CHIMAYÓ — Leona Medina Tiede is feeling a little disoriented these days, she said recently.
She’s closed the eponymous Chimayó restaurant she and her husband Dennis had operated for 34 years, finally getting the rest her children wished for her.
The small café was located next door to the world-famous Santuario de Chimayó, a shrine people visit year round. Many visitors were used to making their obeisance at the Santuario and then dropping in for northern New Mexico comidas next door. That decadeslong tradition ended when the restaurant shut down in the fall.
“I keep feeling like something’s missing,” she said with a self-deprecatory laugh. “I wake up in the morning and think, ‘What do I have to do today?’ And then I realize: ‘Nothing.’ After nearly 35 years, it’s going to take awhile to get used to.”
Leona Medina was a Pan Am stewardess when that was a glamorous occupation. She and Dennis met in Hawaii. He was a student doing temp work for the airline. They married in 1967 and lived in California for nearly 10 years before she brought him home to Chimayó.
“Dennis attended San Francisco City College for restaurant management,” she said. “I taught him how to cook and he taught me how to run a restaurant.” The pair first opened a roadside stand in June 1977 on N.M. 76 before moving to the Santuario location.
At one point they had a thriving flavored-tortilla business going — Leona’s tortillas were stocked in area supermarkets — but they sold “part of” that business a long time ago, she said. “That’s already history.”
On Oct. 16, she and Dennis closed Leona’s Restaurante de Chimayó. They kept the building, though — the old adobe they’d gradually renovated into a stylish, crowded café. “We do have a gift shop in the same building,” Tiede said.
The couple is only opening the gift shop — Leonita’s — on Saturday and Sunday during the winter, she added. She makes bizcochitos, banana bread and panocha, a sprouted-wheat pudding that was traditionally made during Lent in northern New Mexico households. “People love it year round,” Tiede said.
“And we have hot chocolate, hot cider, coffee and soft drinks,” she said. Jams and jellies, aprons, Señor Murphy’s candies, jarred chile sauces and her own cookbook, “Leona’s Sanctuary,” also are on offer.
But no tamales. No posole. No chicharron burritos.
“They come in to see my smiling face and then they make me cry,” Tiede said. “People come in and they have their order all ready and I have to tell them, ‘The restaurant’s closed.’ Oh, they get so sad!”
The tamale orders have been coming in, too, from folks who ordered them by the dozen each Christmas and didn’t know the supply had been cut off. “Some of them have been really upset,” Tiede said.
When she closed the restaurant, Tiede said she aspired to return to the oil painting she’d done as young woman. She’s done that, she said.
“I had four or five that I started a long time ago,” the 70-year-old said. “I’ve been trying to finish them. It’s nice and relaxing.”
Although she acknowledged that she sometimes gets a little depressed because she doesn’t have the busy restaurant any more, Tiede said she doesn’t miss the physical stress of long hours standing behind a hot stove and lugging heavy pots around.
Tending the gift shop from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays gives her the people fix she needs, Tiede added. “It’s the slowest time of year. We may open it more days in the spring.”
And what about Good Friday, the day thousands of pilgrims crowd into the Santuario?
“That’s one thing we’re still thinking about,” Tiede said. “We’ve been doing it so many years. People need it. Even when I was in high school, my mother and I served hot beverages during the night. I think they expect us to be here.”
