Hand of enchantment 🍽

Chile Colorado takes a home-style approach to traditional New Mexican fare via one young chef's family history and restaurant legacy

Chile Colorado’s green chile-smothered pork avocado burrito. Photos by Matthew Schniper.

Chile Colorado opened six months ago in the former Corner Cafe space downtown — a classic location for adjacent courthouse employees and attendees as well as business lunchers over the years. But totally gone is the drab decor and small-town grandma’s diner vibe. It’s been replaced with a vibrantly warm-colored dining room popping with orange and red walls, an excellent hispanic- and indigenous-themed graffiti mural, purple accent lights and Mexican sarape-style, lined fabric-adorned booths. It’s spotlessly shiny and bright, inviting and staffed by sincerely nice people that give terrific service.

Most importantly, the New Mexico-inspired food rates pretty damn good. Signage at the table informs you that everything’s from scratch and made to order, hence potentially longer wait times at rush hours. In towards closing on a quiet-ish Saturday night, we’re promptly attended to, though. And at meal’s end, owner Daniel “Chef Lito” Moreno happens to pop out from the kitchen just in time for me to shake him down for some background info.

Some of what he tells me encompasses his family history in town, dating back to his grandparents’ ownership in the 1970s of two Mexican eateries on and near the Platte Avenue: Pris & Ernie’s and El Matador. Between both sides of his family, he traces heritage through the San Luis Valley and into Northern New Mexico. “The culture of food is so important to us,” he tells me. “It’s a labor of love. I remember being in the kitchen as a little kid, cooking with my grandma.” He says almost everything at Chile Colorado hails from his grandparents’ recipes with exception to his carne adovada, which is something he proudly developed on his own during time spent working construction in Santa Fe, refining his recipe at home. He considers it Chile Colorado’s specialty item. (He won’t disclose his choice of chilies to me, but hints that he buys them from New Mexico.)

“This is the food I grew up eating,” he says. “I like to push that it’s definitely home-style.” Chile Colorado exists not only to exercise Moreno’s culinary passion, but to celebrate Colorado’s hispanic culture, he says. At just shy of 30 years old, he sounds like he’s already lived a full life as he describes traveling across the country with his dad in his younger adult years. He says they are professional architectural woodworkers, which explains why this spot looks so slick in design. They spent a year and a half remodeling it, he says, noting that the addition of a patio (with a mountain view) come springtime will be the next phase. After that, he’s entertaining the idea of a second location already. He doesn’t seem spooked by getting potentially spread thin. I suspect the couple years he spent cooking at Bean Bandit locally got him accustomed to higher volume service.

Owner/Chef Daniel Moreno.

If you’re one of those eaters who first (or entirely) judges a place on the quality of its salsa, enter with ease knowing that Chile Colorado’s rendition rates fantastic. Though it’s not free — the salsa with house-fried chips is $4 — we’re refilled on both at no charge. The thin salsa holds a building heat that definitely bites but never overwhelms the palate and it’s great poured atop just about everything else we order.

Which, between the four of us, is: a green chile-smothered pork avocado burrito and customized combo plates (they sell uno, dos or tres choices for $6, $11 and $16 respectively) that contain beef and chicken tacos, the carne adovada and a dish called Chile Colorado, plus à la carte sides of rice, refried beans and fideo.

Working that in reverse, fideo makes me think of kid-friendly SpaghettiOs gone to Mexico flavor-wise, but with the satisfaction of vermicelli-like noodles. Moreno’s refried beans and rice are both unique; the beans made with bacon, which comes through strongly in the flavor, and the rice hydrated with chicken stock and laced with herbaceous poultry seasoning — resulting in perhaps the most tell-tale home-style taste of the night.

Fideo and a soft-shell beef taco on a combo plate.

Chile Colorado is actually a traditional dish, with recipes like this one to be found in abundance online. In the Moreno family’s version, stew meat is eschewed in favor of ground beef cooked with red chilies. Though it makes for an oily, formless heap by way of presentation, with garnishing melted cheese seeping into the tiny crevices, the dish delivers a rich and creamy texture and deeply earthy flavor with more than modest spiciness. We pounce on it, pinching bites with warm flour tortillas (as if eating Ethiopian fare at Uchenna) and loading bits onto tortilla chips. It’s awesome.

It’s also more exciting and interesting than the simpler beef on the tacos, which is totally fine but more basic and approachable like the chicken tacos, too. Back to the real action, the pork avocado burrito (pictured at this article’s top) reminds me of my old fondness for El Taco Rey’s rendition — speaking of another legacy downtown spot that’s no longer with us — and it also makes me think I’m overdue to revisit Salsa Latina’s take on the beloved item. Anyway, this is the most gooey, stringy and cheesy dish we order, especially as the chile sauce slowly sogs the big, blistered tortilla, making for delightfully soft bites that are really hearty and satiating. We happily mix forkfuls with the rice and beans.

Last on the list, and the main attraction, indeed Moreno’s carne adovada deserves attention. Large, chewy pork hunks cling together in a pasty red chile sauce that’s as fulfilling as the Chile Colorado’s. Ours gets plated side-by-side actually so we get a little taste blending going on between the two proteins and don’t mind at all. Again you’re going to want to pinch bites with flour tortilla hunks or fork the good red stuff onto tortilla chips. As with wine or whiskey, I feel like the red chile flavors unfold the longer they linger on my tastebuds, striking early floral notes and fading to the desert-evoking, dusty earthiness as they commingle with a subtle, smoldering spiciness.

A combo plate with Chile Colorado and carne adovada; the MezcaLito and the dulce burrito.

As for what we did drink, the kids with us put down some sweet bottles of Jarritos fruit-flavored sodas and we went for the $10 house margarita and $12 MezcaLito. The marg’s thankfully not made with cheap pre-mix but real juices instead, and its salt rim helps balance the sweetness. I’m a mezcal fan so I appreciate how strong and stiff its flavor is when blended here with añejo tequila and Triple Sec for the MezcaLito; but if you aren’t a fan or are on the fence order something else. It’s potent. I take my last sips as I get one small bite of the dulce burrito we order for dessert. The kids destroy the rest of the fresh strawberry and vanilla pastry cream filling inside the fried shell; this plate’s your strawberry shortcake across the border.

What I leave for another time, hopefully not too far out, is a return visit for breakfast, offered six days a week. (Chile Colorado is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily but for Sundays, serving all three meals.) I’ve seen enough to know that it shouldn’t disappoint and I’m curious to try Moreno’s take on huevos rancheros and classic breakfast burrito pairings. Plus, you can get the signature carne adovada with eggs and potatoes, and I just know how good that will be alongside a cup of coffee or one of the Mexican-themed latte drinks.

Chile Colorado’s bright space aglow at night downtown.