Indigenous ingredients: Corn Maiden redefines itself with flavors straight from its garden

SANTA ANA PUEBLO -- The drive to Corn Maiden is a beautiful excursion in itself.

A winding one-lane road leads you to the magnificent Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort and Spa on Santa Ana Pueblo where the restaurant is located. Its spectacular view of the Sandia Mountains and the nearby bosque is breathtaking, which puts Corn Maiden in a league of its own.

Indigenous ingredients: Corn Maiden redefines itself with flavors straight from its garden

The menu is equally impressive, with many offerings including ingredients that took months to source. A majority of its ingredients are taken directly from a garden and orchard located just outside the grounds. It is a stunning site filled with growing vegetables, green chile, jalapenos, prickly pear cactus, apple trees and active bee hives where honey for the restaurant’s desserts and other offerings is sourced.

The garden is a labor of love for Nate Larsen, executive chef at Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort and Spa, and Patrick Mohn, Food and Beverage director.

“I like the idea of going out and picking tomatoes, and coming in and roasting them, and making a sauce, and an hour later, I’m serving it,” Larsen said. “There’s something just very perfect about that scenario to me.”

Corn Maiden closed its doors during the pandemic in 2020. It reopened this summer and needed to find a way to stand out from surrounding restaurants. Its answer was a garden that could not only supply the restaurant with ingredients but also make it unique by using items sourced from the property.

“We started with onions, and then we put in irrigation, and we started worm composting,” Larsen said. “And we have composted about 15,000 pounds of coffee grounds. We save all of our coffee grounds from banquets and we run those through our four worm bins that we have out there. We save all of our melon peels from banquets and compost those. And we’ve had to use very little topsoil, most of it’s coming out of our worm bins, this last year.”

Coming into the fall season, the garden still has okra, lemon cucumbers and tomatoes as well as sand cherries and prickly pear fruit.

“We harvest sand cherries on property,” Larsen said. “They’re like little plums. We take those, we juice them, turn them into sauces. We go around the property and we pick all the prickly pears and we juice all those.”

There are plenty more offerings that grow throughout the property.

“Most of the herbs that we use in this restaurant are from the property,” Larsen said. “We have a little herb garden right by the pool. Our rosemary is from the garden. We have wildflowers out there that we’ve been cutting all summer (that are placed in a small glass vase on each table).”

Some of the items grown on property can be frozen and used at a later date.

“The squash and zucchini, we grate it,” Larsen said. “We have so much of it that we grate it and freeze it up in our market. Our pastry team makes zucchini and squash muffins. We have enough squash and zucchini to last us probably a year.”

Towards the end of summer growing season, the team planted carrots, green onions, turnips, radishes and lettuce. The restaurant offers four different lettuces, spinach, purple cauliflower and bok choy that is grown on its property.

“Conceptually, there has to be at least one item from property on a dish,” Larsen said. “Right now, (Corn Maiden’s chef de cuisine George Silva), has a grilled pork chop dish, with a potato gratin and a kind of apple chutney on top of it. The apple juice is from property. We have a little orchard and we juice all the apples, and we freeze the juice, and make apple butter out of it, and use the juice and reduce it. And he adds that juice to his chutney, so it keeps everything tied to here.”

Larsen said a popular request is the Herb Crusted NM Beef Tenderloin. The buffalo meat is locally sourced and is served with beef tallow fingerling potatoes.

“It’s herb crusted and all the herbs are coming out of the garden,” Larsen said. “... After George cleans the meat, he takes the fat scrap and simmers it and makes a beef tallow out of it, and then roasts his potatoes in that. It has a housemade barbecue sauce. It’s an upscale kind of barbecue spice sauce.”

On the lighter end, the Santa Ana salad is another guest favorite.

“(It has) pine smoked beets and we grab pine from property,” Larsen said. “It has a housemade goat cheese. We get a local goat milk in and we break it ourselves and whip it into cheese. (The salad also features) a nut and seed brittle, and pea tendrils that we grow on property. We have a little grow room with grow lights and all of our micro greens we grow ourselves.”

Larsen describes the Corn Maiden’s concept as “upscale New Mexico food.”

“We have a very strong sense of place here,” he said. “We cook with a lot of respect for the land and for where we are located, for the owners of the hotel, which is Santa Ana Pueblo, and we want to be able to really use what’s here and what we can grow here and develop a story off of that. But, I would say that we take food very seriously, but not take ourselves very seriously. It’s not pretentious dining and we want people to come in and have a fantastic meal, but be comfortable.”

He said guests are welcome to ask questions about the restaurant and its cuisine.

“It is professional service, but it is not stuffy,” Larsen explained. “We want people to maybe learn something when they come. The servers are very excited and very well educated on how we get things to the plate and the processes that we’re going through in order to do that. And they love telling the story if people want to hear it.”