For years, if you lived south of the blinking light in Ranchos de Taos, your Sunday afternoon had a hard stop built into it. Ranchos Plaza Grill, the plaza's reliable breakfast-and-lunch spot, pulls its last order around 2 p.m. After that, unless you wanted to drive up NM-68 into town, your options for a sit-down meal with a drink in your own neighborhood were thin. The Trading Post Market stays open until around 8 or 8:30 p.m. most nights, but it's a market, not a place to linger over dinner. The Stakeout has good food and a strong lineup of music on select nights, but it has always functioned as an occasional destination rather than an everyday spot.
That gap closed on May 1, 2026, when Old Martinez Hall reopened at 4140 NM-68, directly across the road from San Francisco de AsÃs Church. The building had sat empty since 2020. What moved back in is worth understanding in some detail, because it changes what a normal Sunday in Ranchos de Taos can actually look like, and it says something about how this particular plaza has always worked.
The gap nobody had to explain to each other
Locals didn't need a news story to know the plaza went quiet after lunch. It was just the shape of the day. You could eat well until early afternoon, browse a gallery or two, and then the options thinned out fast. Ranchos de Taos has never lacked culture or craft. What it lacked, specifically, was a place to sit down after 2 p.m. that belonged to the neighborhood rather than to travelers passing through on their way to somewhere else.
That absence had a history. The hall at 4140 NM-68 is a Pueblo Revival building dating to the early 1900s, and for generations it was where Taoseños actually gathered. It hosted quinceañeras, weddings, and the kind of live band nights that pulled in touring acts because, as longtime accounts of the place note, it was one of the only rooms in the area big enough to hold the crowd. Actors and filmmakers who spent time in Taos, including Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Peter Fonda, were known to pass through it during its heyday. It later became Old Martina's Hall under a different owner, then went dark during the pandemic and stayed empty for roughly six years.
What actually walked back through the door
Jim Long, founder and CEO of Heritage Hotels & Resorts, bought the property in July 2025 and changed the name back to Old Martinez Hall, restoring the original identity the building carried for most of the last century. Long and his wife Rebecca trace their New Mexico roots to the first Spanish settlers who arrived in 1598, and Long has spent two decades building a hotel company, including El Monte Sagrado in Taos, around preserving exactly this kind of property rather than replacing it.
The scale of the place is easy to undersell until you hear the numbers. The building runs over 15,000 square feet, and the dance hall alone holds up to 600 people. That is not a neighborhood bar. It is a room built to hold the whole neighborhood at once, which is closer to what it is actually being used for now. Chef Cristina Martinez, who also runs the kitchen at El Monte Sagrado, oversees the menu and the bar program. The food leans into elevated pub fare with a New Mexican accent: burgers, fish and chips, red chile-dusted fries, frito pie, and biscochitos, backed by a wine, beer, and cocktail list that goes further than what the plaza has had in years.
Long has talked about what reopening the hall meant to him personally, describing a Sunday afternoon at the venue this way:
"This past Sunday I was able to dance with my own 8-year-old granddaughter. That was a wonderful moment for both of us."
That is not marketing language. It is the same room doing the same job it did for a century, just with new hands running it.
The part that is actually new: Sunday afternoons
Here is where the reopening does something the plaza hasn't had in a long time rather than simply restoring what was lost. Old Martinez Hall now runs live music from 2 to 5 p.m. every Sunday, and the programming is not a generic acoustic-guitar-in-the-corner booking. Grammy-winning Taos Pueblo musician Robert Mirabal has been coordinating the lineup, with an explicit goal of keeping traditional New Mexican village music, a blend of polka and ranchera that used to soundtrack weddings and fiestas across the region, from disappearing entirely. On the ground, that has meant afternoons anchored by local performers like Carlos Medina, who plays Norteño-style sets with his group Trio CPR.
That distinction matters if you actually live here. A brewery patio with a cover band is a nice Sunday. A room built in the early 1900s hosting the specific music tradition it hosted in the 1900s, curated by someone with the cultural standing to do it right, is a different thing. It is the plaza recovering a sound it was starting to lose, not importing a new one.
Current hours, as of this reopening, run Friday and Saturday from 3 to 8 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., which gives the Sunday music slot room to breathe on both sides. Whether those hours expand further will likely depend on how steady the crowds are through the fall.
The rest of a day that finally closes the loop
The reason the reopening matters beyond the building itself is what it connects. Ranchos de Taos has never been short on places worth an afternoon. Across the road, San Francisco de AsÃs Mission Church remains a working parish, not a museum piece, built between 1772 and 1816 and still the center of daily life for the families who attend Mass there. Every June, parishioners and volunteers spend two weeks re-plastering the church's exterior with mud and straw by hand, a tradition called the enjarre that keeps the building's famous sculpted buttresses, the ones Georgia O'Keeffe painted and Ansel Adams photographed, intact for another year.
A few steps from the church, Chimayo Trading del Norte occupies nearly 300-year-old adobe buildings on the north side of the plaza. Owner Gabriel Abrums has described Ranchos as one of the last real holdouts of old New Mexico, a plaza where people still live, work, and go to church around the same square. Down the highway, Vargas Tile Company has been a family operation since the early 1960s, now run by sisters Christine Vargas, Vivianna Gonzales, and Patricia Vargas, who moved the business to its current Ranchos de Taos location in 2007. RB Ravens Gallery and Ranchos Antique Furnishings round out the walk, and Taos Drums, a few miles further along, keeps a centuries-old craft tradition running in the same corridor.
None of that changed with the reopening. What changed is that the day no longer has to end at 2 p.m. You can start with breakfast at Ranchos Plaza Grill, spend the middle of the day moving between the church, the tile shop, and the trading post, and land at Old Martinez Hall for dinner and music without ever leaving the plaza or driving into town.
What that fullness actually means if you already live here
This is not a story about a new tourist stop. It is a story about a neighborhood's own daily infrastructure filling back in after roughly six years with a hole in it. The businesses that make Ranchos de Taos worth living in, the church, the trading post, the tile shop, the galleries, were never the problem. The problem was that once the sun moved past midafternoon, there was nowhere new to land. That is now solved, at least on the days the hall is open, and the fact that Sunday specifically got the most deliberate programming says something about what the people running it think this plaza actually wants: not another bar, but its own room back.
If you have watched this corner of Taos County for a while, you already know that Ranchos de Taos moves at its own pace and answers to its own calendar. This is one of those rare changes that fits the place instead of reshaping it.
If you are thinking about what a home in Ranchos de Taos could mean for your own routine, or you are weighing this plaza against others in Taos County, Debbie Friday Jagers has spent her career reading exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Reach out for a free consultation or home valuation, and let's talk about what living here actually looks like day to day.
