Taming the wild Frontier
Written: Sep 30 '99
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Open 24 hours, great green chile, appallingly decadent cinnamon buns swimming in butter
Cons: Your doctor will fuss at you for eating here, and the lines are sometimes long
|
|
|
| Chuq's Full Review: Albuquerque |
Actually, you can't really tame the Frontier ... just have one of those cinnamon buns and the Frontier will tame YOU.
The Frontier is a venerable, beloved restaurant on Central, right across the street from the main entrance to the University of New Mexico. That's Route 66, too, and you can get your kicks at the Frontier 24 hours a day. Its clientele seems to range from university students to blue-collar workers to local families to occasional visitors to the city like me, who make a beeline for Frontier and never want to miss it.
At a glance it's no great shakes - just a coffeeshop/breakfasty kinda place from the looks of it, sometimes with a distressingly long line snaking back from the counter where you order. The line moves quickly, though, and once you order the food comes out without too much delay. Forget your cholesterol count, then be sure to order the Frontier Roll, the aforementioned cinnamon bun that comes to you literally swimming in melted butter. The first time I ordered one, I was appalled. I tried to send it back for one without all the butter, but was informed that "they all come that way". I didn't understand why you couldn't just not put the butter on it, so I resigned myself to the fact that I was getting a cholesterol overdose that day ("Oh hell, I'm on vacation.") and dug in.
Oh my. It's wonderful. If you insist you can hold it up and let the excess butter drip off and then put the roll on another plate (as the plate the bun comes on will have a huge puddle of butter on it). I wouldn't, though. Sometimes you've just gotta say, "What the f... um, heck."
Anything there that has green chile on it is good, too. Green chile is another reason I come to New Mexico, for the green chile to be had there is better than the green chile you'll get just about anywhere else. (Of course, as you may know, the "Official Questions of the State of New Mexico" is ... "Red or green?" You'd think the legislature would have had better things to do that day, but what the ... heck.)
The green chile stew is quite good, as are the breakfast burritos with green chile. And the other great feature of the Frontier is its tortilla machine. Right as you pick up your food, there's someone feeding balls of masa into a machine that flattens them, cooks them, turns them, then spits them out onto a plate so that every single patron of the Frontier has fresh, hot tortillas with their meal.
This is very cool.
Cheap, informal, unassuming, good, hearty food. I visit Albuquerque annually, and always insist on a stop here. And the additional beauty of the Frontier it is that if you get a green chile or cinnamon bun jones at 3am, this is your place.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
Chuq
|
|
Member: Chuck Taggart
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Reviews written: 29
Trusted by: 81 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.