Propaganda by Proletariateats

The burning starts in the back of your throat on your first bite of enchilada, sudden and intense, like heat from a grass fire, and then spills down your esophagus, like some flaming waterfall, until it reaches your stomach.  There, it ignites a waiting claymore of gastric acid, driving auguries of imminent scatological torment into the nether regions of your lower bowels, while, at the same time, somehow calling water into your eyes as if you’ve been just been maced, in the face, from the inside out. 

It’s complicated, this pain, because it hurts everywhere at once, and in places you’ve never hurt before.  It makes you writhe in your restaurant chair and gulp for air, hoping that a good lungful of oxygen might make the burning stop.  Which it does:  the cool air somehow works, and your pain vanishes with the quick cessation of a miraculous reprieve; gone, suddenly, like a shadow of passing cloud on an otherwise sunny day. 

You steel your resolve to take another bite.  You raise your fork in anger and tell yourself that you’re tough enough, damn it, to endure this goddamn spanking machine of a meal and its pleasure/pain cycle of successive bites.  So you eat again, and the results are predicably the same.  Ouch.  

It’s not the enchilada that’s killing you, here, friend-o, it’s the sauce:  the Level Two sauce from the good folks at Horseman’s Haven Café in Santa Fe.  That’s the stuff lighting a fire inside your body right now; the source of all this pain.  The cooks here make the sauce from green Hatch chilis, a variety of pepper grown only in New Mexico’s Hatch valley, and renowned for their sweet-smoky flavor and heat, which tips the Scoville Heat scale at 8,000 units, a level of culinary heat capable of hurting even the most battle-tested of pepper junkies, fools like me.  With this sauce, culinarians at Horseman’s Haven smother everything.

Horseman’s Haven has been making Level Two sauce since the restaurant’s inception in 1981, when owner Rose Romero opened her charming little place next to a gas station—now a Speedway with whom Horseman’s Haven shares a parking lot—on Cerrillos Road, in the decidedly unfashionable district of south Santa Fe.  And that’s a good thing, because to enter Horseman’s Haven Café is to enter a culinary time capsule, one seemingly unchanged from the year it opened, the year Hinckley shot Reagan, and which now stands as a Santa Fe institution, proudly old-school in its sensibilities, and wholly inured to the caprices of modern, culinary fashion. Sitting in my booth by the window, I’m struck by the café’s effortless, down-and-dusty cowboy chic—an interior so like something out of 1983’s Tender Mercies—and by the potency of its diner vibes:  a menu limited to those things the café does well—enchiladas, quesadillas, and burritos—and the steady patois of pinga jokes coming from the kitchen in beer-soaked Spanish.

I order enchiladas.  In New Mexico, enchiladas differ from the prevailing modes of enchilada-making across most of North America.  Here, they’re made from small stacks—not rolls—of blue-corn tortillas.  My stack is filled with chicken, and then topped with melted cheddar cheese and the ubiquitous Level Two sauce that will soon send writhing paroxysms of pepper-induced pain throughout my body, a process the beans and rice on my plate seem only too happy to witness, the bastards.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned.  My waitress—a pleasant, middle-aged woman with a career-server’s thousand-yard stare—has cautioned me on the dangers of Level Two heat, and yet I’ve insisted on tickling this dragon’s tail, as they say, by topping my meal with culinary lava and remanding myself to a world of gustatory hurt.

My server has seen this before.  One look at me, and she’s got me and my bullshit rightfully pegged.  Which means she’s had the foresight to order me sopapillas, deep-fried dough, fluffy as April clouds, but with a hollow center, that closely resemble Native American fry-bread, and which, when served with honey—as they are here, at Horseman’s Haven—offer immediate and palliative relief to fools like me, who’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we can handle Level Two sauce, and who suddenly find themselves tumbling out of the sky at thirty-two feet per second, per second, hurtling back, toward earth, on the gravity of their own humility after the wings of their culinary hubris have melted for flying too close to the New Mexican sun.  The sopapilla work; they extinguish the fire in my belly, and in my head.  They afford me the courage to take another bite. 

Pain is never requisite for gustatory bliss.  This we know.  Too much piquancy—too many Hatch peppers, too much heat—can easily sully the hundreds of careful calibrations and symmetries that make a meal otherwise perfect.  But sometimes, pain is the whole fucking point of the exercise.  Sometimes, you need a plate of enchiladas to kick your ass. Because pain, as we know, is often our truest friend, and the one friend we trust to let us know that we’re really and truly alive.  

So giddy-up, cowboy.  The Level Two sauce at the Santa Fe’s Horseman’s Haven Café awaits you.  Be nervy, be brave, my good rider, and order the green-chili enchiladas.  I promise I’ll be right behind you, happy to wipe away your hot-food tears, with your sopapillas at the ready.  

Contact:  christopher@proletariateats.com