The next day, we walked the trails on Boston Hill in town, starting behind old cottages and winding up past the long-abandoned silver mines that gave the city its name. In the wilderness at the top, we rested on an incongruous turquoise blue bench. Below us, Silver’s core looked tidy and timeless. The town founders were determined to make a lasting place, unlike other slapdash mining camps. So up rose grand limestone, brick and cast-iron edifices. They weathered the crash of the silver market, two flash floods and the collapse of downtown commerce that beset so many small American towns. Now that sturdy shell fosters creativity — including our next meals.

Like Mr. Politte, Rob Connoley of the Curious Kumquat also has an educational mission — and perhaps a more challenging one. He’s crazy for molecular gastronomy. Even in a food-centric town like this one, it was a stretch when he first expanded in 2009, from soup-and-sandwich lunches to multicourse tasting dinners. But Mr. Connoley’s background is in nonprofit community organizations, so he anchored the flavored lip balms and foams with local organic produce, foraged native herbs and pork raised by 4-H kids.

It also helps that his restaurant is set in a converted cottage. The periwinkle-blue dining room conveys an air of homey familiarity even to a concoction like the third course of my tasting meal: an acorn-flour financier, both sweet and earthy, topped with a dainty quail egg.

Mr. Connoley runs a one-man kitchen, yet he still found time for a tableside flourish, pouring boiling pho broth over a rosette of paper-thin slices of rabbit loin. The scent of star anise bloomed, turning the heads of the couple at the next table, who were visiting from Los Angeles.

Our third night was at Shevek & Co. The chef, Shevek Barnhart, grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and, despite 13 years in Silver, still speaks pure New Yawkese. Few moments in my travels have been as happily disorienting as on a previous visit, when I stood on the silent sidewalk after closing time with Mr. Barnhart, Mr. Hellman of Alotta Gelato and his wife, Starr Belsky, deep in food-geek talk about 19th-century French cookbooks.

At 18, Mr. Barnhart backpacked around the Mediterranean, and in the four decades since, he has woven together those culinary threads — Provence, Greece, Lebanon and Morocco all meet on his multipage menu, which includes wine pairings for every dish. My mother whimpered at its breadth, as she had begun to protest our forced march of meals. But a reasonable “tapas”-size portion of the Moroccan date-and-orange salad revived her, and by the end, she was a willing participant in my saffron-laced fig pudding. We sat, full and happy, in the room’s buzz of conversation bouncing off the walls lined with wine bottles.

The one break we took from dining was to shop, but that quickly proved overwhelming too. On the main downtown avenue, Bullard Street, flat awnings shield the storefronts — a mix of galleries, cafes and secondhand shops — from the New Mexico sun. We spent an hour in a vintage store with hundreds of hats, and the antiques vendor Clementine Mercantile had the hi-fi of my dreams, a radio with Lucite knobs in a Silver-City-built Art Deco cabinet.