by Candolin Cook on
JUST AFTER 5 P.M. on a Thursday, Leo’s has barely opened its doors, but the Santa Fe hot spot is already buzzing. With no reservations for indoor dining, the line outside began forming half an hour earlier, wrapping around the former Hickox Street auto shop. At communal tables, a handful of two-tops, and the marble-topped bar, diners begin ordering small plates like spicy pork laab and roasted delicata squash coated with shrimp paste and red chile sambal. Strains of Radiohead drift through the 390-square-foot dining room, where bartenders shake tropical-inspired cocktails. Every seat feels like the place to be.
“We don’t need a ton of people to build energy,” says Zakary Pelaccio, a James Beard Award–winning chef who opened Leo’s last August with designer Jonathan Boyd and cocktail specialist Ian Wolff.
When Boyd decided to convert his woodworking studio into a restaurant, he set out to preserve the character of the 1950s building, where the original auto shop was run by the restaurant’s namesake, Leo CdeBaca. “The space told me what it needed,” he says.
Boyd designed and built much of the interior by hand—sleek wood tables, sculptural chairs, and carefully shaped bar stools inspired by midcentury and Scandinavian design traditions. He converted garage doors into street-facing windows and added custom neon signage to the entryway. Mounted on the east wall, near backlit shelves of rum and whiskey, the furniture maker’s former worktable has become a piece of art. “There are a lot of new people in town—a younger crowd,” Boyd says, “and they’re not really catered to with fun, intimate spaces.”
Still, the real excitement at Leo’s comes from the kitchen. Pelaccio spent years cooking in and traveling through Southeast Asia, developing a deep understanding of Thai and Malaysian cuisines. The menu, co-created with executive chef Stella Achenbach, leans into those traditions while adapting them to local ingredients and dining culture.
“For me, it was the brightness and freshness of the cuisine,” says Pelaccio, who also co-owns Corner Office, a restaurant and wine bar in Taos. “The high-wire act of balancing chili, acidity, sourness, and sweetness.”
That harmony shows up in the elegant crab nam prik, which layers luscious crab and chili paste beneath a silky custard resembling a Japanese chawanmushi. Other standouts include handmade rice noodles—so popular they often sell out within the first half hour—slicked in savory sauce and tossed with pork, shrimp, and Chinese broccoli; and seared pork belly, served beneath a fried egg, garlicky prik phao, and a tangle of Thai basil. Judging from Instagram, the most photographed dish at Leo’s is the whole steamed dorade presented with local herbs and a chili-lime sauce. “To make simple food beautiful, you have to be at the top of your game,” Pelaccio says of the fish dish, executed flawlessly by the 24-year-old Achenbach.
The chefs designed the menu so dishes work best when ordered together, filling the table with contrasting flavors and textures. “It’s a communal style of dining that’s so normal in other cities and isn’t really represented here,” Pelaccio says. A pared-down late-night menu—try the fried chicken—and Wolff’s bar program add other big-city dimensions to the experience. Natural wines line the list, while inventive cocktails incorporate citrus, herbs, and spice. (In the case of Leo’s Not Here, that’s a shot of Wild Turkey with a tom yum back.)
Leo’s has already attracted national attention, landing on Esquire’s Best New Restaurants in America list late last year. But despite the accolades, the place still feels like a cool neighborhood hang. “We built the place where we would want to eat,” Boyd says.