You could say baking is in Ki Holste’s blood. Her grandmother baked pies, her mother baked cakes, and she, herself, has been baking since she was four years old, starting with cookies and later becoming a pastry chef. The creativity she found within the structure of baking is what appealed to her.

“They could bake everything,” she said of the women in her family. “Baking is one of the true pleasures in life.” Today she operates Sugar Nymphs Bistro, found in Peñasco along the scenic High Road to Taos in northern New Mexico.

If you make the trek, you will find homemade Americana dishes with a throwback quality. You will want to be sure and leave room for both savory and sweet; the menu includes a rotating selection of treats and almost always features cakes multiple layers thick. Unless you’re sharing a piece, you’re likely to take the rest of the hearty slice home with you for a midnight snack.

Holste described her food as “an honest meal that has a little zhuzh underneath there. There’s a lot of technique underneath a good soup or a good piece of cake.” Technique and precision are particularly important in baking at New Mexico’s higher altitudes like the Peñasco area, which sits at an elevation of about 7,600 feet. She said she wants everything you eat from the bistro to remind you of a nice memory but also to have the “flavor of the person who made it.”

Sugar Nymphs opened in 2001 in Truchas, farther south on the scenic byway. It began as a collaboration between Holste and her partner, Kai Harper, a chef. Harper had cut her teeth working in kitchens in the Bay Area during the California cuisine revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, where the American farm-to-table movement originated. Both have worked in restaurants across the country and bring their personal experiences of homestyle food.

The bistro offers neighbors and tourists a different menu than the posole, tamales, chile, and other staples you find in most area homes and many northern New Mexico restaurants. “We don’t do New Mexican food. Other people do it so well,” Holste said. Instead, their menu includes dishes such as goat cheese salad, a vegetarian black bean burger, old-fashioned chicken stew, and house-made pizzas on Fridays. 

I hit the throwback trifecta when I visited recently, ordering the local heirloom tomato sandwich, apple crisp, and a glass of ice tea. And I had to try the goat cheese salad, served with toasted pecans, dried cranberries, and a house-made ginger-sesame vinaigrette. 

The tomato sandwich was a special item that day. It was simple, with fat slices of locally grown yellow tomatoes, vintage cheddar, and mayo on a homemade focaccia bun, but it took me back to childhood summers. The warm, early-fall day helped set the scene.

The salad had the perfect ratio of dressing to lettuce leaf, with more goat cheese than I was expecting, and I loved it for those reasons. And, like I suggested, I ended up taking most of the warm apple crisp home with me for a treat later in the day because I didn’t heed my own warning of leaving room for dessert. But the bites I had at the bistro made for a delicious conclusion to my meal, combining the flavors of fall spices and locally grown apples.

As you may have gathered, one of the principles the restaurant operates by is the use of local produce at every possible step. During the growing season, Holste partners with northern New Mexico farmers and growers to bring local flavors to her food. The heirloom tomatoes in my sandwich, for example, were sourced from a farmer in Llano, a community just minutes down the road from the bistro.

The building Sugar Nymphs operates from adds its own local flavor to the experience. Since 2002, the bistro has been housed in what was previously a theater. The sign still hangs outside and a history of the space, from theater to bistro, is peppered on the walls inside the old lobby. And after more than twenty years in operation, Sugar Nymphs accounts for a decent portion of that history.

Holste has stepped into more of an operational role in recent years since Harper retired. But that hasn’t changed the warmth that goes into each meal and the skills developed by each employee whose path crosses the bistro’s kitchen.

Aside from a handful of mainstays, many Sugar Nymphs employees are teenagers who are from the cluster of communities that make up the Peñasco area. Despite this often being their first job, Holste said the one thing she never has to teach the teens is to respect customers.

“If they work more than a year or something like that, they’ll come out of here knowing how to make a cake, knowing how to make a soup, probably have learned how to make our bread, because it’s really easy,” Holste said. With some basic knife skills and quality ingredients, good food is not out of reach for these young adults.

Above all else, she said she wants both customers and staff to feel that Sugar Nymphs is a safe, comfortable place where they are seen.

📍 15046 State Rd. 75, Peñasco, 575-587-0311