ALAMOSA • Denise Vigil would rather tend to other things — inventory, payroll, food prep, etc. — than check social media. But checking social media also comes with running a restaurant.

One day this spring, Vigil was checking The Friar’s Fork Instagram when she came by a message from a local customer. It was a note of congratulations on the James Beard Foundation, the culinary Oscars, naming The Friar’s Fork a semifinalist for America’s best new restaurant.

“Somebody is lying to you,” Vigil recalls thinking.

Vigil wasn’t the only one who had to scan the semifinalist list twice. Foodies across the nation did a double take.

Nominees included New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore. …

… Alamosa, Colorado.

“It was a little bit surreal,” Vigil says.

Soon after the announcement, The Friar’s Fork website showed traffic from people around the globe. The reservation list suddenly grew with out-of-state visitors.

“Everybody I think was interested … like, what, Alamosa?” Vigil says. “I mean, even people in Colorado don’t all know where Alamosa is.”

Alamosa is in the heart of the San Luis Valley, an isolated place between farms and desert and mountains and sand dunes. This is Vigil’s hometown.

In 2021, along Fourth Street, she came by a historic, abandoned church of Mission Revival architecture: stucco walls, curving parapets, arching windows of stained glass. This is where Vigil, 51, would open her one and only restaurant after a long, winding career in much bigger cities and resort destinations.

After three decades of cooking for the rich and famous, Vigil would cook for the rural, blue-collar people of her town widely unfamiliar with fine dining.

However fine, The Friar’s Fork can’t quite be called fancy. Vigil would not want that. She wears a red T-shirt like the rest of her staff; approachable is the aim.

Her approach to The Friar’s Fork upon opening last year: “I’m gonna take it way down. I’m not gonna be plating stuff with tweezers anymore. I’m gonna go really simple. Simple but good.”

Simple but good — that’s the braised lamb shank, which falls off the bone and melts in the mouth with herbed polenta. The menu skews Italian, with classics everybody knows: spaghetti, lasagna, chicken parmesan.

Not everyone knows the kind of flavors that can be achieved by a highly trained chef. The difference is in the sauces and in the patience behind that lamb shank, which stews for 12 hours before reaching tables.

Vigil is quick to downplay any magic. “It’s pretty basic,” she says.

It’s not all local ingredients, she’s sorry to say. Ingredients are far from the exotic she came to know in her career out of culinary school in New York. Such ingredients would threaten prices she seeks to maintain; she’s heard one too many local complaints already about $16 spaghetti.

On the topic of anything more elevated, the workforce must also be considered.

“We’re in Alamosa,” Vigil says. “While I love our crew, we’re dealing with what our local talent pool has to offer.”

When she opened last year, she hired mostly young people who mostly never worked in the industry. One for the kitchen had previous experience at Jimmy John’s.

Next door to the former parish hall where people dine today is The Sanctuary that Vigil transformed into a speakeasy-style bar. The bar manager is responsible for crafting upscale cocktails.

The bar manager just turned 21. He is a friend of Vigil’s daughter.

All that matters to Vigil: “They give their heart. They pay attention to what they’re doing, and they’re required to be proud of what they’re doing.”

It paid off with the James Beard recognition. Judges dine undercover across the country to find nominees.

That’s what representatives for the foundation explained in interviews regarding the surprise Friar’s Fork. They also explained the mission to diversify, not only when it came to race and gender but also in terms of geography. (The Friar’s Fork did not advance past the semifinalist round.)

As a woman all too aware of male-dominated kitchens and the industry’s unweighted focus on major metros, Vigil appreciated the nomination. There was something else she felt.

“I felt like I was back at that level of high pressure, high stress, like you have to perform at a top, top level,” she says. “This wasn’t supposed to be that.”

•••

Following a life in high cuisine and high-octane kitchens, The Friar’s Fork, she says, was supposed to be “a different page out of a different book.”

Vigil’s culinary story starts in the 1990s at Colorado State University, where she increasingly felt uneasy about her English major.

“I know this sounds super crazy,” she says, “but I started feeling really introspective and meditating and praying. Like, what am I gonna do? And I literally just had a dream, like this really intense dream.”

In it, she was cooking. And so she followed the dream.

She left college to find herself in the graces of a French-trained chef who happened to cook at a ranch close to Alamosa. That’s where Vigil learned how to hold a knife among other basics. She picked flowers and herbs out a back door to be used in recipes.

Her education continued in New Mexico at Santa Fe’s acclaimed Coyote Cafe. There she worked under Mark Miller, the first James Beard Award-winning chef whose tutelage she sought.

She then went to New York, a move that startled friends and family back home. “It was like I was announcing I was half lizard people,” Vigil says.

She forged ahead, drawn to this world of science and sacrifice. She found comfort in the chaos, the shouting and the stove heat, hot as the competition around her, and the long hours and the little pay. She bounced around high-profile kitchens, from Sundance in Utah to Aspen to another James Beard Award-winning boss in Portland.

In 2003, everything came to “a screeching halt.”

•••

Her daughter was born. A divorce followed. Those kitchens and late nights were no place for a single mom, she thought.

“It was hard, because it was what I spent my whole life training for,” she says. “I got to that level only working for celebrities and billionaires this whole time, and now what?”

She joined Starbucks, helping the company’s expansion in Colorado. For seven years, she felt out of place, less than herself.

Then the opportunity arose to cook for Louis Bacon and esteemed guests of his ranch in the San Luis Valley. Vigil married a maintenance man she met at the ranch.

“Tough,” is how Nelson Vialpando came to see Vigil. “Very tough. She’s just set in her ways.”

And so he wasn’t surprised when her relentless ambition took her to the abandoned church on Fourth Street.

Raising a child was a proud accomplishment. But all along for Vigil, perhaps another pride tugged.

“You always wonder if this is what you’re supposed to be doing. Are you competitive enough? Is what you’re doing valid? Does what you’re doing matter to anybody?” she says. “Is there more?”

Vigil’s daughter was grown and off to college. Now Vigil could attempt something she never thought she’d attempt: As crazy as kitchens could be, running them seemed even crazier.

It seemed crazy enough cooking back home in Alamosa — “the last thing that I was expecting,” Vigil says.

Or maybe the James Beard nomination was the last thing.

“That was a dream for her,” Vialpando says.

But there was little time for celebrating.

For Vigil, as ever, there was work to be done.