The strip mall at 851 Cerrillos Road does not announce itself. No marquee, no queue snaking past the parking lot. You pull in off one of Santa Fe's busiest commercial corridors, walk maybe thirty feet, and reach two of the most specific food shops in the city. Both belong to the same couple. The story of how that happened involves a road trip, a closed donut shop, and the kind of offhand remark that accidentally becomes a life.
Jeff and Kari Keenan opened The ChocolateSmith at 851A in 2005. Kari describes her entry into the craft the way you might describe a minor accident: she "literally fell into chocolate." That is not false modesty, it is the thing that makes the shop feel so genuine. This was not a calculated lifestyle pivot. It was curiosity that compounded into expertise, and twenty years in, the case in that green-walled room reflects it.
The ChocolateSmith makes hand-dipped dark chocolate with New Mexico green chile, red chile pistachios, and piñons. The red and green chile barks sit beside salted caramels and something called the Pocket Pâté, which looks exactly as interesting as it sounds. The New Mexico sourcing is not a marketing angle, it is the whole point. The chile heat on the dark chocolate arrives a beat after the sweetness, which is how it should work. Leave with the green chile bar alone and you have made a fine choice. Leave with the chile bark too, and you have made a better one.
The Whoo's Donuts origin story is accidental and completely convincing in hindsight. Jeff and Kari were driving to Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque when they noticed that Kip's Donuts had closed. Kari said, out loud, that somebody ought to open a donut shop. "I didn't know at the time it was going to be us," she has said. When the beauty salon next door to The ChocolateSmith vacated 851B, the Keenans took the space and opened Whoo's in 2011.
Inside Whoo's, a reclaimed-wood sunburst anchors the wall behind the counter, the case is full, and a big red clock on the wall functions as a quiet warning: get here before the best ones sell out. In 2023, Tasting Table named Whoo's one of the 12 best donut shops in America, a designation that sounds improbable for a strip mall unit on Cerrillos Road until you eat the donuts, at which point it sounds obvious.
The best seller is the Blue Corn Blueberry Lavender: a blue corn cake donut with a blueberry lavender glaze. The blue corn gives the crumb a denser, earthier character than a standard cake donut, and the glaze is floral without being perfume. It tastes like something that could only come from here. Whoo's also makes a green chile apple fritter, not a novelty, just good cooking with local ingredients. The Keenans run the same playbook next door; the address just happens to be different.
What holds the two shops together is not a brand. They are two accumulations of a specific curiosity, built incrementally on the same strip of Cerrillos because the Keenans kept saying yes to the next obvious thing. That is not a business strategy. It is a disposition, and in Santa Fe, it turns out to be a competitive advantage.
You can read the whole arc in the address: 851A, then 851B, same building, same couple, twenty years of saying yes. The Railyard Farmers Market gets the Saturday press. El Chile Toreado gets the burrito pilgrims. This parking lot on Cerrillos gets the people who know, and increasingly, the people who got the Tasting Table tip and showed up at 7 am to test it.
Whoo's opens daily at 7 am. The ChocolateSmith opens Monday through Saturday at 10 am. Go to Whoo's first, The ChocolateSmith second. The parking lot fits both, and the gap between closing the donut box and opening the chocolate case is just long enough to feel like a plan.
Kari Keenan said she didn't know it was going to be her. How many other things in this city are quietly waiting for someone to say the obvious thing out loud?