Tender Fire Kitchen’s Temperamental Dough

In 2020, Ben Crosky threw a pizza party at his house with a few friends. It was a casual affair, with a new pizza dough recipe he hadn’t tried out yet and some fresh produce from the farmers market. Reflecting on the night now, sitting on the patio of Tender Fire Kitchen’s well-appointed new brick-and-mortar location in Santa Fe, he laughs. “The pizzas were really, really ugly, and not great,” he says. “But it got me thinking . . . pizza is such a familial, nostalgic, joyful food. Good ingredients with that kind of food is just a really nice combination.”

After that pizza party, Crosky spent several months of lockdown honing the dough recipe and searching out the best ingredients—i.e., flour from Cairnspring Mills in Washington and Mountain Mama in Colorado, canned tomatoes for sauce from Bianco DiNapoli, and herbs from Annie’s Herbs in La Mesilla. It wasn’t long before this hard work landed him in a pizza trailer parked variously at El Rey Court, Tumbleroot Brewery & Distillery, and other Santa Fe locales. In this previous iteration as a pop-up-only pizza kitchen, Tender Fire was in high demand, and for many good reasons: the chewy, Neapolitan-style crust, the use of high-quality ingredients, and most especially the fermented dough.

Corn bread baking in the wood-fired pizza oven.

Since that very first party, the pizza dough at Tender Fire Kitchen has been 100 percent sourdough—leavened entirely with sourdough starter, no supplementary commercial yeast added (as is the case with many grocery store sourdough breads and pizza doughs). Crosky’s dough is fermented for three days, which makes for a crust that tastes, well, distinctly like sourdough: sour, tangy, alive.

The downside of sourdough? According to Crosky, it’s uniquely temperamental. “Every single day the dough is different, no matter how precise we are, and that’s just because it’s a live culture. Sure, there’s a lot of variables, including hand temperature, humidity, whatever, the nuance of balling dough. Sure, each person does it a little differently. Our air conditioning went out the other day in the back room, and it was blasting heat . . . our dough that week obviously was super affected by that.”

Though Crosky loved running Tender Fire out of the trailer, as a business model it was necessarily seasonal and weather dependent. Come winter, he and his team stashed the trailer and parted ways until the following spring. “I had to start over every year, and you know, in some sense that’s the dream—but that dream only lasted until time ran out, basically. And so the question became ‘Do you keep doing that, or do you expand, or try something else?’”

As far as his customers were concerned, the answer was an easy one: Increasingly, each time he and his trailer popped up at an event, people asked him when the brick and mortar was coming. Still, it took him a while to commit to that jump. After all, he’d never run a restaurant. But, says Crosky, “I’m really grateful that it took like three years to do it, because I had enough time to decide if I really wanted to do it.”

By the time he decided that yes, he did want to do it, the stars were already aligning. A friend connected him to Phillip Gesue, one of the developers behind Aspect Media Village, located where the Santa Fe University of Art and Design campus once was. The current Tender Fire Kitchen building was once the school’s fitness center—there are still, in fact, squash courts in the back. In March 2026, after a long run-up of construction and remodeling—and continually bailing out the front of the property, which had a tendency to become a mud pit after it rained—Tender Fire Kitchen had its opening night.

Now, a pizza oven radiates behind the bar at the former fitness center, while cooks and servers bustle past with pizzas—a beautiful margherita, a soppressata with hot honey and artichokes, and a mushroom pie topped with house-made chulo, an herby green sauce similar to zhoug. With the help of Vanessa Nemec, Tender Fire’s general manager, the space has become a beautiful, light-filled dining room with high ceilings and plants tucked into the corners, where a date night becomes instantly memorable. Todd Walker, the bar manager, has created a lineup that includes plenty of natural wine and, for the warmer months, a list of spritzes. And the team keeps growing: Tender Fire has brought on a head chef, pastry chef, and morning head chef in recent months. They soft launched their breakfast service the last week of July, and have plans to add a whole non-pizza component to the dinner menu as well. The breakfast menu leans savory and wholesome—think veggie strata (i.e., breakfast casserole), Turkish eggs, and a breakfast salad.

The head chef newly on board is Jessie Schumann, who was previously sous-chef and then executive chef at Arroyo Vino. Schumann has their own passion for fermentation—one that’s extended beyond the restaurant kitchens they’ve worked in to become at-home experiments. “I literally have fifteen pounds of koji sitting at my house right now,” they say. “I’m that person.” Recent creations have included peanut miso and sourdough ice cream, just to name a couple.

Beyond all the newest transformations at Tender Fire, though, there’s also been a return to form in the months since the restaurant opened: In June, Crosky dusted off the trailer to once again serve pizzas at El Rey Court on Sundays. “It’s kind of a nod to the original fans,” Nemec says.

“Not to overdo the metaphor,” Crosky says, “but I feel like we’re still sort of in the autolyze part of the opening—which is like the hydrating part, where you mix the flour and the water together. And then pretty soon we’re gonna add some salt, and start kneading.”

1025 Midtown Calle Central, Santa Fe, tenderfirekitchen.com