Artichoke Cafe, Albuquerque, NM

This is one of the longer-lived fine dining places in Albuquerque, located on the southwest corner of Edith and Central. Nice room, good service, and innovative, well-prepared food.

Here were the dishes three of us tried on September 15, 2002. Quotes are taken from a copy of the menu.

• Appetizer: ``Asian lettuce wraps with Thai barbequed chicken salad, butter leaf lettuce, pickled cucumber, julienne red bell pepper and snow peas, with Nuoc Cham sauce.'' A fine array of superbly fresh vegetables, this will make rabbit-food enthusiasts very happy. The chicken was not too prominent, just a different texture in the complicated whole.
• Appetizer: ``House-cured salmon, thinly sliced and served with herbal potato chips, chevre cream cheese, roasted shallot puree and finished with a mustard and chive emulsion.'' The salmon was exquisite, with some fresh cracked pepper adhering to the edges of the slices. The chevre was nice and light. The shallots were purple and slightly sweet. The emulsion amounted to a few drops, but it was very tasty with the salmon. The potato chips were pairs of paper-thin slices of potato with a fresh herb leaf sandwiched in the middle before frying for visual, textural and gustatory interest. Good stuff.
• Appetizer: ``Blue crab cakes on a bed of frisee, with crispy smoked bacon, sweet corn coulis and chive oil.'' This was my choice, and quite rewarding. Lots of places have crab cakes in this town, but this was one of the best. The cakes were well browned to give some crunch and sweetness to the blend.
• Salad: ``Mixed seasonal greens with choice of dressing.'' We all agreed that if we had to dispense with one course, this would be it. The salads were sizeable, but the greens were not the absolute premium baby green blend that a lot of the competition offers. Not bad, just not too exciting.
• ``Free range chicken breast stuffed with forest mushroom duxelle, roasted and served with sweet cream mashed potatoes and finished with a Madeira pan sauce.'' Very tasty, tender meat, good balance between the earthiness of the mushrooms and the lighter parts of the flavor.
• Seafood special of the day: grilled opah with sour cream chive potato salad, grilled asparagus with orange tomato sauce, and salsa verde. Out of maybe six times I've had opah, this was by far the best preparation, extremely tender and tasty, compared to the somewhat firmer versions elsewhere. As good as the salmon was, I wished I'd gotten this.
• I chose the ``salmon of the day.'' It was wild-caught Atlantic king salmon (is this a sustainable fishery, I was wondering?). Served with a warm rice salad with dried cranberries, grilled asparagus, and ratatouille. Salmon is a tough test for me, since so many places serve it. But this was quite nice. It was sauteed and just barely crunchy on the outside, with the rest of the meat cooked just right. The ratatouille was well made, and the rest of the ingredients sort of blended together into one quite tasty whole.

Last updated: 2002/09/23 03:25:47
URL: http://www.nmt.edu/~shipman/food/artichoke.html