During research for my book. La Comida, The Foods Cooking and Traditions of The Upper Rio Grande, Pruett Publishing, 1995, I came across a lot of North African influences in Northern New Mexican culture. Words like adobe, acequia, and horno were Arabic in origin. The architecture, enclosed adobe compounds like the El Torreon Hacienda, can be found from Tunisia, across the Middle East to Afghanistan. Harissa, a spicy North African condiment, is not really any different than chile caribe served throughout New Mexico. Why is North African, or Arabic culture so imbedded in New Mexico? The answer lies with old Spain. The Moors, (North Africans), occupied Spain for 800 hundred years. They gave the Spanish a since of style in architecture, language and cuisine that was carried with them to the New World during the age of discovery. Northern New Mexico, being both isolated not only from Mexico but also from Mother Spain, retained many of these cultural traditions from what I would call Moorish Spain. Jose de Onis from the University of Colorado put it quite simply, “it remained isolated from the rest of the world for centuries…condemned to eternal solitude and plagued by incestuous cultural existence, as if the Spanish imperial galleons of a distant yesterday were left high and dry, surrounded by a limitless ocean of sagebrush and cacti.”

The restaurant El Meze,( meaning the table in Arabic. la mesa?), in the beautifully restored El Torreon Hacienda is a fitting venue for modern interpretations of an eight hundred year old cuisine. My hope for El Meze is to explore these symbiotic cultures in an artistic vision of exciting and exotic flavors from Moorish Spain that are historically imbedded in the culture of Northern New Mexico.