Once a drifting teen, now a wildly successful restaurateur -- here's how Steve Riley did it

As a homeless teen on the streets of Nob Hill, Steve Riley often passed the storefront that would become his much-ballyhooed restaurant, Mesa Provisions. He knew he wanted to make something of himself, but back then he was more concerned with fun and music than food. His mission would creep up on him, but once he found it, it would become his main course.

“Homelessness wasn’t a choice. It was a matter of bad circumstances and bad choices,” says Riley, 47. “The (University of New Mexico) student ghetto area was one of our favorite spots. I always knew that I’d be back here. This was my long-term goal: to be back here. How that would look, I had no idea.”

These days, Riley is looking pretty good. Mesa Provisions is one of the most popular restaurants in the city. It was voted Best in Albuquerque in 2023 by Albuquerque The Magazine and he is a finalist for the “Best in Southwest” in the prestigious James Beard Awards. He’s booked out three weeks in advance, something more usual for posh Santa Fe restaurants than those in humbler Albuquerque.

Riley could have gone that route, taking his culinary skills to the crème de la crème. But, even while striving for the highest awards the cooking world has to offer, he has kept firmly rooted in Albuquerque and the affordable. He grew up in Albuquerque. He and his brother and sister were often left to fend for themselves as their single mother worked on her master’s in library sciences during the day and the graveyard shift at the U.S. Postal Service at night. And so, unless he wanted “mustard sandwiches,” from an early age Riley taught himself to cook.

Cooking came more easily than school. The family moved around a lot but settled in Los Lunas in his early teenage years. Riley saucily informed his teachers that after eight hours of school a day, he did not plan to slave away at homework at night. By 14, he’d dropped out of school and home and “roamed the streets of Albuquerque as a troublemaker” with a group of friends. Some were musicians, and Riley joined a band.

But by 18, Riley decided he needed to grow up and at least find work to subsidize his music. So, he got a job as a dish washer at Ragin’ Shrimp in Nob Hill. He got promoted to prep cook, then cook, then kitchen manager.

Though he was clearly good at cooking, he still saw it as a means to an end for his music. Until one summer in 1998, while on tour with his band, he was injured and then stranded in Connecticut. In the month it took him to get home, Riley decided that he wanted to focus on cooking. An opportunity would quickly present itself: a friend had gone to work at Café Miche. Miche was then run by chef Jennifer James, who would go on to be a seven-time James Beard best chef semifinalist.

James opened up his eyes to a whole new way of cooking and lit a fire under Riley. Suddenly, he wanted homework and to learn quickly.

By 2001, his mother had moved to Los Angeles to pursue a doctorate in library and information sciences while working part time at the Getty Museum library. His sister had followed their mother, and so did Riley. He worked at Red Car Brewery and then at chef Robert Bell’s Chez Mélange.

“It attracted me because they did everything, there was a sushi bar. The menu changed every day,” Riley says. “I knew I was not going to get bored and I’d learn a ton.”

Bell, already a successful restaurateur with a string of venues to his name, became Riley’s mentor, and by 2010, the two opened Mama Terano’s together, inspired by Bell’s Italian grandmother. Riley was the main chef there until 2017, when he decided that he’d learned enough to open his own place.

He returned to Albuquerque and, after stints back with James at Frenchish, as a sous chef at Level 5 at the Chaco Hotel and then as executive chef at Farm and Table, in April 2021 he opened Mesa Provisions.

He didn’t even consider Santa Fe.

“Albuquerque is my home. I love to go visit Santa Fe, but I don’t know that I could ever see myself living in Santa Fe. I think there’s a lot of great things going on in Albuquerque that get overlooked because so much tourism resources go towards Santa Fe.”

These were, after all, the streets he wandered as a homeless teen dreaming of success.

In many ways, Riley took after his mother, who, after earning her Ph.D, ran the public library in Watts, not the best neighborhood in L.A. When he asked her, why not the library in lovely nearby Torrance, she replied: “Those kids don’t need help learning how to read.”

Riley opened Mesa Provisions on a shoestring budget: he got loans from his brother and girlfriend and maxed out his credit cards. His landlord on Central Avenue, Robert Gahattis — also a restaurateur who owns Duran’s Pharmacy — gawked at Riley when he told him with what little capital he planned to launch a fine dining restaurant.

“That’s not how it’s done,” Gahattis told Riley, but he rented him the space anyway and supported him when he could through the launch.

Though he’s now a James Beard Award nominee from SW Cuisine, Riley doesn’t like to pigeonhole his cooking into a genre. He cooks what he’d like to eat, and since he grew up here a lot of chile is often involved. His cooking is a whimsical mix of favors, green chile cheese biscuits with red chile butter, half a smoked chicken with posole, mushroom enchiladas that taste like the best version of your childhood creamy mushroom soup drenched over tortillas sautéed in duck fat with some green chile thrown in to give it a wholly unique twist.

And though the unassuming storefront belies white tablecloth service, Riley tries his best to keep his restaurant affordable — so that anyone can enjoy a birthday celebration there and not break the bank. This isn’t always easy, especially in New Mexico.

Riley supports local produce, though sometimes it kills his margins.

“Today, I could’ve spent $25 for 50 pounds of organic carrots, versus the $90 I paid for eight bunches of locally grown carrots, which comes out to about 10 pounds,” he says. “So, there’s a big difference in price between locally grown and wholesale organic. There’s a lot of reasons for that and there’s a lot of benefits to spending that money locally and supporting local farms, but as a business, you have to be able to make ends meet. And that’s a delicate balance to do all those things and do them consistently.”

His goal in the short term: Get Mesa to a place where he can take a week’s vacation without having to close. Mesa has already broken all of his restaurant ambitions — he never thought they’d seat 400 people in a week, and last week they sat 447. He never thought they’d serve 100 people in a night, and almost every night they flirt with breaking that number.

“This is the one time in my life where I’m at a crossroads of having more than one option of things I could do,” he says. “For such a long time my goal was to get here. Well, now I’m here. And some part of me is trying to have a moment of being content. I worked a long time to get to this point: Maybe I should take a minute and enjoy it. But I’m not the kind of person to stay idle and I know that as soon as I have an opportunity, I will take it.”

Even with multiple courses to pick from, Riley knows one thing: his path will stay here in Albuquerque, no matter the flavors it takes.