Hillsboro diner wins historic restaurant grant

HILLSBORO – The “Highway 152 Pileup,” a signature breakfast dish at the General Store Café, lands heavily on the table.

It presents a top layer of pinto beans, chile harvested in the Hatch Valley and cheese. The second bite exposes a layer of scrambled eggs, bacon (or ham, or sausage, as preferred) and potato underneath, all on top of a flour tortilla.

Owner Ben Lewis calls it a “deconstructed burrito,” uniting different elements of New Mexican cuisine and named for the state highway running through town.

The town’s original mercantile has been in continuous operation for generations and has served hot meals for nearly 40 years. This fall, it was selected as one of 50 establishments awarded a grant through a program supporting small historic restaurants nationwide.

The café’s narrow dining room stays busy from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. three days a week. The floor, furnishings and cabinets showcasing local memorabilia are old hardwood.

Country music plays softly overhead. The staff greets regulars by name and welcomes visitors to the tiny unincorporated village of Hillsboro — a community of about 200 people near the Black Range, Percha Creek and the Gila National Forest.

Truth or Consequences, the Sierra County seat, is a 30-mile drive to the northeast and the source of many regular visitors to Hillsboro. An informal canvass of diners included cross-country roadsters, visitors from Grant and Luna counties, a game warden stopping for lunch and folks from the surrounding Black Range community.

Among the cars parked along the main road near the restaurant and neighboring shops was a Ford pickup truck with Montana plates and a Tesla registered in Vermont. On another afternoon, a local Model A car club visited town, saying hello with their klaxon horns squawking “arooga” before parking their antique sedans in front of the Black Range Museum down the street.

Food and community

In partnership with American Express, the National Trust for Historic Preservation founded the Backing Small Historic Restaurants initiative in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when emergency public health measures restricted public spaces throughout the country and many restaurants closed their doors for good.

“With our focus on historic buildings and (American Express’) focus on small businesses, restaurants just seemed to be the best place to start,” Natalie Woodward, an associate manager with the Trust, said in an interview.

The program distributed $2.5 million across 50 restaurants this year: $50,000 apiece, with $40,000 to be used for exterior improvements and $10,000 that may be used for other business purposes.

Since its inception, 180 local restaurants have shared $8 million in grants distributed through all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“A lot of restaurants are legacy businesses,” Woodward said. “They need to be in a historic building. It needs to be important to their community: We really like to focus on restaurants that are continuing culinary heritage traditions, and places that mean a lot to their community. … We love that they use locally-sourced ingredients, too.”

The General Store Café is the seventh New Mexico restaurant to win a grant from the program.

The 1879 adobe structure is believed to be the first commercial building in town, built shortly after Hillsboro’s founding as a mining town after prospectors struck gold to the west. It housed a general store for decades before the building was purchased in 1903 by druggist G.T. Miller, whose wife, Ninette Miller, produced paintings that are on display in the diner today, along with antique diner and drugstore signs.

“The stuff in the store, it’s the dirt of time,” Lewis said. “It’s just stuff left over from the different people that have had the place.”

Known as the Miller Drug Store for most of its history, the building has also housed a post office, telegraph and telephone office and a soda fountain.

The commercial kitchen, located in back, “used to be where you went to make a phone call in Hillsboro,” Lewis said. “There was a phone on the wall so you could have some privacy, and there was an operator with a switchboard that was listening to everything that was said and making sure everybody in town knew.”

Part of the building was destroyed by a devastating flood that hit the town in 1914, but business continued. A new family owner operated it as the Hillsboro General Store from 1969 to 1986, before it changed hands again and added a lunch counter called the Country Café.

Ben Lewis remembers eating there with Doreen, his wife, during a cross-continental drive about 34 years ago. The couple lived in Winnipeg, Canada, where he worked in the Manitoba provincial government and she worked in banking. After adding New Mexico to their itinerary on a lark, they discovered Hillsboro on their way to Silver City.

In 1995, they returned and Ben Lewis — who grew up in central Texas and was ready to make a change after 22 years in Canada — discovered the store was for sale. Much to Doreen’s surprise, Ben bought the place.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he laughed, sitting on the porch in front of the café 30 years later.

Passing the skillet on

The Lewises live in a gunmetal gray house next door to the restaurant — “a 15-second commute,” as Lewis says — and they plan to retire there very soon: Lewis is in the process of selling the café to an employee.

Before the pandemic, the café opened five days a week. During the closures, Lewis ran deliveries for the postal service in Hillsboro and neighboring Kingston to stay afloat. Post-pandemic, it has limited its operations to Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

With the grant, Lewis plans to trim two sycamore trees that block views of the restaurant from the main street, add art or signage to the west-facing wall, upgrade the front walk and fencing, and do some restoration work at the entrance. The projects, submitted as part of the grant application, aim to preserve the building’s design and character while enhancing visibility and safety.

Although he speaks cheerfully of “going to sit on the porch,” it is hard to imagine Ben Lewis staying even 15 seconds away.

As he detailed the work to be done on the restaurant, Lewis repeatedly stopped to greet patrons leaving the diner, most of them by name, lighting up as he ribbed them or asked about their meal. When a woman named Jan spoke highly of the chowder, Lewis said, “Well, good, I won’t beat the cook then!”

The interactions illustrated a fundamental feature of “small, historic restaurants” that isn’t an artifact, like one of Ninette Miller’s paintings of tigers or a historic plaque affixed to the wall of an elderly building, but experienced in human interactions and gatherings around food, coffee or a milkshake.

“It’s about keeping history alive through the places that nourish those communities and cultures,” Woodward said, saying the General Store Café “embodies that mission, preserving not only a historic building but the sense of belonging” diners find here three days a week.