Mexico at home 🍽

Sonora's Prime Carniceria & Taco Shop exudes authenticity and approachability on the Northeast side

Sonora’s butcher counter and mini retail market is near the Banning Lewis Ranch developments in Northeast Colorado Springs. Photos by Matthew Schniper.

Where to start? The paleta with the whole Oreo encased in it? The michelada to-go kits that await your favorite Mexican lager at home? Or the Choripollo entrée?

Eh, let’s set the stage first. We’re at Sonora's Prime Carniceria & Taco Shop at the intersection of Barnes and Marksheffel roads. It’s the storefront that was for a brief stint, starting in 2017, The Collective, taken over in 2019 by Happy Belly Tacos. (That was just before the pandemic and subsequent contraction of Chef Mark Henry and partnering restaurateurs Sean and Inez Fitzgerald’s restaurant holdings.) Today, the spot’s an extension of a Mexican enterprise with two locations in Pueblo and one in Tucson, Arizona. This Springs eatery and market grand opened a year ago, almost to the day, on June 19, 2022.

A scroll back through its active Facebook page and other social media and online reviews shows that Sonora’s has been quite well received by the fast-developing Northeast C. Springs community and patrons from other parts of town. It’s steadily busy on the Saturday afternoon we drop by, both with deli and market business and restaurant traffic.

From a somewhat large menu that includes apps, burritos, tacos, tortas, enchiladas, combos and quesadillas, we order a couple dishes at the back counter to share, mindfully saving room for dessert. We peruse the front retail area before settling at a community table to dine. The patio’s rained out this day, so we enjoy the unique experience of seating ourselves amongst shoppers, who pluck fresh produce (cilantro, onions, peppers) from a long cooler behind us. It and another whole refrigerator are stocked with a wide drink array: everything from Clamato to the super sugary Fantas, Jumex juices and flavored coconut waters.

Sonora’s Choripollo takes grilled chicken adobado and tops it with chorizo and queso for a rather rich bite.

We begin dining on our first dish to arrive, the Choripollo. That’s a portmanteau for chicken and chorizo, and to make matters more complex, they’re jointly sauced with a thin but hearty queso sauce. The grilled chicken’s generous chile seasoning sets the underlying flavor profile, earthy and scantly spicy, blending seamlessly with the homemade chorizo’s zesty character. The house queso makes it eat more like nap-inducing comfort food, with rice and beans (which rate only basic) adding a side of starch and a small salad and loose guacamole scoop lending fresh vegetal relief. Diced fresh jalapeños as salad garnish offer the most heat on the plate, and with included tortillas (we choose corn) we construct our own napkin-slaying tacos. We’re having fun.

Next comes a big bowl of tortilla soup, from an “authentic Mexican recipe,” fitting for the overcast day. Its chicken broth appears thin and translucent, almost a true consommé, with a mild flavor that inspires me to hit Sonora’s tiny salsa bar (at the store’s rear, adjacent to the restaurant ordering counter) in search of enlivening elements. Otherwise, the soup’s stocked with ample, soft pulled chicken threads, sogged and submerged tortilla strips, sunken avocado wedges, a stringy cheese goo on the bowl’s bottom and bits of diced tomato floating atop. I add fresh chopped cilantro and white onions, dried oregano and squeezes of lime and I crumble a single dried chile de árbol in search of spiciness. All in, it’s a pleasing soup experience for $11.99, and we take more than half of it home, full from the Choripollo.

Tortilla soup before I dress it up with salsa bar fixings.

I should note that I also grab some mild-to-medium spicy salsas, a verde and a rojo, from the back bar to make our tacos with. They’re both bright and piquant, with necessary acidity to help cut through the chorizo-queso fat combo.

After finishing what we comfortably can of those two main items, we ponder one of the homemade desserts, especially the tres leches but also the chocoflan. They look wonderful based on photos that appear in a slideshow on a large TV monitor next to the digital menus (above the ordering counter). We’re also tempted by a drink called Cafe de Olla, described as traditional Mexican coffee prepped with cinnamon, cloves and star anise, sweetened by piloncillo (raw, unrefined sugar). But they’re out of that drink this day, and we decide to leave the desserts for a future visit — a lure, a reason to return with backup. (Read: my girlfriend’s teenagers, one of whom I lovingly, and not without reason, nicknamed “sugar dumpster” at one point during the pandemic.)

That decision frees us to raid a paleta display we’ve been eyeing, which has a large-print sign over it advertising the locally made, Michoacán-style ice cream bars and ice pops. “Hecho a mano en Denver” it reads, “Paletas Michoacánas Artesenales.” The slick-branded company behind the cold magic is Chupacabra. Yes, the “goat-sucker” creature of lore, slayer of livestock, blood-drinking beast that you shouldn’t think about when camping in the dessert and you have to leave the tent to pee in the middle of the night. (When all monsters strike, as we know.) That Chupacabra — except delightful paletas that ironically I want to suck on, instead. I see what they did there.

The paleta cooler and our choice of pistachio and cookies & cream.

Now we’re presented with a new dilemma: which flavors to get? Everything looks amazing, even the chicle (bubble gum) which I’d never typically be attracted to. Big slices of strawberry and kiwi make a mixed fruit bar quite alluring. But oh the Mexican chocolate! An employee tells us the strawberry cheesecake’s her favorite, that she eats one daily. Damn. It’s no easy decision, but we finally settle on the bright green pistachio pop and Oreo pop because we’re suckers for that whole Oreo cookie suspended in the cream like Han Solo in carbonite. (But less tortured looking.)

Maybe just because we’re overly stimulated by all the color and our frozen sugar fix, but for some reason that Oreo tastes more brilliant than it should, or usually would. It’s a joy to tooth into. The pistachio too holds a textual treat with bits of the seeds flecked throughout the form. We’re happy with our choices, of course not knowing what we missed with the others.

Later, at home, we make use of a couple michelada to-go kits we purchase from the retail market for $3.99 each. They’re Salsa Sinaloa-brand Michevasos, composed of a plastic pint cup with a spice packet and tiny glass jar of syrupy flavoring mix. All you need to do is open them up, pour ‘em in the cup and add your preferred cerveza. We try out Trader Joe’s surprisingly decent, Trader José Mexican lager with a mango tamarindo flavor michelada mix and a mango habanero one. Both sip sweet (due to 20 grams of sugar in the thick mixes) but balanced enough by the beer’s body and tart, spicy medley of lime, chiles and salt from the spice packs. Despite the environmental cost of additional packaging and overall upcharge for convenience, the kit does make for an amusing assembly or an easy car-camping drink in the woods I imagine.

Make a michelada at home with this kit and your choice of beer.

Anyway, rolling back the timeline to when we were still in-market at Sonora’s: We do some people watching as we dine and I ask a couple folks who appear to be regulars what they think of the place. One couple, with a pair of young kids in tow, sounds enthusiastic about their pickup order to which they’re adding sauces and fixings from the salsa bar. The mom, sweet as can be, mentions that she loves the “beer-ear-ee-ya,” clearly referring to the birria, but with an extra vowel thrown in, so that it kind of slant rhymes with “diarrhea.”

We politely don’t correct her or snicker, and let the moment pass gracefully. But it does provide us the context to put a framework around Sonora’s to distinguish it from the many other carnicerias in town. Simply put, it’s much more gringo-friendly and approachable. Sure, there’s several Hispanic patrons who speak to Sonora’s staff in Spanish during our visit, but there’s a higher count of gringos who appear more in-the-know and cozy-comfy among these shelves of imported snack foods — partly lit by the pink glow emanating from the shiny-clean butcher counter, with overhead piñatas far out of the reach of pesky toddlers.

I can’t say I’ve ever seen as many random white people (myself included, ahem) when I’ve shopped at Carniceria Leonella, or Luna Market or anywhere else. That could easily be the demographic on this side of the Springs, but Sonora’s seems to have modernized the carniceria/mercado/restaurante experience (with touches like those digital screens, shiny epoxy floors, big faux marble tiles and an American convenience store retail vibe) in a unique way that still feels authentic to Mexico and its culture. This is the gateway grocery store: Shop here, get hooked, and soon you’ll be seeking out tripe tacos and handfuls of dried chile pepper varietals in the far corners of Southeast Colorado Springs, home to the legit shit.

In that way, Sonora’s proves to be much more than a carniceria and restaurant; it’s an ambassador.