If there’s one similarity between Steinbeck’s magnus opus and the New Mexican restaurant on Cerrillos, it’s the kindness and joie d’ vivre of the bussers and servers. For years he’s been trying to get me to one of those restaurants, the quaintly named Tortilla Flats. He happily avoids the Plaza’s maddening crowds and eschews its anointed restaurants to partake of eateries which may not be as well-trafficked, but offer excellent food prepared and served from the heart. Given his druthers as to where to spend his hard-earned dollars, he’ll take Santa Fe’s burgeoning west-side every time. My friend Carlos would argue that despite the gentrification of the Plaza area, the expansive west-side more accurately represents the “real” Santa Fe where real people-the locals–transact their daily commerce. Though Santa Fe’s touristy-artsy Plaza area and the city’s western fringes along Cerrillos are hardly Monterey and Tortilla Flats, there is a clear demarcation between the two, a distinctness that bespeaks of vast socioeconomic differences. They cared nothing for accumulating material possessions or the responsibilities inherent with ownership.

The paisanos of Tortilla Flat were carnal beings, happiest when their appetites (food, drink, women, music) were sated. They had no qualms about cadging for food or purloining it from neighbors or restaurants.

They rebuffed the notion of holding down steady employment or paying rent. Unlike their stodgy, orthodox counterparts in Monterey, the men of Tortilla Flat defied social mores, conventions and expectations. The quirky inhabitants of the ramshackle community were a dichotomous lot–hedonistic drunks, adulterers and thieves on one hand on the other, paisanos with surprisingly kind-hearts who asked nothing more from life than loyal friends and a little wine. In his 1935 novel Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck introduced the literary world to the downtrodden denizens of Tortilla Flat, an impoverished barrio on the shabby hillside just outside the respectable city of Monterey, California. “ Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold.” Tortilla Flats New Mexican Restaurant in Santa Fe

Tortilla flats restaurant