D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April 2011
Eggs, Over — Easy!
The Adobe Springs Café returns to its roots, with egg-cellent results.
by Donna Clayton Walter
Sitting tall at the Piñon Plaza at the cresting curve of Hwy. 180, the Adobe Springs Café is under new ownership and refocusing on what has made it a longtime Silver City favorite: excellent breakfasts and lunches.
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Chef-owner Greg Cook — hey, with a name like that! — has worked at the eatery through several incarnations. He worked the kitchen under the Springs’ most recent owners, who had greatly expanded the lunch menus with hearty international dishes and added upscale dinners with a deep wine list. Cook also worked at the restaurant under previous longtime owner Steve May, when the restaurant focused on breakfasts and lunches the locals could count on, as well as working for the eatery’s owners before that. Now Cook has purchased the restaurant with his wife, Jennifer, and several recent visits for both breakfast and lunch give evidence that the Adobe Springs Café is serving up what the people are hungry for, and with prices that are kind to the budget.
Here’s an eye-opener: Build a breakfast around some sweet or savory rib-sticking staples, like a short stack of buttermilk or wheat pancakes, two hearty homemade biscuits with gravy or two slabs of French toast, all for just $4. Add an egg any style for a buck or some ham, bacon or sausage ($2.50) and you’ve got a darned pleasing and reasonable breakfast. Too early to put it together yourself? Pick the Classic Breakfast with two eggs, meat, hash browns and toast, for just $5.95. You may need to share the ample Breakfast Burrito ($5.95), which is absolutely stuffed and smothered. Build your own omelet ($7) with three choices of fresh items like bell peppers, green chiles, spinach and, of course, cheeses. Need more than that? Add additional items for 75 cents each.
It’ll take visit upon visit to sample the many items on the breakfast menu. My own favorite is fast becoming the Huevos Rancheros ($8), a hearty dish with beans or hash browns over two blue-corn tortillas, cheddar and two eggs, the whole lot smothered in red or green and served up with a warm flour tortilla on the side. I’ve also greatly enjoyed the French toast — they’ll hold the powdered sugar if you ask — and found the side of bacon to be of marvelous quality: not too salty, perfectly crisp, and ample enough to split with my dining companion. Other breakfast specialties well worth exploring are: the Southwest Breakfast ($6 with one egg, $7 with two), just what you’d expect with green chiles, hash browns, bacon, cheddar and a tortilla; the hearty Country Breakfast ($8) with chicken fried steak, eggs, potatoes, biscuit and steaming white gravy; and the classic Chorizo and Eggs ($7).
Coffee is hot and decently strong, and the attentive staff sees to it that you are refilled!
Lunch at the reborn Adobe Springs is nothing short of consistent satisfaction. The menu is fresh, reliable and reasonably priced. And if you’re on your lunch hour, this is the place to come for good food in a reasonable (but not rushed!) timeframe. I’ve had three lunches at the new Adobe Springs, in and out in an hour.
The salad menu ($6-$8) is big and varied: Chef, Spinach and Taco salads each are, truly, a meal. The special Pollo Loco Salad ($10) with crispy chicken breast, cheese, chile-lime salsa, served with chile verde rice, is for those with large lunch appetites. Most of the sandwiches are $7 and come with shoestring or sweet-potato fries, side salad (get the bleu cheese dressing!) or soup of the day. Burgers ($7-$9, depending on your choice of extras) come as beef or six-ounce chicken breast. I found the chicken to be delightfully moist, and The Cali version, with melted pepper-jack cheese, grilled tomato and avocado, took me straight to the West Coast. The iced tea is freshly brewed, unsweetened and oh-so-refreshing.
Watching your waistline? Adobe Springs Café offers "Reduced Portion" options (nicely discounted, too!) at both breakfast and lunch, for "kids, seniors and regular folks with smaller appetites." The Poquito Breakfast Burrito ($4) or, for lunch, the Half Sandwich with a side ($6) sound "just right," as Goldilocks might say.
Waitstaff are fresh-faced, friendly, able to answer menu questions and eager to please. Some with a little less experience, perhaps, have kept me waiting a bit too long for ketchup, mayo and once for cream for my tea, especially when the restaurant had just re-opened and was working out its kinks. But this has improved over this little bit of time, and the staff’s smiles and the excellence of the food have made those little hitches already fade from memory.
In short, Adobe Springs Café has a hit menu and serves it up well — a "go-to" eatery to which I’ll return again and again!
Adobe Springs Café, 1617 Silver Heights Blvd., serves breakfast and lunch six days a week, 6:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed Tuesdays. 538-3665.
Donna Clayton Walter sampled the Buckhorn in
our December 2010 issue.