SANTA FE, NM (By Henry Shukman, NYTimes) November 20, 2005 — When I first went to New Mexico in the early 1990's, with my young English head full of D. H. Lawrence, imagining adobe cabins among pines with big vistas of blue desert opening up below, I didn't like chili peppers. In fact I was afraid of them. I'd once had an encounter with one on an Argentine train. I bought a plastic plate of food from a platform vendor, and blithely bit off half of what I took to be a small, wrinkled tomato. Big mistake.

One of the many things I'm grateful to New Mexico for, now that I've lived there on and off for over a decade, is converting me to the chili. It happened one afternoon, on a long, lonely drive through the Black Mountains. I stopped at a small general store and bought tortilla chips, and on a whim, a jar of hot sauce called Religious Experience: The Wrath. It was the name that did it. I set the jar between my legs as I drove, and began by touching just the corner of a chip to the oil on the salsa's surface. As I drove I kept mechanically doing it. Something happened. The pain started up, but instead of shying away from it, I dipped back for more. Soon I was shoveling it in. By the time I reached my destination, I was a high, happy devotee. And the jar was empty.

Now that the red dust is settling after Santa Fe's tumult of popularity in the 80's and 90's, and "Santa Fe style" has become a fact of life, what has happened to Santa Fe's famous Southwestern cuisine, with its pungent and piquant seasonings? There are certainly still excellent local restaurants, like the Coyote Cafe and Geronimo, turning out superb versions of Southwestern food, but for the town's cognoscenti, if not for the tourists, things have moved away from guacamole and the chili.

There's a quieter, cooler generation of fine dining emerging: small, unobtrusive places that don't advertise, that develop undercover reputations among those in the know who pass through or live in the hills around town. Last month I visited three of the finest newer restaurants, which have hardly a trace of the Southwest, except in the adobe walls that house them: Aqua Santa, Trattoria Nostrani and Kasa Soba, all quite distinct, but united by being small below-the-radar places, with superbly high standards, and chefs with obsessive relationships to food and wine.

AQUA SANTA

Aqua Santa is one year old. Its owner and chef, Brian Knox, used to have perhaps the best-loved restaurant in Santa Fe, Escalera, then vanished from the scene after that closed in 1996 (a big rent increase was to blame), and re-emerged recently with this one-room adobe, a place that feels as much like a living room as a commercial property. Indeed, Mr. Knox is a gregarious, congenial host; he'll emerge from the open kitchen at one end of the room to greet every guest, and is as likely to wax enthusiastic about the latest volume of Seamus Heaney as about the wild boar that has been marinating for four days.

Mr. Knox, a slow-food aficionado, has a kind of eco-theory of cuisine. One of his signature dishes is slow-braised lamb ragù over papardelle with hazelnuts and pecorino. The lamb, melt-in-the-mouth tender, comes from local farmers who graze their flocks on fields where hazel trees grow, and presumably hazelnuts fall. However subtly, not only an infusion of hazelnut has entered the meat but also the pecorino cheese, made from ewes' milk. The result is a sense of deep, rustic harmony.

Likewise, a signature starter is his Caesar salad with pan-fried oyster and boiled egg. Here the anchovy and raw yolk in the dressing echo both the brininess of the oyster and the soft, warm yolk of the egg. Another wonderful starter is the little square pizzetta with taleggio cheese, serrano ham, smoked pine nuts and white truffle oil, a warming, sophisticated appetizer on chilly autumn nights.

The menu changes at least weekly. On my last visit, I was lucky enough to get a succulent bistecca alla fiorentina, a pan-fried T-bone with caramelized onions, garlic and rosemary, cooked juicily à point. My friend had the Moroccan-spiced squab (a k a pigeon). This was superb, having been marinated for three days and cooked partly in a pan in the kiva fireplace in the corner of the room, and subtly fragranced with piñon smoke. It came with couscous and pine nuts. We finished up with the rich chocolate pavé with espresso cream and with some wonderful hydroponic strawberries.

The wine list, printed on the back of the menu, is commendable. There's a bottle for every wallet (except perhaps for the hyperspender's), and the friendly, excellent staff members always have new bottles open that they're happy to pour by the glass. We had a delectable Bandol rosé followed by a glorious 2000-vintage Zenato Amarone.

The atmosphere is understated. This is something of a common cause among these restaurants, each determined that nothing should distract from the experience of what's on your plate. Tuttle and Diebenkorn prints hang on the walls, although the art tends to rotate through Mr. Knox's formidable address book. Regulars at the restaurant include Bruce Naumann, Susan Rothenberg and Mr. Tuttle, who live locally and evidently feel at home in the warm, low-key glow of Mr. Knox's hospitality.

TRATTORIA NOSTRANI

Eric Stapelman, owner and sommelier of Nostrani, and Nelli Maltezos, the head chef, are longtime collaborators in the restaurant trade, but only four years ago did they buy out their partners and continued on their own. The result was Trattoria Nostrani (the second word is Venetian slang for "ours"), an avowedly Northern Italian haven in a small adobe building that was once a bordello in downtown Santa Fe.

Here too the décor is cozy and unobtrusive. The only thing that might distract from what's on your plate here is what's in your glass. As soon as we arrived, the ebullient Mr. Stapleman showed us his sanctum sanctorum, a newly built wine cellar full of treasures - a phalanx of Brunello di Montalcino's Barolos, reserve Chiantis and big-name Burgundies, and Pauillacs and Pomerols going back to the 1940's. Should you want to, you could buy a bottle for the price of a decent car here.

After an amuse-bouche of porcini risotto cake over diced beets, we started in with bruschetta with artichoke pâté and tapenade, and autumn harvest roasted plum tomato soup, with heirloom tomatoes from the restaurant's organic garden. Both dishes set the tone, achieving a surprising mix of lightness and richness. Our primi piatti were truffle taglierini with Parmesan, and potato gnocchi with aged Asiago cheese. The small gnocchi, made in the restaurant, were particularly good, and had a lightness that comes from adding a touch of olive oil to the dough. With these, the time had come for a dreamy 1985 Castello di Ama San Lorenzo Vineyard Chianti Classico, dark, lambent, smooth and floral, from Nostrani's breathtaking range of Italian reds.

For secondi piatti, my wife had succulent halibut over clam sauce, and the combination of the melting halibut with the chewiness of the small clams worked wonderfully, while I had the saltimbocca di quaglie, a split, pan-roasted quail over zucchini, in a Marsala reduction to which a couple of spoons of Sauternes had been added to counteract the dryness of the reduced Marsala. To close, we had baked figs with pistachio frangipani and delicate warm chocolate sauce, the freshness and faint tartness of the figs setting off the warmer, sweeter elements; and fresh strawberries with reduced aged balsamic vinegar, faintly caramelized by its 25 years in a barrel.

Everything here is inspired by the northern half of Italy - Abruzzo and Umbria, but especially Tuscany and Piedmont. The restaurant offers the same kind of congruence Brian Knox seeks: food and wine that pertain to the same soil, weather and sunshine. The effect is peculiarly satisfying, and somehow wholesome; you leave feeling nourished by more than food. The chiseled all-male staff in black shirts seem part of the blend too, though you can't help feeling you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of them: the restaurant is serious not only about its no-smoking and no-cellphone policies but also about its fragrance restrictions. One foursome were recently turned away because one of their number had simply too much scent on.

KASASOBA

With its one long room and only 10 tables, at which each place comes with a single pebble on a napkin, Kasasoba has a touch of Japanese minimalism, offset by movie posters on the walls advertising such spectacles as the original Godzilla. It opened in March 2001 as a noodle house (hence the name, a rough multilingual equivalent for "House of Noodles"). The timing couldn't have been worse, with the starch-free Atkins diet just hitting its stride. The owner, Christian Geideman, adjusted: a longtime aficionado of Japanese food, he converted it into an authentic izakaya house at dinner (lunch is still noodles), izakaya being something like Japanese tapas, with the emphasis on high-quality ingredients.

Dinners here consist of a number of smaller dishes. We began with palate-cleansing cucumber shavings with seaweed, refreshing with their touch of shiso, a mintlike herb - something like super-subtle gherkins; then a cake of chilled tofu with scallion marmalade (hiya-yakko tofu). Then came hot grilled skewers of shiitake mushrooms, the hot chunky flesh mixing well with the cool daikon.

A signature dish is the free-range chicken gyozas, their filling ground in-house, slightly spicy and wonderful, which we followed with a palate-cleansing mound of blanched, chilled spinach with sesame dressing (goma ae). A glorious fan of yellowfin squares came next, their margins paled from searing, each with its own dab of wasabe, and a little bowl of tamari with shaved ginger standing in it (wild Kyushu kihada tuna tataki); then lobster futomaki with avocado, rolls of fresh lobster sushi wrapped in yuba, a skin that forms on boiled soy milk.

Then came another signature dish, gyuniku tataki, thin slices of rare grass-fed beef tenderloin with ponzu. The cool, almost raw beef with the spicy sauce created a memorable halfway house between steak au poivre and steak tartare. As in all great Japanese cuisine, the chef has an eye on the seasons, the table being one place where the rhythms of nature are still expected to be felt.

The five-page sake list was a revelation. Our ginjo sake came in an iced bottle, poured into shot glasses. I never knew sake could be so good - a taste of nectar-flavored dew. (For those like me who didn't know, the quality of sake is determined by how much the rice has been polished before fermenting.) Fortunately for my desert thirst, the recommendation was to accompany it with a bottle of Sapporo beer.

Three memorable restaurants, with hardly a chili in sight: Santa Fe is moving on.

Bill of Fare

Meal prices are for three courses for two without alcohol and tip.

Aqua Santa, 451 West Alameda, (505) 982-6297. Dinner Tuesday to Saturday; lunch Wednesday to Friday. $70 to $100.

Trattoria Nostrani, 304 Johnson, (505) 983-3800. Dinner only; closed Sunday. Around $120.

Kasasoba, 544 Agua Fria, (505) 984-1969. Lunch weekdays (noodles only), dinner daily. Around $85.