Chef Olea’s Legacy

GRACE, DEDICATION, AND PASSION PROVE TO BE HIS LIFE’S SECRET INGREDIENTS

BY VANI RANGACHAR PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL QUAT FOR TREND

He’s dedicated, effortlessly creative, resilient, and as warm as his signature Sopa de Amor made of green chile, crab, amaretto foam, and a seductive touch of chocolate. And we’d all be better off if we had a bit of Fernando Olea in us.

No chef in Santa Fe is as beloved and well-known as Olea, thanks in part to his ever-present cowboy hat and the fact that he looks a lot like actor Robert Duvall.

For more than 30 years Olea has been giving the “city different” a cuisine unlike any other. In 2022 he won both a coveted James Beard Award and Chef of the Year honors from the New Mexico Restaurant Association.

But it hasn’t all been an easy ride. A fire closed his renowned restaurant Sazón in 2019. Then the pandemic forced another shutdown, so he switched to a takeout menu of Mexican street food like tacos, flautas, and tostadas. And just last fall, he suffered a stroke.

Olea was at the restaurant when he felt dizzy, so he went home. “I tried to put on my boots and couldn’t balance, so we called 911,” he says. A helicopter flew him to the University of New Mexico hospital in Albuquerque, where he stayed five days submitting to “every kind of test.” He could touch his nose and say what the date was, so the doctors called it a minor stroke and released him.

He went directly to Sazón’s kitchen, with no back-frombeyond transformations. “I see life the same way,” he says. “I’m very thankful to God, and I know there is one.”

His faith is based on a traditional Roman Catholic upbringing in Mexico City. These days he doesn’t always go to church, but he prays all the time and carries a St. Michael Archangel medal around in his pocket.

Olea came to the US as a young man to manage a family-owned furniture store in Minneapolis, Minnesota, then moved to Santa Fe to sell beds and sofas for the same family. They also owned Bert’s Burger Bowl, a longtime favorite in Santa Fe, and when they retired in the early 1990s, they asked Olea to take over. “I told them I knew nothing about food and even less about the restaurant business,” he recalls. “But they said not to worry. They would teach me everything I needed to know.” He thought