REVIEW

Are you searching for that little, unknown, out-of-the-way mom-and-pop restaurant serving home-style New Mexican food? Then you should have come to Sadie’s 50 years ago. Today’s Sadie’s is huge and extremely popular. The portions are beyond huge and what’s on the plate is most definitely restaurant food. But if flavor is what you are after, you will be very happy at Sadie’s.

The burger is crusty and the fried potatoes are terrific. If you like your burger on tortillas then this one will likely please you.

As you scan the menu while munching on the chips and very hot salsa and guzzling the enormous margaritas, pay close attention to anything containing the word adovada. This is an adovada house, and one fine way to enjoy this chili-braised pork is in the stacked enchiladas, but then you’d miss the real reason we are recommending Sadie’s: carne adovada spare ribs. At first glance you may think this menu item refers to a typical rack of grilled or roasted ribs perhaps rubbed with red chile to make it suitable for a New Mexican menu, but you’d be way off base. Adovada spare ribs are just that: adovada made the usual way but with very meaty ribs standing in for pork chunks.

You can also get your adovada as part of a stacked enchilada plate.

We’ve come to wonder why all adovada isn’t made with pork ribs, because when you braise fatty meat on the bone you get infinitely more flavor than you do with lean boneless meat. The fall-apart ribs are piled atop a hillock of crisp-fried cubed potatoes, and the whole thing is drowning in the complex braising sauce. This is not a dish for fat-phobes. Know that when you braise fatty meat, a lot of that meltaway fat ends up in the sauce (and perhaps that answers our own question as to why adovada ribs are so unusual). Yes, look at this one way and it’s over-sauced, greasy food, but as we said this is not made to resemble home-cooking. We think it’s fabulously delicious. As with all Sadie’s entrees the portion of braised ribs is laughably large. What remained on our plate after dinner looked like it could still feed a table of four.

Fresh sopaipillas are an ideal medium for soaking up some of the richly flavored chile sauces at Sadie’s.

We also sampled the green chile burger (available with cheese), which comes on a folded and toasted flour tortilla, the burger itself crusty and coarse-ground. It’s a good burger but we never get quite the same burger satisfaction from tortilla-wrapped burgers that we do from bunned burgers. And that’s all we had a chance to sample at this one meal, so if you visit Sadie’s and venture beyond the adovada and burger, you’re on your own. But we urge at least one of your party to get the adovada ribs.

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FOOD: 

BEST THING TO EAT: Adovada spare ribs