Mouth by Southwest

No cuisine has its roots more deeply buried in this country than Southwestern, a cooking style that originated with the region’s first inhabitants and evolved as Spanish, Mexican, Texan, Cajun and Creole elements were added to the indigenous ingredients used by Native Americans. As a result, Southwestern cooking is full of flamboyant colors, assertive smells and confident flavors. It’s impossible to confuse true Southwestern dishes with anything else — the melting pot of chiles, cheeses, beans, squashes, pine nuts, rice and assorted corn products is unmistakable.

Julia Siegfried-Garrison is a Nebraska native, but when she fell in love with hubby Ordy Garrison a decade ago, she also fell in love with Southwestern cuisine. “Ordy’s family is originally from southern Colorado and northern New Mexico,” Siegfried-Garrison explains. “His mom cooks traditional Mexican, though, so I first tasted those ingredients in her dishes. Then we went to Taos and other parts of New Mexico, and the foods I ate there just sort of built on what I’d already been exposed to.”

While Siegfried-Garrison first moved to Colorado for college, she found that no matter what career she thought about pursuing, she always wound up working in a restaurant as a second job. “Mostly it was Italian places,” she says. “Canino’s, Santino’s, where I worked as a manager; I also did some work with Cliff Young. But I kept thinking about the foods of the Southwest, and when I saw Like Water for Chocolate, I felt like the movie spoke to my feelings about cooking as a reflection of the soul. So the idea for this place has come out of that.”

Julia Blackbird’s landed last year in a cramped space in Highland that had been a Mexican bakery for decades; today it resembles the Garrisons’ home, with the same Southwestern knickknacks, the same featured artists — Daniel Luna did the blackbird out front, Stevon Lucero’s jovial paintings hang on the walls — the same bright colors and rustic furniture, the same bustling atmosphere. “Whenever I get cranky, my husband reminds me that I’m in my soul kitchen,” Siegfried-Garrison says. “And that I believe that no matter how crazy it gets, we’re all connected here by my true of-the-earth cooking.”

Although many menu names come from the Garrison familia — grandma Bernia’s Bizcochitos, son Teo’s Guaca — the recipes are Siegfried-Garrison’s own. She kept the menu basic: five antojitos, or appetizers; two soups, including Julia’s Famous Posole, a corn-sweet, pork-enriched flu shot of a concoction; a dozen entree platos; three side dishes; and a half-dozen desserts. Working in one of the smallest kitchens in town, she and former Santino’s cook Alejandra Soliz whip these dishes out amazingly fast, particularly considering that the service staff is friendly but far from expert and the place is always packed. Apparently the lack of a liquor license hasn’t hurt business (Siegfried-Garrison hopes to get a license by the summer); regulars know to skip the usual sodas and go straight for the refreshing homemade strawberry lemonade, with big pieces of fruit floating in a not-too-sweet lemon blend.

A glass of milk to counteract some of the chile fire wouldn’t be a bad choice, either. Our meal heated up fast with the delivery of a basket of tri-colored chips and salsa, a complimentary starter that hinted at the flavor layers to come. The salsa was tomatoey-sweet, thin enough to coat the chips but not watery, and sparked by a few bits of fresh cilantro and a sharp, short jalapeño bite. Jalapeños were more of a presence in the chunky, hand-mashed guacamole, also studded with big pieces of tomato and really big pieces of cebolla — that’s onion for the gringos in the crowd.

Siegfried-Garrison cooks with Chimayo chile, the best-known — and many consider the finest — ground New Mexican chile. The chiles themselves are grown at high altitude in the Sangre de Cristo area around Chimayo, a town about 25 miles north of Santa Fe, and there’s something about the air and soil there that produces a hot chile with a deep, rich flavor. A little of it goes a long way in Julia’s green chile, which also benefits from the sweeter taste of long-simmered Anaheims and a few pieces of lean pork. With its thicker texture and less muddied flavors — in true New Mexican style, this chile is mostly about the chiles — there’s no mistaking it for a standard Denver green. “I always think of Denver’s green chile as diluted,” Siegfried-Garrison says. “Everything’s so goopy, and you almost can’t even tell what you’re eating.”

We got our first taste of the green with an order of tres hermanas, or “three sisters,” three enchiladas that also came with a Chimayo-chile red sauce, dark and brooding, with a coarse, homemade consistency and a slight chile heat, and the much more fiery chile caribe, a potent blend of sweet and spicy. The enchiladas featured blue corn tortillas on the outside — blue corn has a milder, slightly less sweet taste that complements savory dishes — and three different fillings inside: grilled, shredded chicken; spicy shredded beef; a creamy queso fresco. More chicken and beef had been stuffed into the Taos tacos, which featured shells flash-fried from blue corn tortillas and a side of fresh pico de gallo in which jalapeños played another starring role. And blue corn got another workout for the chiles rellenos, three roasty-toasty Chimayos stuffed with goat cheese and then encased in a thick, almost pancake-like batter of the blue stuff. Smothered in either green or red, the rellenos were a New Mexican marvel, as were the tamales, with masa harina cooked super-soft around green-chile-flavored cheese. And the Navajo stew was a tasty bowl of history, a righteous mixture of butter-soft beans, chewy posole, sweet corn, squash and potatoes so tender they nearly disintegrated in the mouth, all packed into a slightly salty, soothing broth enriched with bits of goat cheese.

As interesting as Southwestern flavors can be in main dishes, they’re often both weird and wonderful in desserts. For Julia’s pastel de chocolate diablo, pine nuts gave extra texture to a chocolate cake with a gingerbread-like quality; for the peach soup, ripe Colorado peaches (where did she get those this time of year?) had been puréed with white wine and chilled until the mix was oh-so-light and frothy, sweet but not filling. “I like foods to be about the way it feels in your mouth, the sensuality of it, the way it gets under your skin,” Siegfried-Garrison says. “I wanted to do a Southwestern restaurant that would be more about those things than about trying to duplicate the Southwest.”

And she succeeded. Julia Blackbird’s soars.