Marketsteer Steakhouse quickly carved out a stellar reputation for sublime fare such as juicy porterhouse and butter-poached Maine lobster after opening in 2018 in Santa Fe’s Hotel St. Francis. Now, settled into their gorgeous new digs across town, this popular steakhouse still has the chops.
Marketsteer Steakhouse Delicousness
What makes Marketsteer stand out? One unique ingredient is the intriguing background of executive chef Kathleen Crook, who co-owns the restaurant with her wife, Kristina Goode, Marketsteer’s general manager.
Crook grew up in a family of ranchers and farmers in Artesia, in southeastern New Mexico. Growing and picking food from the fields gave her a familiarity with fresh produce, while working with the family cattle gave her supreme knowledge about beef. The work ethic gave her the grit she later required to run a restaurant. “Being a farm and ranch kid, there was no such thing as summers,” she says recently, taking a break in the dining room before the bustling dinner shift. “It just meant more work.”
After high school, Crook hit the rodeo circuit with a college rodeo scholarship and won the prestigious World Champion Breakaway Roper in 1997. In those days, she could hardly make her way around a kitchen. “I honestly I wasn’t even boiling water back then,” she says. “I didn’t know how to hold a knife. Cooking was so hard and I just wasn’t part of it.” Until, that is, an infomercial roped her in and changed the course of her life.
Making a Shift to Cooking
“I was in my early 20s after college and was working at my mom’s ranch,” she recalls. “It was March and the wind started in and blew straight for days—50 miles an hour with sustained gusts of over 60. I could see the dust blowing through the windows. Late one night, I was watching tv when I saw a commercial for the Scottsdale Culinary Institute Le Cordon Bleu. I decided then to make a complete career change. I never looked back.”
Trading her saddle for a set of chef knives, Crook finished culinary school and hit the Dallas restaurant scene in 2003, where she met Goode while they were working at the same restaurant. The pair pulled up stakes for Aspen in 2010, to open Steakhouse 316 for CP Restaurant Group. But in 2018, the Land of Enchantment lured her home.
“We knew we wanted our own restaurant, we were just trying to figure out how to get there,” Crook says. “We came to my dad’s farm in Artestia and we did an upscale food truck, Farmer’s Feast. That’s where we came up with the burger on our bar menu, the Johnny C Smash Burger. We knew we wanted to go somewhere and Santa Fe hit all the marks, with being close to the mountains and having a great climate.”
A Dream Restaurant and Bar Combined at Marketsteer
Crook and Goode jumped at the chance to buy the building that formerly housed El Meson which they then gutted and redesigned. The bar, aptly called the Tack Room, salutes Crook’s rodeo years with her medals, ribbons, and photographs displayed beneath two glass-topped tables. A painting of a Longhorn skull above the dining room fireplace honors Goode’s Dallas roots.
In addition to beef, Marketsteer’s menu offers sumptuous sauces as well as Colorado lamb T-bones, jerk-brined chicken, seared diver scallops and other enticing fare. Riffs on traditional steakhouse sides include chicken fried lobster mac and Boursin creamed spinach. Filet mignon and halibut are bestsellers but Crook has a favorite. “I really love my Tex-Mex Mussels. I went through a lot of different renditions before I came up with Texas Shiner-Bock Beer and green chile butter.”
Crook’s ingredient for success is simplicity. “You buy quality ingredients but you don’t need to over-manipulate it,” she says. “You buy quality and let it shine, rustic but refined.”
Story by Lynn Cline
Photos Courtesy of Marketsteer Steakhouse
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