HG and BSK’s favorite luncheon restaurant is The Compound on Santa Fe’s gallery lined Canyon Road. The Compound is a lovely place. White washed adobe walls and beamed ceilings. A few select works of Native American and Hispanic art. Best of all is the New Mexico light — most artfully represented in the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe — that pours into the room. The lunch menu is small but choice: A “Stacked Salad” with butter lettuce, ham, avocado, tomatoes, cheese, hard boiled egg, bacon, blue cheese dressing — basically a riff on Cobb Salad; a house smoked pastrami sandwich; a lobster and crab salad; a lunch-sized steak; a burger with poblano peppers. All good but the star is the chicken schnitzel. The chef gently flattens a generous chicken breast (still a bit thick, not a paillard). Then the chicken is given the traditional Viennese Veal Schnitzel treatment of breading and frying to greaseless crispiness. It is topped with a sauce of wine, butter (maybe a hint of cream), parsley and an abundance of capers. Flanked with a mound of sauteed leaf spinach. HG accompanied the dish with a nice flute of Gruet sparkling white from New Mexico. In HG’s opinion, the Gruet is better than champagne or prosecco.
HG has long dismissed the chicken breast finding it dry and tasteless. Not The Compound chicken breast. Don’t know the secret. Brining, perhaps?
