It’s been open for four decades. How long have you been striding atop its brown-tiled floors? I know more than one person whose first solid food was a Frontier tortilla.
This week Toby Smith interviewed longtime patrons of the UNM area’s favorite eatery. It’s a great read because most good stories are stories about people.
... there are the regulars, habitués addicted to shambling the lunch-hour queue, mulling the mélange of artwork, searching the diners for a familiar face.
had a landlord ask that I meet her at Frontier
-at midnight-
to sign a lease.
I can't remember what the next two rooms were, but when I started going there it was just the main room and the first side room, which was called the "Frontier Gallery" and featured some great local art. I had a favorite table in a corner of the main room that was eventually engulfed by their mirrored spy cave.
..back in the early 1970's, (late 1960's) was a place called the Spoofer Shop. It was one of the first head shops around (along with Roach Ranch West and Gold Street Cirsus Records) that 'hood. Might of been one of the first in the state. You'd have to ask an old hippie to be sure. And the precurser to the Living Batch Bookstore (some name with the word Grasshopper in it) was in another of those store fronts before Frontier bought them all up.
And their hot salsa used to be called Ranchera Sauce. I don't know when or why they stopped calling it that. And they used to have white coffee cups with an elegant embossed band around the top. And you could smoke in there. Eventually, you could only smoke in the back room, then not at all.
Turns out I was just shitfaced. It was just some cute blonde boy.
