CORTEZ – Past the car washes and banks, the budget motels and storage buildings, beyond the liquor stores and auto parts shops, you’ll arrive at a single block of U.S. Highway 160 that makes the almost hourlong journey from Durango worth your while.
There in the first block of West Main Street, you can shake off the detritus of America’s ubiquitous exurban sprawl and revel in a small Western town with a big Western past. Early Native American settlers? Check. Greedy land speculators? Check. Water poaching to support the first ranchers and farmers? Check.
But that was 128 years ago. Today, what remains is a couple of blocks of massive historic buildings, and the one of most interest to Durangoans in search of a good meal is the restaurant-loaded stretch on the north side of West Main Street. Who needs history when you can dine like this?
You’ll forget all about the trio of historic trails nearby – Old Spanish Trail, San Juan Skyway and Trail of the Ancients – when you taste Stonefish Sushi’s inventive lobster pizza, a 4-inch disc of chewy, deep-fried sushi rice topped with shredded lobster in a creamy, spicy sauce and garnished with mango, avocado, masago and daikon sprouts.
You’ll question your determination to make it to the Ute Mountain Tribal Park as you sample one of Sol Pizzeria’s concoctions like “the meat one,” a pie topped with a confounding mix of hummus, tomato sauce, basil pesto, mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses, plus sausage, meatballs, bacon and pepperoni. Locals swear by it.
And as you munch on a turkey club with crisp bacon and lettuce fresh from the farm at Laurie Hall’s The Farm Bistro, you’ll hardly remember a blip of local Cold War history when a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft burned up its engine and glided through the valley to a safe landing at the Cortez airport.
Who needs to go to Mesa Verde anyway?
Well, OK, it would be a shame to come all this way and miss out on the region’s premier tourist attraction – an enormous national park blessed with vistas of all of the Four Corners states and filled with ancient skyscrapers designed by the ancestral Puebloans 750 years ago.
So while you’re nearby, why not tuck into original Southwestern cuisine at Pepperhead, featuring food of the ancients like corn, squash, chiles and grilled meat? The colorfully decorated restaurant features barbacoa tacos this day, a soulful combination of shaved beef in a Mexican-style barbecue sauce topped with jalapeño coleslaw and cilantro.
Let’s face it – Cortez is not exactly scenic, although it does sport a scruffy, Wild West, been-there-done-that vibe that makes mohawks, full-body tattoos and cowboy hats equally ho-hum sights on Main Street. So, you might ask, why start a restaurant renaissance here?
“I didn’t want to drive to Durango to get sushi,” said Brandon Shubert, “so I decided to open my own place.”
The Durango native worked at the Metate Room in Mesa Verde’s Farview Lodge along the way and decided he wanted to return to Cortez to start a business and raise his family. There being no sushi for 50 miles, it seemed like a good bet.
Where better to invent a rice-based seafood pizza than in a town of 8,500 people more than 700 miles from the ocean? Where else could you name your popular tuna-cucumber-avocado roll “the stoner?” Where else could you paint your walls orange, install a koi pond in the dining room and fill the space day and night with the hippest scene in three counties?
As for Shubert, all he wanted to do when he opened on Main Street almost four years ago was to provide for his family and offer his friends and locals a cool place to hang out. So, how’s it going?
“Things are going way better than I thought. I threw my business plan out after three months,” he said.
A few steps down the block, The Farm Bistro is as homey as Stonefish Sushi is happening, with stone walls, ceiling fans and enormous chandeliers hanging above the wooden tables filled with a Friday lunch crowd. You take a seat, peruse the menu and the daily specials – this day there’s pasta puttanesca, pizza with lamb meatballs and a chicken caprese pannini – and order at the back. You also serve yourself coffee, tea and water and set your own table, all very, well, farm-like.
That saves money so owner Hall can keep her locally sourced dishes within the realm of the average diner’s budget. The local leader in the farm-to-fork movement, Hall and her husband, Rusty, started the restaurant as a way to use up the surplus from their 70-acre farm. Not surprisingly, that led to the Bistro gaining a reputation as a twigs-and-berries kind of place.
“When customers see that we have chicken pot pie and french fries and bratwurst, they can’t believe it,” Hall said.
Hall used her background in advertising to market what folks around here call restaurant row, creating a central website, restaurantrowcortez.com, promoting all four restaurants. The idea was to boost business during the slow winter season. But crucial to the marketing campaign was the owners’ realization that they could help their businesses thrive by working with – rather than against – each other.
“It’s a dream to be part of something so cooperative,” said Tess Montano, co-owner of Pepperhead, the first restaurant to open on the north side of the block in 2009. “We’re not competitive, but we keep each other to high standards.”
And lo and behold, it worked. Restaurants like brand new Sol Pizzeria got a lift because of the online recognition, but just as important, owner Scott Bauman got a sense of welcome, too.
“There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for each other,” he said of his fellow restaurateurs on the block. “You can pop over and say, ‘Hey, do you have some of this, I’m out,’ and our neighbors will help us.”
His pizza shop is sleekly furnished with wood floors, deep orange walls and a lavender-colored counter and is filled with teenagers and families with young children as reggae plays softly during a late lunch hour.
Bauman and co-owner Todd Folmer conceived of their restaurant as not your usual pizzeria – offering a large, 18-inch, family-size pie, allowing customers to buy by the slice and being willing to customize their Italian-American favorites to suit diners’ needs. So there’s gluten-free crusts for the wheat intolerant, vegan cheese for the dairy allergic and hummus topping for the vegetarians.
“We wanted to be the one to do that for people,” he said. “We want to be part of the local scene.”
That scene is much different than it was when Laurie Hall arrived here nine years ago to find McDonald’s and Golden Corral as the town’s dining stalwarts. If you wanted something else, well, you were out of luck. But no more. While it may have taken a decade, Hall sees only blue skies ahead for Cortez’s restaurant row, saying the demand for quality ingredients and skillfully prepared food is on the rise.
If you taste a whoopee pie or coconut macaroon from the Pie Maker, located inside The Farm Bistro, you will, too.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
