SARA JO MATHEWS named Prairie Hill Café, the restaurant in Las Vegas’s Plaza Hotel, after the road leading to her family’s ranch. Their beef stars in the Jackpot Cowboy, a triple-layered, nine-ounce smash burger topped with Muenster cheese and “fancy sauce.” Mathews and her fiancé, Ryan Snyder, also oversee Byron T’s Saloon, named after the Plaza’s first owner. “He’s said to be one of the spirits that haunts the hotel,” she says. “It would be bad juju to change the name.”
The patio at Campo is a great place to spend an evening. Photograph by Sergio Salvador.
Trailblazing chef Jonathan Perno helms the kitchen of Campo, housed in the former dairy barn of Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm, in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque. Perno focuses on local and heritage crops. Los Poblanos also hosts a monthly dining series and afternoon tea at La Quinta, a 1935 building designed by John Gaw Meem.
Renovated as a luxurious Auberge Resort, Bishop’s Lodge, north of Santa Fe, has a restaurant as noteworthy as its rooms. SkyFire is in the main lodge, which was the Pulitzer family’s private residence after they purchased Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy’s famed retreat in 1915. The evolving menu includes mushroom empanadas with mole based on a recipe from a local cook’s grandmother.
