Food xxxx
Service xx
Atmosphere xxx
Value xxxxThis out-of-the-way spot is worth finding. Eske’s Pub centers on an 80-year-old adobe house on a dirt lane sort of southeast of the municipal parking lot at the corner of Kit Carson Road and Route 68. It’s a very comfortable and inviting atmosphere with two inside dining areas with pub-style high tables and stools in one room and picnic tables in the other. One outdoor seating area is shaded by trees, the other has awnings and umbrellas.
The food is so good you need to remind yourself that this is also a brewery that offers Taos Green Chile beer and a long list of seemingly every variety of ale. They’re all made on the premises and served unfiltered and unpasteurized.
To digress for a moment, pub food usually calls up memories of the equivalent of pickled eggs (or worse, pig’s feet) in a jar on the bar. Food at the oldest ale house in the country, the glorious McSorley’s in New York, was a plate of sliced onion, mustard and some crackers, designed to appeal to no one’s palate but to meet some arcane and puritanical city law based on the shame of public consumption of alcohol. Slim Jims, anyone?
Eske’s is from another, more inventive, planet. This pub cooks.
For lunch, we shared a large cup of Wanda’s light and spicy green-chile stew ($3.25) that was excellent and filled with potatoes, carrots, onions, squash, green chile and mushrooms and, most of all, flavor, zest and a good feeling when you’re done eating it. The club ($8, with optional New Mexico green chile) starts with the great idea of herb-and-beer-battered oat-nut bread as its foundation and then layers in turkey, ham, bacon, Swiss cheese and strong mustard, the whole thing grilled into a wonderful sandwich. The sun-dried tomato and pesto pizza on a tortilla ($8.95) was appropriately offered as a special. It sounds almost too cute for words but it works. Feta, Parmesan, smoked chicken, tomatoes, pickled onions and pesto on a crisp toasted tortilla may be as far from a pizza as Taos is from Sicily, but the tastes and proportions give it a synergistic unity of textures, colors and flavors.
Both entrées come with fresh side salads of crispy greens and thinly julienned carrot. Try the miso-ginger dressing — sharp, complex, smooth, and wonderful.
The three-layer chocolate cake was decadent, dense and over-the-top. This almost pure-
chocolate cake was … (use all the words here you think describe the best chocolate cake and frosting you ever had and then realize that in a “what the hell” attitude they slip a square of pure chocolate under the whole thing as a prop). The New York-style vanilla cheesecake ($3.25) held its own in a more demure, understated way next to the screaming flamboyance of the chocolate cake.
Eske’s also offers a different theme menu each night. Sundays, for example, are reserved for such blue plate specials as traditional fried chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, roast turkey and meatloaf. Other nights feature Indian, Asian and Greek cuisines. Tuesday is sushi night.
Wine is available by the glass ($4-$6). There’s a
shiraz from South Africa ($6), a Carmenere from Chile ($6) and some Italian and California vintages. The house specialty is an agave wine margarita ($4.75). Live music is presented almost every night in the beer garden.
Service is friendly and acceptable, but our server could have been more familiar with the menu, its ingredients and preparation.
Lunch with one beer, one iced tea, an appetizer and soup, two entrées and two desserts was $31.95 before tax and tip.
ttt
106 des Georges Lane, 1/2 block from Taos Plaza, Taos, 505-758-1517
Lunch 11:30 a.m.-4 p.m. daily
Dinner until 10 p.m.
Beer & wine
Handicapped-accessible (outside)
MC • V
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