D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
June 2010
The Spirits Are Willing
Two Spirits Café in Pinos Altos expands, serving its hearty but healthy breakfasts and lunches on a new patio.
Story and photos by Peggy Platonos
Two Spirits Café in Pinos Altos may be small in size, but it is large in heart. The café instantly attracted so many enthusiastic and devoted customers when it opened in March 2009 that owner Lee Eagle initiated a patio-building project less than two months later. That patio is now complete and open for outdoor dining, doubling the restaurant's capacity from 7 to 14 tables.
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Two Spirits Café's new patio
doubles its capacity. |
The restaurant is open for breakfast and lunch five days a week during the summer months. Eagle does all the cooking and conjures up meals with a unique blend of French, Cajun and Southwestern influences. Using only organic vegetables, locally grown whenever possible, and meat that is "all natural or organic," she goes to great lengths to ensure tastiness, tenderness and healthfulness.
"Every meat here is cooked in a crock pot, including the ham used in the ham salad," Eagle says.
Breakfast customers have had to adjust to the fact that no bacon is served at Two Spirits Caf. The other two traditional breakfast meats, sausage and ham, receive special treatment designed to minimize potential health hazards from any substances used in their processing.
"I marinate the sausage and ham in ginger ale, then steam them to boil off anything used in the processing," Eagle explains. "This also eliminates 70% of the salt and fat."
Customers seem to approve of the results. "Sausage is one of the breakfast favorites," Eagle says, "along with Corned Beef Hash, Chicken Fajita Hash and our Mighty Meat Scramble, which includes beef, chicken and Polish sausage." Cajun Fried Apples are another special breakfast treat — not always listed on the menu but always available to people in the know. And on Saturdays, ribeye steak is offered as a breakfast special.
Generous portions are part of the Two Spirits allure, both for breakfast and for lunch. "We have big meals," Eagle says, "but we very rarely have anything come back on the plates."
She serves huge bowls of soup and chili, and mountainous (and very popular) plates of salad at lunchtime, along with sandwiches packed full of beef, ham or chicken. The Sunday midday special is always Cornish game hen. And the desserts Eagle turns out are as tasty as they are elegant, regularly receiving raves from customers, with the most memorable being one woman's exclamation that the dessert she had just devoured was "mouthgasmic."
"We served an average of 109 desserts a week last summer. In the last week of our winter schedule, when we were open only four days a week, we served 204 desserts," Eagle says. "This summer we expect to sell more than 300 desserts a week."
Considering the fact that the restaurant's seating capacity is now doubled, with the new patio open for business, that estimate may well be low.
Two Spirits Café is located in Pinos Altos on the main thoroughfare, Highway 15, about a 10-minute drive from Silver City. The building is cozy and rustic, with several derelict antique trucks serving as flower planters in and around the parking area.
In nice weather, the bench outside the restaurant is occupied by an elderly farm couple — dummies Eagle created 25 years ago in the days when she was earning a living making and marketing dolls and turquoise jewelry. Among the dolls she created in those days were representations of a number of Native American tribes, including the Mescalero Apache tribe that is her heritage. (Though Lee uses the surname of Eagle "for ease," her full legal surname is Eagle Eye, an English approximation of her father's tribal Apache name.)
A laundromat shares the building with Two Spirits Caf. And a simple but elegant horse-drawn carriage is usually parked under the trees around the laundromat end of the building, with rides available through the streets of the historic village of Pinos Altos. The rides are offered by retired rancher Sonny Rumschlag and are not affiliated with the restaurant, but they fit in well with the down-to-earth country atmosphere of Two Spirits Cafe.
Two Spirits Café is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Breakfast is served until 11:30 a.m., after which the lunch menu takes effect. For more information, call 388-1659.
Send Mimbres freelance writer Peggy Platonos
tips for restaurant reviews at platonos@gilanet.com or call 536-2997.