We spent our first night in New Mexico in Santa Fe at the beautiful and historic La Fonda Hotel.  It sits on the oldest hotel site in the United States, dating back to 1607.  Our charming suite had French doors opening out onto an enormous balcony with views onto the plaza and to the mountains in every direction, reflecting blue and purple at sunset.

The hotel itself is spectacular and quirky.  In the center is a gorgeous atrium restaurant and there is shopping steps outside the door on the plaza (expensive but beautiful shopping).

Santa Fe is a beautiful city, filled with art, beautiful architecture and colorful and interesting people.  Driving around the city and the hills, I took many photographs of beautiful doors. Most of those photos will be in a separate post, except for the purple door in the photo gallery below.  That purple door is the front door of the home that used to belong to Andrew’s Grandmother McDaniel.

We finished our evening with dinner at the Coyote Cafe within walking distance of the LaFonda, and had a local favorite, elk tenderloin, served with smoked bacon, morel mushrooms and asparagus. (Andrew also had the macaroni and cheese with green hatch chilis – yum!)  We might have been able to resist eating dessert (cough, cough), but . . . they had buttermilk panna cotta.

I had never tasted panna cotta until about a year ago.  It is an Italian dessert that is somewhat similar to custard, but it is thickened with gelatin instead of eggs.  It does not sound delicious, but it is delicious.  Coyote Cafe serves a mercifully small portion of panna cotta.  The flavor was excellent, but the consistency too firm for our liking.

Nonetheless, Coyote Cafe and LaFonda were both winners in our book and we are looking forward to our next visit to beautiful Santa Fe.