Medley

The Restaurant

Medley sits at the bend where State Road 150 leaves El Prado and starts climbing toward Arroyo Seco and the ski valley, a five-minute drive from the Taos Plaza. The building reads as a high-desert roadhouse — low-slung pine-and-adobe, a small front porch, a wine shop attached to the dining-room wall that doubles as the restaurant's storeroom. Inside, around forty-eight covers across two rooms with hammered-copper lighting and a long communal table that anchors the back space.

The cooking is unselfconsciously modern American with seasonal New Mexican accents: ahi tuna tartare with truffled avocado, a New Zealand lamb chop with pinion-nut crust, a daily fresh fish that arrives twice a week, hand-cut pasta, a vegetable plate that rotates with the farm box. The kitchen is run by chef Colleen Medley with pastry chef Wilks Medley — a husband-and-wife operation in the literal sense — and the dessert list reads at a level that is rare outside major cities: a Mexican-chocolate lava cake, a brown-butter pear tart, a malted-vanilla ice cream made daily that has its own following.

The adjoining wine shop matters. The cellar runs to roughly three hundred references with retail prices in the bottle shop and a fifteen-dollar corkage that turns Medley into the most flexible serious wine night in town. The room is loud enough to feel like a celebration and quiet enough to hear conversation across a table of six. For a birthday dinner that wants energy, food, and a real wine pour without the formal-restaurant ceremony, Medley is the Taos default.