Anyone who has eaten in Red River for a long time remembers two versions of Texas Reds Steakhouse: the two-story landmark that stood at 111 East Main Street, and the bright red restaurant that serves dinner today at 400 East Main Street. When a visitor on our Facebook Page asked whether the current restaurant is "the rebuilt one," the honest answer turned out to be more interesting than a simple yes. The restaurant was indeed brought back after a devastating fire, but it was not rebuilt where it started, and the building it calls home today is far older than the fire that displaced it.
Texas Reds first opened on Thanksgiving Day in 1967 at 111 East Main. It was a two-story presence on Main Street, with its old west saloon at ground level and the dining rooms upstairs. Checkerboard tablecloths, wooden plank floors, peanuts tossed on the floor, and steaks charbroiled in butter made it a Red River institution. According to the New Mexico tourism listing, the name itself came from Texas Red, the nickname of the man who built the building that housed the original restaurant.
On Wednesday, November 3, 2004, the original Texas Reds burned to the ground. Food writer Gil Garduño of the NM Gastronome had eaten there just weeks earlier, on September 24, 2004, and his review still carries the address of the lost restaurant, 111 East Main. The fire ended nearly 37 years of dinners at the original site, and the two-story building was never rebuilt there.
Instead, Texas Reds came back a few blocks east, at 400 East Main Street, inside the Lodge at Red River. As the NM Gastronome puts it, the restaurant rose again, "albeit no longer as a two story monolith on Red River's main street." Diners who remember both rooms sometimes say the new one is simply the relocated one, and that is the accurate way to describe it: the restaurant moved, and the business, the name, and the old west spirit moved with it.
The building it moved into is a landmark in its own right. New Mexico Magazine describes the Lodge at Red River as a 24-room lodge built in the 1940s, and the town's visitor site, redriver.org, notes that the famous Texas Reds Steakhouse and the Lost Love Saloon are located right off the lodge lobby. In other words, the red building in today's photographs predates the 2004 fire by roughly six decades. It is not a replica of the lost original, and it was not built to replace it. It is a historic lodge that gave a displaced restaurant a second home. The fit makes a certain sense: the restaurant's own website lists its operator as D-Bar-D Inc., a name old timers know from the D-Bar-D saloon that became the Motherlode Saloon, just next door at 406 East Main, back in 1975.
Today Texas Reds serves dinner Wednesday through Sunday at the Lodge, with steaks, prime rib, and live music in the Lost Love Saloon beneath its winged red heart sign. So, is this the rebuilt one? It is the same Texas Reds that opened in 1967, rebuilt as a restaurant and a Red River tradition after the fire. The building, though, is the 1940s Lodge at Red River, which was standing on East Main long before the original Texas Reds was lost.