New Mexico's Famous Green Chile Cheeseburgers

I often get asked about my time here in New Mexico and people want to know about the weather, my proximity to Mexico and Texas and somewhat on the culture.  I’m a foodie and I now live in the Green Chile capital of the world.  How come they never ask about the food part of the culture? 

Las Cruces, NM is in the middle of the Mesilla valley and is divided by the flowing Rio Grande, just 35 miles upstream from Juarez, Mexico and the western tip of El Paso, Texas.  Well that is a bit of a misnomer, because the Rio Grande (translated Big River) is more like pequeña cala or small creek.  This time of the year it is actually just a sandbar as it passes under Interstate 10 in Las Cruces.

This city has an interesting mix of people with the Snowbirds from all over the country, the students at NMSU, the farming community, and the locals.  It is fairly well spread out for a community of only 100,000 and considering it is the second largest city in the state it still has that small town charm.  There are only four golf courses in town (one is private) which are all amazingly affordable compared to what I am used to in Oregon, California and Colorado yet it is fairly easy to get a tee time and you can golf year round.  There are the major food chains here from Fast food to QSR and even full-service casual style dining.  There are five BBQ joints in town and some are good, some not so and one that should not even be in business (I am not here to slam anybody).  Obviously there are a number of wonderful Mexican restaurants, both independent and chain, and I have enjoyed trying them and most importantly the various sauces and other concoctions created from the local chiles.

The local university, NMSU is also the home of the Chile Pepper Institute (www.chilepepperinstitute.org) headed up by director Paul Bosland, who in my opinion is freakin’ Yoda when it comes to chiles and how to grow them.  He has recently done some work on intensifying (is that a word?) the Bhout Jolokia, which was the first to surpass the 1,000,000 Scoville units mark and now the Red Scorpion, or ghost chile, which has reached even higher marks on the same scale.  To give you a bit of perspective on how hot that is, one Bhout Jolokia pepper would be like eating over 350 jalapenos or a half dozen Habanero peppers.  Aye, Mui caliente!!!  You see Chiles are the main crop down here.  More than Pecans and New Mexico supplies 10% of the world’s pecan consumption.  We are only 30 miles south of Hatch, where chiles became famous, and you can even ask for them on your Big Mac© here.  Every grocery store has roasters out front during harvest season and of course there are a number of festivals dedicated to Salsa and the chile during the year.

So being surrounded by numerous varieties of chiles it makes sense that I would apply them to my cooking and I do.  Your standard Nu-Mex or green chile, some call them Anaheim’s, comes in a variety of heat levels and has amazing nutritional and medicinal properties that I love.  They are higher in Vitamin C than an Orange, great for your heart and most importantly, in my case do amazing things for keeping blood normal.  Forget an apple a day to keep the doctor away.  I recommend two Serannos and jalapeno for overall health.  I bet you can probably lower your cholesterol level 15 points just by smelling the air here as they are roasting chiles in the fall.  Well maybe, besides it can’t hurt and I love the smell of fresh roasted chiles.

The Owl Bar and Cafe in
San Antonio, NM

The Buckhorn Cafe and Pkg goods
in San Antonio, NM

One of the big things down here is obviously the green chile cheeseburger.  Everybody does one.  Many restaurateurs claim they have the best but I always think it is a bit subjective and everyone should try a few to see which ones they like.  That brings me to the point of this week’s blog. I recently took a drive up to San Antonio, NM to try out the Owl Bar and their neighbor across the street, the Buckhorn, both known for their green chile cheeseburgers.  San Antonio is about 140 miles north of Las Cruces and 90 miles south of Albuquerque.  It is a very small town, population at less than 1,000 and is the birthplace of Conrad Hilton, (I can’t imagine Paris Hilton ever visiting her great grandfather’s hometown). It is near the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge which gets an enormous migration of Sandhill Cranes and Winter Geese in the late fall, similar to the Swallows in San Juan Capistrano.  It is also about ten miles west of the north entrance of the Trinity test site (now White Sands Missile range) where they tested the first atomic bomb.  It is a quaint little town that most Interstate travelers would just pass on by and I would have done the same except for two reasons.  First off, a lot of the locals here In Las Cruces have told me about the town and the green chile cheeseburgers there and they talk about one place or the other.  A majority will say the Owl had better burgers but my next door neighborhood told me that Bobby Flay went up against the owner of the Buckhorn on his show Throw down with Bobby Flay and he lost.  I have been to Bobby’s place in Las Vegas, Mesa Grill and I love the Mesa Burger with its Vidalia onions and the Spicy horseradish mustard all under melted cheddar.  Bobby knows burgers and has been a pioneer of infusing Southwest flavors and chiles into his cuisine.  There is a reason why he is who he is and let’s faces it, the guy can cook and he knows what people like and executes it very well.



Manny Olguin defeats Iron Chef Bobby Flay on
Food Network's Throw Down with Bobby Flay

So I’m hooked and already drooling at this point, and decide to head up with a friend one Saturday.  I have a light breakfast, toast and juice, because I am going to have two burgers that day and head on up.  It was a great drive through the Southern New Mexico desert that day, early February and still 68°F without a cloud in the sky.  We got into San Antonio about 11:45 am and decide to go to the Owl first.  We pull up and I see this typical light brown stucco building with heavy thick wooden doors.  We walk in and it’s dim lighting with dark wood everywhere, the floor, tables, walls, booths and even the ceiling.  


You cant miss this sign as
you pull of the highway and
head east a few hundred yards

Only one booth has customers. There is a long bar opposite the door and the five booths up front.  Funny the building looked bigger out front.  We walk to the end of the bar and I see entrance to another dining room behind the bar.  We step in, having to duck from the low clearance, and I see eight more booths in a rectangular room with four tables in the middle, two of which are occupied.  Guess what, it is all wood in here to.  From my first impression I would say it was a greasy spoon that aspired to be a dive.  MY KINDA PLACE!!

The back room of the Owl has
more woods then my golf bag

  The waitress comes by and hands us the menus and takes a drink order.  I look at the menu and there are a few Mexican items on the menu but right there in the center is why I came here.  It reads like this:
Green Chile Cheeseburger (with lettuce, onion and tomato)…………………. $5.50

Green Chile Cheese Fries at the Owl Bar and Cafe

That’s it.  No other fancy burgers with fifty toppings and a choice of cheeses.  There is only one burger option.  Now I am intrigued.  I order a burger and a side of chile cheese fries when my friend Tom tells me the cheese fries are just the fries, cheese sauce and diced green chiles.  I was used to either red or green chile stew on my chile cheese fries but had an open mind.  The Cheese fries came out first and I decide to play it safe and use a fork because if it weren’t for the few fries sneaking out from underneath the mound of chiles and sauce I would have thought it was soup.  They were fresh cut fries.  The kind that darkens when fried from the starch that had not been completely rinsed away and add great flavor to a fry.  The cheese sauce was a scratch béchamel sauce with what, I am assuming, was a mild cheddar cheese added to it.  The chiles were finely diced and lightly sautéed and piled, more like shoveled, because there was a ton of them, YUM!   I stabbed the fork into the middle and made sure I got a good tasting of all three ingredients.  The chile flavor was wonderful.  It tasted like they were roasted five minutes ago.  The flavor of freshly roasted chiles is simply amazing.  Once you have had that taste I guarantee you will never buy that little can of diced chiles in the ethnic food aisle of the grocery store ever again.  It is so incredible and you get to know the difference between roasted a few hours ago and a few days ago.  The cheese sauce was dripping smoothly over the fries to coat them from end to end with its lacteous blanket.  It was lightly seasoned which is good because I really did not want anything from hindering those chiles.  The fries, well I am a bit of a snob on fries and I thought these fell a little short.  A good French fry is first, fresh cut, not frozen.  It is blanched a first time about two thirds of the way in oil that is about 300° F and cooled and then finished at 375° F to make a crispy outside but a creamy inside.  It is in my opinion the only way to cook a French fry, not only for its taste and texture but it also keeps the fry from becoming to greasy.  If done right, Fries done this way remain crisp and are capable of supporting sauces much like what was on top of these.  The owl definitely skipped the second fry on these so the steam from the inside of the potato could not get hot enough to push out all of the oil from the fryer and well they were soggy and partially cooked at best. 

The Green Chile Cheeseburger at the Owl
is worth the 2 hour drive I made to have it

Thank God for the chiles and sauce on top or I might have refused to even try the burger.  The burgers came out a few minutes later and let me tell you this, WOW!!!  It was a simple burger grilled on a flat top and had some sautéed diced onions, a slight spread of mustard with the diced green chiles and, wait for it, American cheese.  There was absolutely nothing special or fancy about this burger.  It had a standard white bun and was not huge, maybe a ¼ pounder.  No mystery sauce or special ingredients but I have to say, it was the best burger I have had in last couple of years.  They did it right you see.  No one ingredient was overbearing and dominant.  They all worked together to present a wonderful flavor profile that highlighted the fresh chiles.  This burger alone was worth the two hour drive.   I am now starting to understand why the people in Las Cruces all stop here on their way up to Albuquerque. 

Tom gave me some of the history of the place on how the customers have been tacking up dollar bills and other foreign currency on the walls for years.  I had noticed there was a wall near the front door with the foreign currency but I did not see any American currency.  The waitress told me that they finally had to take down all of the money and the owners used it to help out one of the locals who had some problems and apparently it was up in the thousands.  I love local support from local business owners.  I liked the wood walls unclutterd a bit better but I have to admit it reminded me of the Little Bear Tavern in Evergreen, CO.  Only they don’t nail money to the walls there.  They nail bras on the wall there.   I started to wonder if this place had the same kind of nightlife, hmmm???   I smiled and went back to this wonderful creation of a burger and thought what a great idea it was to come up here.  I finished my burger very happy about the experience.  As for Tom, well he had two. 

The Buckhorn boasts about their burger being ranked #7
on the GQ top 20 bucket list burgers

We settled up and decided to go across the street to the Buckhorn.  It was 12:45 now and the middle of the lunch rush.  Maybe we did not plan this just right.  This is the place that beat Bobby Flay and I was looking forward to it.  I just ate one burger but was still a little hungry, so I knew I was going in with a clearand open mind.  The sign out front reads “#7 in America.” A good omen hopefully.  As we walked inside, I notice that it is an even smaller place than across the street.  There are maybe eight tables and four seats at the bar.  All of the tables are full and there are two parties waiting ahead of us.  There is a sign written on cardboard that reads, “We are not fast food, if you are in a hurry, we are sorry.”  I thought it was a little cute but I would not expect a place that beat Bobby Flay and received a decent amount of praise from the media, former governor and native New Mexicans to be a fast food joint, but hey, we can roll with it. Tom pointed out the sign and said, “I guess we will be waiting for a bit,” with a slight grin on his face.  I smiled back but then all of a sudden, it apparently inspired a dirty look from the guy in front of us who said, “It’s not McDonald’s, what do you want?”  Now Tom is 6'7” tall, a former lineman at Colorado State and one thing I have learned over the years is whether its humor or an insult, you don’t say that to someone who is 6'7” tall and pushed other big guys around for sport.  Tom looked at the guy and smiled and looked at me as if I was going to squash him myself.  Twenty minutes later, we saw two seats open at the bar and decided to sit there.  Mine had an empty plate and cup in front of me but I just pushed it forward for the server/bartender to clear when we were greeted. 

The warm and cozy front dining room and bar
at the Buckhorn Cafe in San Antonio, NM

The Buckhorn is different from the Owl.  The walls are painted white and the wood trim is stained a light Oak color.  There are definitely some brighter colors in here and exposed windows that light can actually get through.  Overall, it does seem like a warmer environment.  I noticed on the wall next to me a plaque on the wall with a cover of GQ magazine and a page that says “The 20 hamburgers you must eat before you die."  The Buckhorn was #7 on this list.  This explains the sign out front.  I really hate when places make false claims so after seeing this, I am getting excited for more of that green chile goodness.  A gal came from behind the bar and gave us a couple of menus.  I knew what I came for but I wanted to look it over anyways.  

The Buckhorn was ranked #7 on
GQ's 20 burgers to eat before you die

There was variety here.  They had the Buckhorn which is their “signature” green chile cheeseburger as well as 5 others that basically featured other toppings besides green chiles.  There were also a few other options which, as I thought to myself with confidence, could wait until another trip up to this quaint little town.  The decision was quick.  We both ordered the Buckhorn and a Pepsi.  I had the cheese fries at the Owl and that was enough for me on this trip.  


Now I have been in the restaurant business for almost 20 years now.  I have worked Front of the House Manager for some, Back of the House Manager for others, worked up to General Manager and even Multi-unit Manager for some.  I have also worked for independent owners as a GM and I prefer that over corporate but I value the systems and organizational skills I learned in the corporate environment because it made me understand from an early part of my career the importance of a team effort in providing great customer serviceand I apply those today.  You know that WOW factor that brings people back on a regular basis.  It is essential for survival in a business where 50 % fail in the first year.  I am sure that the average Joe on the street will overlook one or two mistakes a restaurant makes if great food is accompanied by great service.  I am the same way.  It takes a lot for me to get upset at a restaurant.  I never complain about anything unless the food is cold or cooked completely wrong.  I know when a problem is the kitchen’s fault and when it’s the server’s fault.  I expect the server to recognize the problem beforehand but I also know some owners and managers push bad product and service in order to meet costs and numbers without realizing how much this causes many restaurants to fail.

This appeared to be the case as the wheels definitely came off the wagon here.  First off, the waitress never cleared the plate and glass in front of me let alone wipe down the surface.  My Pepsi was delivered in a can with a paper cup and no ice.  If ice is a premium, I will pay for it.  A cold soft drink poured over a full glass of ice tastes ten times better than without.  Try it some time, you will see.  The next thing is that we waited 52 minutes for our two burgers.  I spun around on my stool once to count people in the restaurant and I counted 23 people total sitting down at tables.  The kitchen which was open and next to the bar had two guys working in it.  One was working the cold station, building the buns and also doing fries while the other guy was working the grill station.  Manny Olguin, the owner was standing nearby talking with one server and occasionally ringing out checks.  The flat top was a standard 27” griddle so it could probably handle 16 burgers at a time with plenty of room for peppers and onions to be sautéed.

It always amazes me how some people handle their work flow.  There are a number of ways to do multiple things at once, whether it is multi-tasking or repetition of the same task.  This would be like a cook who puts out orders while completing their prep and all the while, cleaning as they go.  Then there are some who only can do one thing at a time or they lose concentration.  I am quite sure we had the latter with our grill cook today.  The fact that the owner is standing there and knows his customers are waiting for the food and still does nothing to help a cook who is struggling to do one ticket at a time says a lot about how much he cares about guest satisfaction. 

So here I am waiting for about forty minutes, my Pepsi has been empty for about twenty-five minutes and I have not seen my server come by to offer a refill, I am thinking I should have had a second burger at the Owl and Tom looks at me and makes and suggests I go out back and help them slaughter the cow.  The server finally comes up and says “Your burgers will be next”, (she never asked if I wanted another Pepsi).  I smiled as I realized my thirst would have to wait another few minutes and figured the #7 burger in America will fix all of these issues in my mind.  About ten minutes later the burgers were delivered and I ordered another Pepsi for me and a beer for Tom.  I looked at my burger.  It was a little thicker than the one at the Owl, maybe a 1/3 of a pound I figure.  The bun is a standard 5” white bun and I see the toppings seem to be the same ones.  I cut in half and take my first bite. 

The Buckhorn Cafe's signature burger, the Buckhorn came
with a huge case of Topping overload

“Holy Root Vegetable, Batman!!” My head jerks back in shock as I set down my burger.  The first bite was a blast of onion that would knock over a Rhino.  I peel up the top bun and look inside.  There is ton of yellow mustard that is acting like glue for maybe a tablespoon of chiles and ¼ cup of fresh cut onion chunks.  The patty on the bottom bun has a semi melted slice of American cheese with another ¼ cup of those onion chunks sitting on it.  Onions are a simple thing.    You only need about a tablespoon of diced onions on a burger, not a 1/2 a cup.  I think the ratios are a little off and there are obviously some execution errors here as well.  Also, onions are sautéed for burgers because they mellow out quite a bit when cooked and provide a nice sweet component to balance off with the savory of the burger and chiles.  You only need a slight bit of mustard to add the bitter component.  What I had here was a slathering mess of mustard with an overkill blast of onion.  The purpose of spread toppings like mustard, mayo, “the secret sauce” or whatever you put on your burger is to coat the bun and prevent the juice from the burger from making it soggy.  Smart chefs will also use it as a canvas for additional complimentary flavors, for example, Chipotle Mayo or Avocado Honey Mustard.  A simple rule of thumb for you grilling enthusiasts out there, if you can’t taste the hamburger, you need to cut back on toppings.    

I scraped off the onions and what I could of the mustard, reassembled my burger and tore off a piece of the burger s I could see how the beef tasted.  Other than being well done it was actually seasoned quite nicely and was still moist.  It is a shame it was blocked by everything else here.  That is everything except the chiles.  I did not even taste them on the next few bites.  I finally put down the burger and lifted the top bun and scooped some out of the sea of mustard still on the bun to try them.  I saw the guy sautéing them on the griddle but these were lacking that freshness I had across the street. They were very bland and well tasted like they came from, wait for it… a CAN.

All that is going through my head right now is this guy beat Bobby Flay?  I think either the judges were biased or Manny cooked one thing for the throw down against Bobby and puts out something different for his restaurant.  I am just a simple man with simple tastes who writes a simple blog.  Sure I don’t pull punches and I call it as I see it, but how could GQ Magazine, The Food Network and the many people of Southern New Mexico be so wrong about this place?  Well I can make assumptions from years of experience and say The Buckhorn probably was not always like this with plugs from the aforementioned groups above.  Maybe they probably have new help and the kid behind the grill is still learning.  He should be helping him through it though. It is an owner’s responsibility to monitor the current state of the restaurant.  That means having the systems and tools to measure performance on a shiftly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis on all facets of operations.  I have always said that great restaurants don’t fail because the food is bad or the service is bad alone.  Most fail because it is a great chef who makes amazing dishes but he may not have a good head for business or sometimes a GM micro manages a thing to death and sacrifices quality to hit numbers.  Poor customer service is always a cancer.  The point being is that if the Buckhorn does not do something to improve upon these short comings.  It is going to be one of those places.

Overall it was a good trip.  If I had to rank the two places I would say this.  The Owl is one of those off the beaten path dives that is a true diamond in the rough.  They are keeping it simple but doing it right.  They skip the fancy fanfare and give you a solid product.  I give them a thumbs up on value, décor, and service.  I give the burger two thumbs up and I almost never do that.

The Buckhorn dropped the ball in every possible way and I admit I was extremely disappointed.  This being said, I will try them again because I always give a place a second chance to earn my money and see if it was the one freak set of circumstances that occurred while the planets were all aligned or something like that.  Either way, I will send a copy of this post to both owners because as an operator myself I like to get feedback and try my best to improve upon the processes that ensure great guest satisfaction.  So on my next trip I will try the Buckhorn, that is after I get one at the Owl Bar and Café.