we were able to o it all for remarkably cheap.
And, even though it was a vacation, we got a lot of work done! We knew we had a lot to do for an upcoming project so we booked a few extra days to make sure that we’d have time to work without feeling like we were missing out on vacation activities. Our absolute favorite cozy spot to work in is Collected Works / Iconik Cafe—a coffee shop and book store combo in the heart of downtown Santa Fe. It’s the quaintest little spot with a big fire going and an amazing $7 breakfast burrito the size of my head. I had one almost every day of this trip and yes I am nauseous!
Below are a few of our recommendations and favorites! We highly recommend you spend a weekend (or longer) here if you ever get a chance :)
Hotel St. Francis—This gorgeous hotel is right in downtown with a fantastic restaurant and bar. The lobby is home to Secreto Lounge, which has one of our favorite drinks of the trip, the smoked sage margarita. Damn it was so good. Also they wildly had the most delicious chicken sandwich ever? There’s a beautiful fireplace in the lobby that had a fire going at all hours, so we ended most evenings there with a glass of wine and a book. Magic.
Shopping Downtown—We are not the kind of people who shop on vacation. Mostly because we’re always trying to save cash and avoid being broke, but also because like if we just spent money on a flight and hotel the last thing I want to do is buy more stuff. But Downtown Santa Fe is… different. The shops are incredible. Sure, there’s random trinkets and crap like there is in every touristy place, but there are also so many amazing finds. The Native American rugs and pottery are stunning and so unique to this area, you just need to visit a few of the shops on the main square to get a taste of it all. And then there are boutiques like Parts Unknown and Standard & Strange that have some of the most wonderfully curated men’s clothing we’ve ever seen. Bliss.
Ten Thousand Waves—a spa / resort / communal bath situation tucked between snow-capped trees right near a national forest. It was such a fun experience. We didn’t get spa treatments but did spend time in the various baths and saunas, all while sipping hot green tea.
Meow Wolf—This is not something you’d typically expect to find in a place like Santa Fe, but something you absolutely must do if you visit. It’s really, really hard to describe. But basically it’s a ginormous installation art piece mansion thing in a warehouse with a mystery you try to solve and it’s absolutely incredible and completely worth the $35 entry fee. That’s all I can really say about it. It gets very busy on the weekend, so we’d recommend trying to visit when it’s slower so you can really take your time and soak the whole thing in.
Museums—there are several museums right in downtown Santa Fe but the two we most enjoyed were Georgia O’Keeffe Museum & the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Spend an afternoon getting cultured!
New Mexican Cuisine—Some quick basics: New Mexican cuisine is kind of similar to traditional Mexican cuisine in that it’s a combination of indigenous and colonial Spanish cuisines. But it’s a littttle different than Mexican cuisine, and one huge hallmark is their chile sauces. Pretty much every New Mexican spot you go will offer you green or red chile sauce (or both, which you can call “Christmas”) to top pretty much anything—green is milder and red is spicy. You’ll come across lots of tacos, enchiladas, and massive burritos that will rock your entire world and may give you a tummy ache. Worth it!
The Shed is an absolute must for lunch or dinner. They have phenomenal red chile and posole (a regionally traditional hominy and pork soup) housed in a nine-room 17th century adobe home with tiny entryways and colorful walls. Absolutely quintessential! We had our first meal here when we landed, and our last meal here before we left.
Tia Sophia’s is an incredible little breakfast and lunch spot serving up authentic New Mexican breakfasts. They claim to have invented the popular “Christmas chile,” which is when you get both red and green chile as your topping (usually on burritos or enchiladas). So definitely do that.
La Plazuela is in the LaFonda Hotel and has one of the most beautiful dining rooms downtown. It’s a gorgeous enclosed courtyard with lit up trees that reminded us a little of one of our favorite spots in Mexico City, Azul Historico. The food and setting is slightly more upscale than the other places on this list, but no need to get dressed up.
Tune-Up Cafe is a little dive cafe serving up New Mexican and Salvadoran breakfast and lunch about a ten minute drive from downtown. Matt said the chili relleno was the best he’d ever had! The green chili chilaquiles were dope, also!
Cafe Pasqual’s is a cute little spot downtown that kinda leans on the hippie/organic vibe in the best way possible. The food is fresh and flavorful, with slight twists on classic New Mexican cuisine with some of the best mole enchiladas we’ve had outside of Mexico City. A great spot for lunch or dinner!