Supermercados flourish in LV

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, March 7, 2001 | 9:54 a.m.

A visit to a supermarket geared to a Hispanic clientele is a fascinating cultural encounter filled with tempting sights, sounds and smells. Las Vegas is dotted with such places, located mostly on the north and east sides of the city, where the majority of our Spanish-speaking population resides.

The city also has dozens of mom-and-pop Hispanic grocery stores, too, as well as butcher shops known as carnicerias. But the focus here is on super- mercados, Spanish for supermarkets. These giant stores often serve as meeting and eating places for locals, where it is possible to take care of almost any food need in one stop.

Los Compadres Meat Market 4381 E. Stewart Ave.

This could be the city's brightest, cheeriest Hispanic market, a spotless place filled with colorful produce spilling from plastic bins. It is also home to one of Las Vegas most extensive Latino bakeries. Lively salsa music plays on overhead speakers. The meat counter offers fresh Mexican cheese and honeys for tasting, with accompanying tortilla chips and sweet biscuits.

Ripe avocados are 69 cents each and the incendiary habanero chile, reputed to be the worlds hottest pepper, is $1.99 per pound. There is a meat department where nice cuts of meat such as flank steak are sold for $1.69 per pound. A variety of ready-to-eat Mexican sausages, including chorizo and longaniza, hang from overhead racks.

Mesquite charcoal is sold in 8-pound bags for $2.99. You also find a wide variety of seafood at a nicely maintained fish counter. Crawfish are $2.99 per pound, shrimp $4.99 and up, sold by count.

At the bakery counter, or panaderia, the selection of Mexican breads and cakes is the equal of any in town. All are made fresh daily on the premises.

You can also have a sit-down meal in the market cafeteria, where foods are served from a steam table. Steak, breaded fish and roast pork are just three of the delicacies served daily on giant platters, accompanied by Mexican rice and black or refried beans for $4.99.

King Ranch 810 N. Decatur Blvd.

Perhaps those unfamiliar with Hispanic markets will find this place a bit more accessible. Signs are in both English and Spanish, and the market is set up to be a crossover place to shop. The center aisles, for example, where dry goods and household products are sold, look the same as aisles in a Smith's or Vons.

But a closer look reveals this market's true colors. Above the beer cooler, for instance, are colorfully decorative, hand-painted ceramic crocks. And one aisle is devoted to exotic imported products from all over the Spanish-speaking world. Here you can buy the champagne flavored, non-alcoholic soda La Colombiana, for $4.29 a six-pack, or even chimichurri, an herb and garlic sauce for beef from Argentina, for $3.49 a jar.

You'll also find great bargains at King Ranch. The store sells its own corn tortillas at under one dollar for a pack of 50, and a cast iron skillet called a comal, for $5.99, to heat them on. Two-hundred gram (about 7-ounce) jars of freeze-dried Nescafe are $2.99, a very low price. In the meat department, where all cuts are posted in two languages, there are also gorgeous rotisserie chickens, dusted with the store's special spices, for $4.99 each.

The market is part of a California-based chain and owns many of the farms where the produce is grown, so the fruits and vegetables are very reasonable. On the way out, grab a wheel of Mexican sesame, peanut or pumpkin-seed brittle, 3 ounces for only 99 cents.

La Bonita 2405 E. Ogden Ave.

The first thing you'll notice coming through the automatic front doors is a huge display of brightly colored, paper-mache pinatas perched on top of a giant food case. On top of other cases are vaporerias, enormous, 35-quart metal pots typically used for steaming foods or making cauldrons of soup, sold for $26.99.

The meat department is really large here, and there are attractive-looking things to buy in it, such as marinated, cubed beef, onions and peppers for making fajitas, $2.99 per pound, whole Cornish game hens, called cordonices here, $1.69 each, and flat, breaded, ready-to-fry beef filets known as milanesa in Spanish. This is also one of the only places in the city to buy various cuts of chivo, or kid.

In the produce department, there are ripe navel oranges, 5 pounds for 99 cents, and wonderful looking Mexican papayas, two pounds for 99 cents, plus much, much more.

Just past the fruits and veggies, there is a revolving metal gate leading to an attached dining room furnished with both booths and tables. Freshly made tamales are $1.50 each, Mexican sandwiches called tortas with a choice of meats are $3.49, and a number of different-style tacos are offered. The food is all delicious.

Supermercado Del Pueblo 1000 N. Rancho Drive

The aisles are crammed and the market is less tidy than the others discussed above, but there are usually a few good reasons for a trip here. One day last week Haas avocados, sitting in an enormous bin by the front entrance, were three for 98 cents, an unbelievable price, and a 5-ounce bottle of El Tapatio hot sauce, only 38 cents.

There is also a fine selection of dried, packaged chiles for the home cook, and good produce, such as yucca, a low 69 cents per pound, and nopales, a type of edible cactus, 98 cents for two pounds.

But both carnitas, Mexican roast pork, and roasted chicken legs, sitting under a heat lamp, looked frazzled. And the sight of a check-cashing service placed directly in front of a crowded bank of slot machines is just not as happy an image as you'll take from the other three markets.