About
What this site covers, and how it is put together
El Farol SF is a reference on the food of Santa Fe, New Mexico — the chile, the dishes, and the ground they came from.
The site is organised around one crop. Chile is where the arguments start and where most of them end, so it gets the largest section and the first place in the menu. Everything else follows from it: the dishes it is cooked into, the places those dishes are eaten, the people who bred and grew the pod, and the two roads that brought the rest of the larder north and west.
What is here
Twenty-five pages, grouped into five sections. Each page is about something a reader can go and look up: a named cultivar with a release year, a named place with an address, a named person with a public record, a statute with a number. Dates and figures are attributed to the institution that holds them — New Mexico State University for the breeding record, the state legislature for the state question and the state cookie, the National Park Service for the historic trails.
Photography and maps
Every photograph carries its credit next to the caption. The map on the front page is drawn from real coordinates rather than sketched, and the pins are the places the pages keep returning to: Chimayó and Hatch at either end of the chile ground, Las Cruces where the breeding was done, Santa Fe where the result is eaten.
Foreign-language words appear where they are the right word — ristra, acequia, adovada, posole — and are glossed in English the first time they turn up on a page.