Real New Mexican breakfast,
a block from the Plaza.

Inez Trujillo grew up in a Santa Fe family that has cooked New Mexican food for four generations — her great-grandmother's red chile recipe has never been written down, passed instead through smell and taste at the stove. She opened Sunny Cactus in 2011 in an adobe building on East Palace Ave, one block north of the Plaza, in a space that had been a family hardware store for thirty years before that.

The green chiles come from Hatch, New Mexico, and arrive in bulk during the harvest season. Inez roasts them in-house every single morning — the smell drifts out onto Palace Ave by 6:30 am and is, locals will tell you, one of the better alarm clocks in Santa Fe. The sopaipilla recipe is her grandmother Lupita's: same dough, same hand-stretched thickness, same squeeze of local honey on the side.

The dining room is small — fourteen tables, Saltillo tile floors, a hand-painted mural of the Sangre de Cristo mountains on the back wall. Canyon Road galleries are a ten-minute walk east. The Palace of the Governors is a block west. Inez is almost always in the kitchen.