Every mountain town has one dining room that feels like it has always been there, and on Red River's Main Street that room belongs to Texas Reds Steakhouse. The restaurant dates its start to Thanksgiving 1967, and its own description of the formula has barely changed since: the best and freshest food it can serve, at a reasonable price, with generous portions of friendly service and an old west atmosphere. In a town built first on mining and then on welcoming visitors, Texas Reds became one of the fixed points of an evening on Main Street.
The original Texas Reds was a two-story presence on East Main Street. When New Mexico food writer Gil Garduno visited in September 2004, he listed the address as 111 East Main and described a carnivore's paradise: an old west saloon at ground level, dining rooms upstairs, checkerboard tablecloths, wooden planked floors, and peanuts diners were expected to toss on the floor. It was deliberately overdone, cheerfully touristy, and exactly the kind of room a ski town runs on.
The steaks built the reputation. Garduno praised the porterhouse, more than 18 ounces and charbroiled in butter, and a New York strip nearly an inch thick that he found almost tender enough to cut with a fork. For steak alone, he wrote, Texas Reds was one of the two or three best restaurants in the Land of Enchantment, helped along by bountiful dinner salads and the house Texas Reds salad dressing. Dining at nearly 9,000 feet, he noted, only sharpened the appetite.
Then, weeks after that September visit, the original building was lost. On Wednesday, November 3, 2004, Texas Reds burnt to the ground. For a restaurant approaching four decades on Main Street, it might have been the end of the story. Instead, as Garduno later put it, it rose like a phoenix: Texas Reds was rebuilt, though no longer as the two-story monolith old-timers remembered. In 2006 the name spread down the Enchanted Circle when a second Colfax County Texas Reds opened in Eagle Nest.
Today Texas Reds stands at 400 East Main Street, still family dining in the old style. The Red River chamber directory bills it as serving great steaks for 50 years and calls it the town's source for live music and entertainment, with music Thursday through Sunday at its Lost Love Saloon. The house keeps its old-school ways: no reservations, but call-ahead seating on the hostess hotline, and dinner served Wednesday through Sunday from 4:30 to 9:00 in the evening.
Main Street has worn many faces since the boomtown days of saloons and dance halls, but its job has never changed: it is where Red River gathers after the day outside is done. Texas Reds has done that job through ski seasons and summer crowds, through a fire that took everything but the name, and into a second building and a second generation of regulars. Some restaurants are landmarks because they are old. Texas Reds earned it by coming back.
Planning a Red River getaway? Book your stay at the Claim Jumper A-Frame 6
