New owners to take over San Marcos Cafe — and its managerie of fowl Susan Macdonell and her husband, Tom, have sold the San Marcos Cafe and Feed Store on N.M. 14 south of Santa Fe. Clyde Mueller/The New Mexican The days of Buddy the Chicken at the San Marcos Cafe and Feed Store are long gone, and now the landmark restaurant south of the city is entering yet another era, with its pending sale to a Michigan couple. “It’s time for a change, time for retirement,” said Susan Macdonell, who along with her husband, Tom, bought the business, then just a feed store, in 1984. The restaurant, known as much for the poultry that greet diners outside as for the fowl on the menu inside, was added soon after. The buzz over huevos rancheros, breakfast crepes and giant cinnamon rolls at the cafe Friday morning was a lot about what would happen to the menagerie of peacocks, turkeys, ducks and other fowl that freely roam the grounds of the restaurant, planted along N.M. 14 just north of county roads 44 and 45. (An emu rescued by the Macdonells from the hills north off Madrid about five years ago and kept penned in the back died a few months ago.) Macdonell, dressed in her usual bright red apron over a faded blue shirt and jeans, tried to assure patrons that as far as she knew, the new owners were planning to keep things pretty much the same, including letting the fowl roam more or less freely on the 5-acre parcel. Meanwhile, Cindy Holloway, who bought the property with her husband, Mark, said nothing to leave patrons and neighbors thinking otherwise. “It is such a charming and such a wonderful place,” Holloway said. “Obviously [the Macdonells] have been in business and successful for 30 years, so Mark and I plan to run it much the same way Tom and Susan have, and we hope to be as successful as they are.” Holloway said she and her husband were married in Santa Fe in November 2012 after visiting here numerous times. “It just felt like home, so we are very excited” to have found such a community-oriented business, she said. The Holloways currently live in Grass Lake, Mich., and have operated several restaurant-related businesses, but never an actual dining establishment. They are expected to take over the San Marcos in late July or early August. The San Marcos has not only survived but prospered in an area where so many other restaurants were launched with great hope, only to fade away, sometimes even before the neighbors knew they were there. “We just kept hanging on,” Macdonell said. “It never has been bad, it just kept building over the years, and we have never had a lot of debt. It’s made money ever since we opened the doors — maybe not a lot of money, but enough to keep it going.” She said many of the failed startups, especially over the past few years, might have succeeded if they had served only dinner, a meal the San Marcos dropped years ago, primarily because three meals a day just got to be too much work for Macdonell, who still does much of the cooking herself. “At first we served breakfast, lunch and dinner. For years, the only meal I didn’t serve was dinner Sunday night,” Macdonell said. She said the Holloways plan to add a dinner menu. “The neighborhood will really love that. They have wanted a place for dinner for a long time.” Macdonell said she tried closing on Mondays and Tuesdays, “but then [author and art collector] Forrest Fenn screamed at me, ‘Where are we going to eat?’ So I opened back up.” Macdonell figures the cafe derives about half its patronage from the tourist trade and the other half from locals. Plus, you can throw in the occasional celebrity. To name but a few: Ed Harris, Ron Howard, the Cohen brothers, Kiefer Sutherland, Randy Travis and the more-than-occasional Sam Shepard and Wes Studi. “Peacocks and movie stars kind of sums up the place,” Macdonell said. The Macdonells, who bought a home just down the road from the San Marcos, may take off on a few trips or spend more time at another home they recently bought in southern Colorado. As for Buddy the Chicken, the white Cochin bantam and unofficial maître d’: “He was so tame, he didn’t realize he was a chicken,” Macdonell said. “He would take walks with us and hold court out front.” Buddy also would, on occasion, make his way inside and sit on patrons’ feet “until we’d pick him up and shoo him out.” Buddy, who died in spring 1996, is likely the only chicken to have received an above-the-fold obituary in his hometown newspaper. Buddy was succeeded by another bird, Russell Crow. Though he never rose to Buddy’s stature, Russell left his mark until he disappeared during the New Year’s Eve snowstorm of 2006-07.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 21:44:26 +0000
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