On Fourth St. and Barelas Rd. there’s a small stretch of businesses with a long history of Duke City swagger. The Gutierrez family were the original owners of the buildings located at the corner of Fourth and Barelas until Homewise, a nonprofit and developer focused on providing affordable housing, purchased the property in 2020. Venues on the property have previously existed as DIY art spots over the years, including the Small Engine Gallery, the Donkey Gallery, the Normal Gallery, Tan Gallery, the Tannex, Graft Gallery and La Chancla Gallery and Performance Space. Right now, the plaza known as “4th and Barelas” contains The Minnow Performance Space, Alpaca Gallery, FourteenFifteen Gallery, La Michoacana Del Norte Ice Cream and, as of May 2025, its newest neighbor, the Street Food Institute (SFI). On July 26, the plaza will host two community-focused events with art, music and a unique food experience. The SFI will host a pop-up event starting at 9 a.m. with free breakfast, live music and health resources. And beginning at 7 pm., a second party will pop off, creating an all-day space for residents to gather, eat good food, reconnect with old neighbors and bring generations together.
“We envision it as a neighborhood ecosystem where people can get together and come have some food, but there’s also business support,” Emily Birch, Operations Director of the SFI says. “There’s also art galleries nearby, so there are a lot of pieces to this. And the neighborhood itself has a rich history of art and food, and we’re just trying to bring that back to light.”
New Concepts, Old-School Neighbors
On a weekday afternoon you might see a group of Rio Grande High School students whipping up potato salad in the SFI’s spotless new two-million dollar kitchen as part of an internship program, but the aroma of fried chicken permeating the building smells like the recipes have been tweaked over the years and honed to a science. Former students return to the SFI years after moving on to careers in the culinary industry for advice from their old mentors, who are happy to oblige if it means keeping the neighborhood’s food history alive.
The SFI is a nonprofit organization whose main mission is to train food entrepreneurs in starting their own small business. In May, they joined the Barelas neighborhood at their Fourth Street location, but they’re not a new organization by any means. Birch says they were first established in 2013 under a foundation in Santa Fe called the Simon Charitable Foundation. As the program grew and expanded, the SFI spun off to become its own 501 C3 in 2017 and has made a lot of progress in the past few years. Today the SFI offers workforce development training for individuals interested in working in the culinary industry, operates two food trucks and provides catering services for private events. The SFI partners with Homewise to operate its kitchen and plans to open three retail spaces where folks can grab a hot bite to eat by this fall. Birch calls the SFI a social enterprise.
“Although we do some community food truck shifts as well, it’s really part of our training program,” Birch says. “We have a 12-week entrepreneurship class that people can take, and then they can take an internship with us and gain hands-on experience while helping us do our catering gigs.”
Birch says the commissary kitchen is where all food production happens, and then the cooks load up their food trucks and hit the streets. They post up around town in spots such as the Downtown business district and dish out grub to hungry professionals.
“All small food businesses that are not a brick-and-mortar have to operate out of a commissary kitchen per the City of Albuquerque Health Department,” Birch says. “So that’s kind of where we come in. The need for commissary kitchens is in really high demand right now. So this was a perfect opportunity for us to partner with Homewise, open this commissary kitchen and offer a space for entrepreneurs.”
Since its inception, SFI had been a longtime partner with CNM, and the school had a kitchen space available for them to use. Birch says when they found out that the school was going to tear down that outdated building, the partnership with Homewise was born. She says Homewise was interested in developing the Barelas neighborhood and reactivating the space. So it was a perfect opportunity for the development company to put its foot in the game and bring SFI in to run the kitchen.
“We want to sell staple products, and we have a great relationship with the Rail Yards Market, so we want everyone to be able to afford fresh produce as well,” she says. “We’ll have SNAP and EBT available, but also hot grab-and-go foods that we prepare in the commissary kitchen, and then we’ll sell it out of this storefront. So really, the biggest idea with these spaces is to have food in the evenings, because once two o’clock rolls around, everything kind of shuts down, except for fast food in the area.”
Birch says they are constantly trying to build partnerships for events like the pop-up on the 26th. Homewise typically sets up a table, but the SFI also has a partnership with The Lotus Effect, a nonprofit that provides behavioral health services, and Sandia Serenity Wellness, which gives free vitamin B-12 shots to anybody who’d like a boost. She says their student graduates often provide food for their events, too — whether it’s a dessert or some sort of savory option like fried chicken for sandwiches or smoked brisket for street tacos — creating a test market of sorts for their food concepts where they get real-time feedback from people about their products.
Community cooking classes are free, but due to space restrictions they require an RSVP to take those courses. Their comprehensive cooking and entrepreneurship courses are very affordable, and getting into courses at the SFI has a different process than you might be used to in the age of social media, but there’s an important reason for that.
“We’re still trying to kind of keep these programs available to the neighborhood, and then once we kind of get our processes in place and get a feel for how things flow, we’re going to open it up to the public,” she says. “We always ask for people’s contact information at events and reach out to them personally to make sure they’re still good to go for the class. In this neighborhood, that’s really the best way to get in touch with people, because not a lot of people have email or that sort of thing. So we think that face to face contact is really important.”
If you’re interested in taking classes, it’s probably best to come out in person or contact them directly through their website at streetfoodinstitute.org. Right now, they’re keeping it old-school — handing out flyers door-to-door in the neighborhood and working with the Barelas Community Coalition to spread the word — but whether you live in a house in the old Barelas neighborhood or don’t live in a house at all, the SFI wants to feed hungry folks in Burque.
“We also have a partnership with an organization called La Planta, and they’ve generously donated staple food products and produce to us,” Birch says. “So when people come through our space during these events, they can get a bag and take and take food home with them. We’re really trying to feed the community. We try to be as open arms as we can.”
Homewise Is Where the Heart Is
Homewise, the nonprofit that owns the property at Fourth and Barelas, helps people become homeowners through financial education, lending and comprehensive home-ownership services. They also develop housing for low and moderate-income individuals. They purchased the property in 2020 to prevent it from being demolished and helped convert the space into the Street Food Institute’s commercial kitchen. Monica Bencomo, the company’s community development creative manager, says she’s been acquainted with the property since she was in her 20s and used to frequent its DIY spaces long before her company became active in the Community Kitchen project. Given the area’s history and the fact that Homewise had already discussed the possibility of adding affordable housing to the property, the partnership with the SFI was a match made in Heaven.
“At one point there were food businesses there in, like, the 1940s,” she says. “The original owners of the property are the Gutierrez family. They had a restaurant there called El Coronado Cafe and they also had the Coronado Chili Products building. So there was the past history of food, and the more recent history, of course, is the artist community. And so it just made kind of sense.”
Bencomo says the pop-up event on the 26th will be a Barelas neighborhood block party, and the tenants of the 4th and Barelas Plaza will be the hosts. Since the folks at SFI will be headed to an event in Santa Fe after the morning event, Flame Kissed Catering will fire up the equipment in the kitchen later in the day to prepare made-from-scratch sausages for sandwiches on homemade bread. Save extra room for dessert, because Big Ass Cookies will be hooking up the hood with colossal confections. As the SFI heads north, Santa Fe’s DJ Luz Skywalker will be headed south to hit the streets of Barelas with traditional salsa, cumbia, reggaeton and old-school jams to satisfy long-time residents, but she might sneak in some darkwave and rocksteady for the artsy types. Many of the vendors are from the Barelas community, including Fairy Julz who specializes in handmade candles, botanicals, crystals and art.
“All of these vendors are small businesses, and we’re not charging any type of vendor fees, because I want to make it as accessible as possible,” Bencomo says. “It’s giving them a space to sell their work, and it’s just gathering. To me, gathering together is important and building community is very important right now, too.”
Birch says the SFI had to put in work to win over the Barelas residents, many of whom have lived in the area for generations, and it’s paid off. If you know the neighborhood, you know they have each other’s backs, and they’ve been historically resistant to other development projects in recent years. That’s why they want to keep it real with the locals first before expanding their services across the state.
“We have a great relationship with the neighborhood that’s taken time to cultivate, because this is kind of a tight-knit community. They were a little wary of us coming in at first, but we’ve done a lot of work to be accepting and understanding of their needs,” Birch says. “After years of construction, noise and disruptions, our big first main event was just a big, huge neighborhood matanza. We had a big party, and we invited everyone. We had tacos and music, and it was just our way of saying, thank you for putting up with us and being patient.”
For a comprehensive list of vendors and individual posts about block party participants, you should check the 4th and Barelas Instagram page for updates.
Pop-Up on the Plaza
July 26, 9 a.m, 7 p.m.
4th and Barelas Market
1411 Fourth St.
Free