SUN Staff Report
While local Denver Bronco fans mourn the team’s blowout loss in Sunday’s Super Bowl, Northern New Mexico residents will have something else to cheer about at another major sporting event very soon.
Both Española’s Stop and Eat Drive-In and Abiquiú’s Ghost Ranch will be featured in a 90-second Coca-Cola commercial played during the Winter Olympics opening ceremony on Friday.
The commercial depicts people of various cultures, ethnicities and races participating in everyday activities, while children sing “America, the Beautiful” in different languages, including English, Spanish and Keres.
Stop and Eat’s sole appearance occurs at the four-second mark and shows icicles melting from the restaurant’s overhang, before an RV pulls up to the parking lot. Ghost Ranch appears at the two, 24 and 56-second marks and depicts children traveling to the ranch and camping.
A 60-second version of the commercial played during the Super Bowl featured Ghost Ranch but not Stop and Eat. The 90-second commercial is currently available on YouTube.
Stop and Eat owner Gerald Martinez said business and support from the community has picked up since the video was posted on the Internet.
“It’s amazing the response we’re getting,” he said.
Martinez said a Coca-Cola site manager approached him two weeks before Thanksgiving and asked Martinez if he would be interested in being featured in a national commercial. When Martinez asked the site manager why she picked Stop and Eat, she said she grew up in Albuquerque and remembered Stop and Eat from her childhood visits to Northern New Mexico.
For Martinez, including Stop and Eat in a Coca-Cola commercial about America was a no-brainer.
“It just gives off that classic look and we’ve sold Coca-Cola since we opened in 1967,” he said.
Many community members reached out in appreciation of the commercial through Facebook.
“I saw this as a beautiful example of the diversity that makes us and has always made us a remarkable country,” Joyce Dawson Davidson wrote on Ghost Ranch’s Facebook page. “I’m proud of Ghost Ranch for being a small part of that beautiful message.”