You know you're in for something good when a man with a tiny plastic spoon asks conspiratorially: "Have you tried the cherries jubilee? It's what got me into the biz."
Alotta Gelato is a typical small-town ice cream shop: rumbling freezer compressor, giddy barefoot kids, board games stacked in a corner. But its product is on a higher level, made from ingredients like sweet-tart Italian amarena cherries. It's just one reason I love Silver City, a town of about 10,000 in southwestern New Mexico.
Silver, as it's known, has recently become a road-trip destination among those willing to drive for a good meal. But it's no overnight sensation. Alotta Gelato's Mitchell Hellman, the man with the spoon, celebrated the store's 10-year anniversary last month, and a couple of other great restaurants have been around just as long.
Silver began as a mining town in 1870, hippies came a century later, and newer artists have since arrived and added their own flourishes, like candy-colored paint jobs on the stately cast-iron facades downtown. The food scene is an extension of this creativity, and it prizes local ingredients — farmers' market tomatoes can sell out in 35 minutes — as well as excellent imported ones like Mr. Hellman's cherries. This isn't because it's trendy, but because Silver City's isolation — the town backs up against the 2.7-million-acre Gila National Forest, and it's 45 miles to an Interstate — inspires chefs to build their own world.
As a guidebook author, I had been to Silver several times, but was always too rushed to savor the place. Last spring, over the course of four days, my mother, Beverly McFarland, and I ate our way around town and checked up on some new developments. Chief among those is the Murray Hotel, which reopened last summer after being boarded up for more than 20 years. In 1938, the hotel signaled modernity with its solid concrete architecture, glass bricks and porthole windows. Now the front doors were open to the street, and the black terrazzo lobby floor gleamed as if it was laid yesterday.
"Oh, you have my favorite room!" the desk clerk exclaimed as she handed over our key cards. From our window on the fourth floor, I could see the place we'd be having dinner, and I briefly worried that I had planned too much eating and not enough exercise. Downtown Silver City is only about half a mile long.
Jake Politte opens his restaurant, 1zero6, three nights a week. Savvy regulars know to check the short but intense menu online Thursday morning, then call to put dibs on entrees like pork loin bathed in bitter chocolate, Mexican chiles and Thai fish sauce. We tucked into crispy-custardy Cambodian mini-pancakes and "Sichuan ravioli" — gingery dumplings in a chunky tomato sauce. Mr. Politte's eclectic culinary taste is echoed in the restaurant's décor, in which a billboard-size Bollywood poster faces an Indonesian wood skeleton.
As we finished a fruit tart lined with a slick of bitter chocolate, Mr. Politte, tattoos swirling down his arms, came out to relight the candles on his Buddhist shrine. He told us how he'd arrived in Silver from the Bay Area a decade earlier. He'd been looking for a remnant of the New Mexico he'd known in Santa Fe after high school, in the early 1970s, "back when it was just cowboys and Indians and hippies." Mr. Politte found a little of that rough-around-the-edges atmosphere here.
He relishes introducing customers to new flavors — fresh banana blossoms, say, which he scored from a grocer in Tucson. Or chapulines (grasshoppers), brought to him by a customer from Oaxaca. "People say, 'Whoa, that's scary,' " he related with glee, "and I say, 'No, man, it's food.' "
The next day, we walked the trails on Boston Hill in town, starting behind old cottages and winding up past the long-abandoned silver mines that gave the city its name. In the wilderness at the top, we rested on an incongruous turquoise blue bench. Below us, Silver's core looked tidy and timeless. The town founders were determined to make a lasting place, unlike other slapdash mining camps. So up rose grand limestone, brick and cast-iron edifices. They weathered the crash of the silver market, two flash floods and the collapse of downtown commerce that beset so many small American towns. Now that sturdy shell fosters creativity — including our next meals.
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