Doc Martin's

The Restaurant

Doc Martin's is the restaurant inside the Historic Taos Inn, the central building of which is the original home of Dr. Thomas Paul Martin, Taos County's first physician, built in the late nineteenth century. The dining room opens off the Inn's famous adobe lobby with its two-storey kiva fireplace; the room itself runs across what were once Dr. Martin's house, examination room, and waiting parlour, now a single sprawling space of around eighty covers with a low viga ceiling, white-stuccoed walls, and original heavy wooden doors.

The cuisine is New American with Southwest accent — green-chile-glazed pork tenderloin, blue-corn-crusted trout, a chile relleno that has been on the menu in some form since the 1930s, a daily pasta, a serious burger built on a brioche bun that is the only burger in Taos taken seriously by national food writers. The menu also runs a strong vegetarian and vegan parallel column, which is unusual at this scale of dining room in northern New Mexico.

The wine cellar is the underrated argument. Doc Martin's holds a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence that has been continuously renewed since the late 1980s — one of the longest unbroken runs in the American Southwest — and the four-hundred-plus-bottle cellar runs serious depth in California Cabernet, Oregon Pinot, and an unusually deep Spanish section. The Adobe Bar next door, a James Beard-recognised hotel bar, supplies live music four nights a week without intruding on the dining room. For a Taos dinner that wants real local history, this is the room.