[eat & drink]
Pagosa Springs’ Aqua Sol combines the best bits of a bar and a juice bar The eatery’s cocktails remind us a lot of more healthful beverages What do you get if you combine a most like an homage to the bar’s previjuice bar with a real bar and then add in ous life. The margarita is a combination some Mediterranean food? The answer, of cold-pressed juice and tequila, with it turns out, is Aqua Sol, one of Pagosa lime, jalapeño, cucumber, pineapple, Springs’ newest eateries. cilantro, and ginger, garnished with Tajin and a lime. Pagosa beverage connoisseurs might be familiar with The Juice Goddess, a The juice ingredients were delicious juice bar that served smoothies, acai and seemed very much like something bowls, matcha green tea, vegan snacks, you’d get at a healthful juice bar, and and the like. Well, it’s gone now. Sorta. surprisingly, the addition of the tequila certainly didn’t alter that much. The The Green Goddess has evolved into Aqua Sol Waterfront Eatery + Bar, which cucumber and cilantro were the two most prominent flavors, which, assuming opened on Labor Day on the far eastern you’re one of the people who perceive end of town. In addition to the interior and the bar, the restaurant has two tiers cilantro positively (rather than as soapy of outdoor seating: a patio immediately and rotten), is quite refreshing. The jalaNick Gonzales/DGO adjacent to the building and overlooking peño-ginger combo carries a bit of a bite, »» The Juice*d Goddess Margarita at Aqua the San Juan River, and a lower area next and if you combine that with the agave Sol Waterfront Eatery + Bar showcases the to the river itself. holding the Tajin to the rim as you sip it, restaurant’s previous existence as a juice it adds an interesting secondary flavor. We dropped by on a warm but partly bar. cloudy day in late September to check After that, we tried “The PB-OB” — they’re drinking whiskey that tastes like out the part of the restaurant that pineapple juice, orange juice, coconut peanut butter.) intrigued us the most: the booze-inmilk, dark rum, and Skrewball Peanut fused juice-based cocktails. (We weren’t Butter Whiskey. (If you’re looking for a Anyway, the cocktail had an unusual hungry at the time, but the savory and quick chuckle, head to Skrewball’s webbut pleasant taste — our server insisted spicy smell we got as a gyro passed by site, where the marketing photos feature on sticking around to watch our faces as our table pretty much ensured that we’ll a bunch of young Californians having we took our first sip. It reminded us of a head back for food sometime soon.) the time of their lives sitting on roofs smoothie you’d order at a spa. The only We started with the “Juice*d Goddess and cliff diving on a hot summer day. You reminder that you’re drinking a cocktail Margarita,” the drink that seemed the know, like everyone totally does when is the flavor of the rum.
As our final cocktail, we decided to get a frozen drink — The White Walker Slush (“because winter is always coming” says the menu) — a frozen piña colada. It intrigued us largely because of the “A Song of Ice and Fire”/”Game of Thrones” connection. The White Walkers and House Stark, from whom the motto is lifted, are both from the cold, northern part of Westeros, whereas a piña colada seems like something you’d drink somewhere tropical, such as Dorne. It turned out, though, that Aqua Sol didn’t have all the White Walker ingredients quite yet, so we ordered the “Daydream Slush,” the frozen margarita. Made with lemon, lime, and orange juice, it tasted a bit fresher than your average frozen margarita — but not as fresh as the Juice*d Goddess. After a few sips, we began to notice that it does that thing where the liquid part of the beverage was easy to sip away from the drink, leaving a bunch of ice behind. We had to wait a while for the ice to melt and become drinkable again, but we enjoyed both the margarita and the bar where we were drinking it. —— Nick Gonzales
Looking for new movies? The American Indian Film Fest is online this November The virtual festival features 102 films It’s getting cold outside again, and the number of outdoor events we can participate in while safely socially distancing ourselves is drying up. As such, we’re back to looking for things we can do indoors. The only problem is, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, there aren’t a ton of those either.
ago) back in March.
After struggling for a while to stay open playing old movies and whatever dreck Hollywood was willing to part with during the summer, most, if not all, of the local theaters have closed until further notice. And as of Halloween, the last of the temporary drive-ins has gone away. So ... we’re back on the couch.
• “Monkey Beach,” directed by Loretta Todd, follows a woman, Lisa, who returns to her home village from Vancouver when visions warn her that her younger brother is going to be in danger. This sets Lisa on a quest to rescue her brother as she journeys by boat to the Land of the Dead.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t watch new movies. There may not be theaters to watch them in, but film festivals may be able to carry us through the winter.
Access to each program and feature of the festival is selling at $10, but there’s also a sliding scale that drops it down to $8. Of particular interest to us are the three narrative features the festival has nominated for best film:
Courtesy of Mama-oo Productions
»» “Monkey Beach” is one of the three features nominated for Best Film in this year’s American Indian Film Festival.
in San Francisco but has gone virtual. It
will last from Nov. 6 to 14 and has 102 The 45th Annual American Indian Film Festival, for instance, usually takes place films, 55 of which are world premiers. As
far as we can tell, only one film overlaps with the Durango Independent Film Festival that happened (a thousand years
• “Parallel Minds,” directed by Benjamin Ross Hayden, is a sci-fi flick in which a researcher and an old-fashioned police detective have to team up to stop an artificial intelligence as it uses Red-Eye, a Continued on page 10
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