Diluvian Roswell

There are a few exciting local events each year, such as the UFO Fest and the Piñata Fest. At least, Piñata Fest had good live music the last time I was there. Also, St. John’s Church has a yearly feast that carries on all weekend with great bands and food. And then there is the Chile Cheese Fest.

This weekend, I was tempted to spend most of my time reading and napping as I had the previous weekend. A call from my sister and a brisk walk in the cool sunshiny day snapped me out of it. I needed to get out and see some sights. I had missed Piñata Fest and the St. John’s feast weekend, but I spotted a flyer for the Chile Cheese Fest on Facebook (I was specifically searching for community events). I texted a friend and asked her if she wanted to go. She had never heard of it but said it sounded delicious.

Sadly, when we arrived about the dinner hour, there wasn’t much happening. We spotted three food trucks and a handful of vendors and a man with DJ equipment on the courthouse steps.

It was sparse, only a few people were drifting through, and the music was an uninspiring canned Latin mix. However, the Roswell Daily Record captured this image of someone roasting chile, so clearly exciting things had happened at some point:

Roswell is an agricultural town, and New Mexico is an agricultural state. Two of our most iconic ag products are chile and dairy. I would guess dairy is our biggest money-making agricultural product. Chaves County has more dairies than anywhere else in the state. A Chile Cheese Fest could be both appropriate for this part of the state, as well as a lot of fun if it had live country or folk music and food tasting and vendors actually selling chile and cheese products. Maybe this did happen earlier in the day or at previous festivals – I don’t have a clue.

In any case, we were soon bored of the uninspiring vendor goods and headed to Martin’s Capitol Cafe for dinner, which is a block away from the courthouse.

Martin’s has been in Roswell a long time. One of our local hang-out restaurants, Pepper’s, closed in the last year, leaving us with a handful of these types of places left. I’m familiar with Martin’s mostly because we used to have them cater at the church for events, and sometimes families hire them for funeral receptions. The family who owns it are parishioners.

Keeping with the theme of chile, I ordered the asado. I often use asado as a guage for a restaurant’s quality. It’s easy to get it wrong. You can’t just take diced pork and throw some chile on it. It has to be marinated in the chile and then simmered in it. Martin’s got it right! It was really good. The sauce might have been slightly salty for my taste, but the chile was just a little spicy and smokey, and the pork was perfectly cooked. I was surprised. I had only eaten their enchiladas and hadn’t ventured beyond that New Mexican staple. Also, the staff were amazing and friendly. I’m going to go there more often, I think.

I called this post Diluvian Roswell because I wondered if people backed out of the Chile Cheese Fest because we had been under a flash flood watch and were still under a river flood watch (if the Pecos rises above flood level, it will head right towards Roswel). It stopped raining over the weekend – but the locals are traumatized from the 2024 flood that changed the landscape of the town and destroyed hundreds of homes. We are headed for more rain this coming week, which has people on edge.