It was the appetizer that made the dinner illegal: grilled polenta with mushrooms.
No joke. New Mexico health officials had ordered the restaurateur, Carlo Gislimberti, to stop serving wild porcini and chanterelle mushrooms he had picked in the mountains near here.
Never mind that Gislimberti knows his amanita muscaria from his boletus edulus (the first is poisonous, the second is not). Never mind that he has a sheaf of recommendations from botanists and biologists describing him as a pedigreed mushroom-picker.
The officials told him to serve only mushrooms from an approved source-a commercial wholesaler or some other distributor.
A few years ago, Gislimberti’s gourmet tussle with the bureaucracy would have been unthinkable in this dusty little one-traffic-light town known for its Georgia O’Keeffe landscapes and its painted-sky sunsets.
Residents so resisted glitz and glamor in the 1980s that Robert Redford was forced to shoot “The Milagro Beanfield War”-a home-grown comedy that was part fiction, part fable and part political allegory-in nearby Truchas, N.M.
But Taos is changing. The main road through town now has a series of traffic lights, a discount department store and a string of fast-food restaurants.
And Taos is coping with an influx of residents, mostly from Los Angeles, New York, Dallas and Europe.
The newcomers have helped turn Taos into a boom town. Last year, 25 percent more tourists visited Taos than in 1993.
With that increase came more spending: gross receipts in Taos County climbed $11 million, to $44 million, from 1993.
The Federal Aviation Administration has projected a 20 percent surge in air traffic at the Taos airport, and the agency predicts another jump if a proposed new runway is approved. A new hospital opened last month.
And soon tourists may be rolling the dice on 10 acres near the Gislimbertis’ restaurant, Villa Fontana. The Taos Pueblo Indians, who live on one of the oldest continually inhabited settlements in the United States, are about to break ground on a gambling casino.
The prospect of such development has some people worried that Taos will become an “adobe boutique,” with single-family homes, weekend houses and condominiums that are imitations of centuries-old dwellings.
“It’s almost like anything’s OK, as long as it has that faux adobe look,” said Lauren Cramer, a longtime ski instructor in Taos Ski Valley, the mountain resort 15 miles from the center of town.
With the fake adobe have come higher land prices.
“In 1980, land close to town was $3,000 an acre,” said Noralyn Coar, a real estate agent.
Last year, she sold a single-acre parcel for almost $30,000.
“It’s gone through the roof,” she added.
The town’s rhythms are changing as well.
It used to be that banks opened when the tellers arrived and closed when they decided to go home. Now, people in Taos actually wear watches.
“These days,” said Ray Trotter, a dealer in Indian textiles and artifacts, “they’ve got to be at a certain place at a certain time.”
“I moved here because I was selfish: Taos had clean water and clean air,” said Trotter, who was born in Texas. “We could sit on the front porch and play cards and drink tequila. Now, when we and all the vehicles decide to quit at 4 o’clock, 5 o’clock, it’s like there’s a traffic jam.”
And if the casino draws out-of-towners, there may be more traffic.
Last month the Taos Tribal Council formed Taos Pueblo Enterprises Inc., a business arm to manage gaming ventures.
Although tribal leaders have blueprints and a construction schedule ready, it remains to be seen when the casino will open, what kinds of games will be played there and how much money the American Indians can keep.
They have not yet worked out a compact with state officials, which is required by federal law if they are to have slot machines or roulette.
“We’re not hung up on the public’s idea of what is traditional or not,” the tribal war chief, Vicente Lujan, said.
“Anyone who knows the history of our people at Taos Pueblo knows that we always put our traditions first. We’ve been caretakers of this part of the earth for over a thousand years. As such, we take a very long view of things.”
That long view, he said, may include more than just a casino.
“If gaming can help us become self-sufficient and generate the capital to start other tribal businesses, then it is a good thing,” he said.
“And if we had a few more jobs around here, more of our people could remain at home and take part in our Indian traditions, rather than leave the reservation for jobs in the cities.”
Even before the American Indians announced the casino plan, Taos was a town divided.
David Hundley, an architect who specializes in restoring authentic adobe houses, said there was a “cross-mixing of resentment from wannabe hippies and wannabe yuppies.”
“It’s always the same old story,” he said.
“Once anybody comes in, they want to close the door. The hippie population that moved here 20 or 25 years ago is now doctors, lawyers or real estate agents. They picked up property when it was really, really inexpensive.”
Hundley himself owns a compound near the center of Taos-a 325-year-old main adobe building and two smaller buildings, including one that used to be a chapel, laid out around what was a fortified plaza.
There is only one entrance, and Hundley likes it that way.
“No one else could alter my life style,” he said. “It could be in Spain, it could be in Sweden.”
In fact, getting to Spain or Sweden is easier than getting to Taos. Scheduled airline service on Mesa Airlines was discontinued in 1993, although Chris Wooldridge, a pilot who owns a hotel in Taos Valley, has applied to the FAA for permission to set up his own airline, making flights to and from Albuquerque, N.M. (Flying time: about an hour.)
And the town has proposed lengthening its 5,800-foot-long runway to accommodate airplanes making what are known as crosswind landings.
“I’ve had plenty of people not land” because of strong winds at the airport, said Steve Stanton of Air Taos Inc., which manages the airport under a contract with the town.
“The fear is an expanded airport will generate commercial traffic,” he added.
The airport is adjacent to the Taos Pueblo, and there has been concern about increased trafficover the American Indians’ airspace.
“In my opinion, it will decrease overflights of actual inhabited areas of the pueblo,” Stanton said, “but it will increase flights over noninhabited areas.”
As for Gislimberti and the mushrooms, he has been picking edible fungi since he was a little boy in the Dolomite region of Italy.
“Over there, people consume them like people eat bananas here,” he said.
“You have to buy a license, and the limit is four pounds per person. So you see whole families picking. Everyone’s got their four pounds.”
Gislimberti hunts for mushrooms in the mountains near Taos during the fall.
Like many experts, he is secretive about where he hunts: he will not say exactly where his choicest finds come from.
But he has a reputation for bringing back delicious ones: just last year, the restaurant won an overall excellence award from American Express, and Gislimberti prepared a five-course mushroom tasting for Tavern on the Green in Manhattan and an elaborate meal in Los Angeles, at $160 a person.
Now, though, he is under orders not to serve his beloved mushrooms.
The word came from Tito O. Madrid, the area supervisor for the New Mexico Environment Department, the state agency that conducts health inspections.
Both sides agree that what made the mushroom matter particularly frustrating was a single line in the two-page cease-and-desist letter that Madrid sent Gislimberti in October, the line that said Gislimberti could serve only mushrooms from an approved source.
Both sides also agree that there is no definition of what is an approved source for wild mushrooms.
The approved sources for other kinds of foods can provide invoices, Madrid said, “so if there are problems, we can trace the food back and find out where it came from.”
Madrid said he trusted Gislimberti to pick the right mushrooms in the woods. “But for every good mushroom,” Madrid said, “there’s a look-alike that’s very toxic.”
Gislimberti and his wife, Siobhan, first tried to become an approved source, incorporating themselves as distributors.
They had internationally known chefs vouch for their credentials as experts who could pick and prepare mushrooms without risk.
Now, they have requested a variance from the approved-source regulations, which would let them resume serving the mushrooms while the state draws up new rules.
The problem is, New Mexico has no licensing examination for mushroom-pickers.
“They have a license to go fishing, to go hunting, even to pick pine cones,” Gislimberti said.
“If you buy mushrooms from Italy, Africa or Yugoslavia, they are all gathered the same way.
“People pick the mushrooms, bring them to a factory, the factory makes it into a business and they send the mushrooms to you in a can or frozen or dried. Why not just license us here?”
