If you have driven Old Pecos Trail often enough to stop noticing the giant adobe lizard climbing the side of the building at 2239, you already know what is inside. Some people call it Pecos Trail Café. A lot of regulars just call it Jorge's, after the chef who has run the kitchen for years. Either way, the restaurant announced last month that its landlord is not renewing the lease, and the doors will close in February 2027.
Jorge Antuna and Jesus Rivera opened the place in 2012, both of them arriving from Durango, Mexico with more than two decades in the food business already behind them. They make their own flour tortillas in house. The flan has a following. Families who started coming when their kids were small have watched those kids grow into teenagers and then adults, ordering off the same menu of carne adovada, chile rellenos, and a green chile stew regulars will tell you they went back for seconds on. Antuna told the Santa Fe New Mexican the restaurant is not done, just displaced. "We are planning to relocate to somewhere else," he said. "We're exploring all opportunities." About the landlord's decision, he was matter of fact. "It's fair. They own the land, and they have a right to lease it to whoever they want."
What is harder to walk away from, he said, is the neighborhood itself.
A Site That Has Never Kept a Restaurant Long
Here is the part most people driving past the lizard do not know. A Santa Fe Reporter dining writer who finally visited the café a couple years ago admitted he had put off writing about it because he assumed the address itself was bad luck. He remembered an unnamed restaurant and hotel operation there when he was a kid, then a stretch of years when the same building operated as a place called Peppers, before Antuna and Rivera turned it into what it is now. Three different restaurants, at minimum, have tried to make that one parcel work over the decades. Pecos Trail Café is simply the one that lasted longest.
That longevity mattered beyond the immediate neighbors, too. The same writer noted that people from Eldorado treat the café as their stop, since it saves them the full drive into town for a solid dinner. That is not a small detail for anyone living along the Old Pecos Trail corridor between the Plaza and the outer subdivisions. For more than a decade this has been the one dependable kitchen on that stretch of road, the place you did not have to drive all the way in for.
Whoever takes the space next inherits a building with a documented pattern of not holding onto a tenant. Antuna and Rivera broke that pattern for fourteen and a half years. What replaces them, on a site with this track record, is worth watching.
The Same Month, a Different Kind of Address
Here is where the timing gets interesting. While Pecos Trail Café's clock runs out in February 2027, Second Street Brewery is targeting the exact same month to open its third Santa Fe location, a taproom at 1025 Midtown Calle Central inside the Aspect Media Village development on the city's Midtown campus. The new spot sits directly north of the newly opened Tender Fire Kitchen and across the street from Sky Cinemas Midtown. Rod Tweet, the brewery's president and founding brewmaster, said renovation on the roughly 2,050 square foot space was set to begin within about a month of the announcement, putting it on schedule for that February target. It will not brew on site, but it will have a bar, a pool table, a patio, and what Tweet called a limited cold food menu.
Tweet's comment about the location is worth sitting with. "It's really great, the mix of energy and tenants and surrounding neighborhoods," he said. "I think we'll do really well. And it's not far from where our original location was," a nod to the brewery's first home at 1814 Second Street, long since closed. A brewery that started on Second Street is choosing to plant its third flag on a redeveloped campus a short distance away, in the same month a family restaurant on a residential corridor is being told its lease will not be renewed. Two Santa Fe businesses, same target month, opposite directions.
The Popcorn Cart That Grew Walls
A third story from the same stretch of local news fits the pattern. Jessica and Joe Thurman, transplants from Colorado, started Santa Fe Popcorn Co. as a food cart on the grounds of Nuckolls Brewing Co. in the Railyard. About a year and a half later, they signed a lease at 135 Palace Ave, Suite 200, a block or so off the Plaza, and spent May undertaking what Jessica Thurman called a floors to walls renovation. The result is roughly 800 square feet indoors and a 400 square foot patio, with a full espresso bar, gift boxes stocked with items from other local makers, and a mural by artist Kryshana De Herrera painted directly on one wall. They opened quietly on a Saturday for a soft launch, with a grand opening to follow. "We noticed there was a gap in the popcorn market," Thurman said. "Popcorn is very nostalgic."
That same week's local business roundup carried a run of other headlines worth knowing if you keep track of this stuff: Sky Cinemas Midtown planning a new screening room, a business called Versos opening at Palace Modern, Bell Tower Bar reopening for the season, and the owner of Time Travelers and Hard Cider expanding into a spot called Chomp. None of these are isolated. Read together with the Popcorn Co. move and the Second Street Brewery announcement, they describe a specific kind of energy landing in specific places this year, mostly clustered around the Railyard, Palace Avenue, and the Midtown campus.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this is a story about restaurants failing. Antuna's kitchen is not struggling. It is losing a lease. The pattern across these stories is less about who can cook and more about which corridors are currently absorbing new investment and which ones are being quietly reassessed by the people who own the buildings. Right now, that investment is visibly landing near the Railyard, on Palace Avenue, and on the Midtown campus, where a media village development is actively recruiting tenants like a brewery and a screening room. Old Pecos Trail, for the moment, is not getting the same treatment. It is losing its longest-running kitchen with no announced replacement.
If you have a regular order at Pecos Trail Café, you have a runway. February 2027 is still a year and a half out, plenty of time for a few more visits before the lizard on the building watches over someone else's menu. Antuna and Rivera say they are looking for a new spot, so keep an eye on their usual channels if you want to know where the flan lands next. And if you have been meaning to try the popcorn everyone is talking about, or check out what Second Street is building on the Midtown campus, this is the season those places actually open their doors.
Santa Fe changes shape a little every year without most of it making the news. This particular month, it did, and it is worth knowing about before you plan your next dinner out.
If you are watching how a neighborhood evolves and want someone who pays attention to this kind of detail when it comes to property, not just restaurants, Mike Sanford is always glad to talk through what is changing in Santa Fe and the surrounding communities. Let's Connect.
