‘A super mix of cultures’: How a Mexican-inspired cafe is becoming a sweet west-side gathering place

Just after 1 p.m. on a weekday, Azúcar Café was buzzing as a sudden wave of coffee-starved customers arrived.

Behind the counter, where Mexican sweet bread sits next to guava tarts and dulce de leche-filled alfajores from South America, Azúcar’s baristas operate in sync as a rush of orders come in for horchata latte and salsa verde chilaquiles.

The sounds and smells inside Azúcar — from whiffs of cinnamon-infused coffee to the background hum of reggaeton or ranchera music — remind co-owners Frida Guerrero and Andres Sanchez of a loved one’s home.

“Anytime you go to a relative’s house in the Latino culture, there’s going to be pan dulce and there’s gonna be café,” said Sanchez, 29. “That’s how everybody gets together. That’s how you make community.”

Coffee at these gatherings, added Guerrero, 27, “just tastes a little sweeter.”

Azúcar Café, located at 2843 S. 5600 West, joined the West Valley scene more than three years ago, bringing Mexican-inspired drinks and goods to the western edge of Salt Lake County’s west side.

The café, sandwiched between coffee chains and fast food joints, has brought more than delicious Mexican-inspired delicacies. It’s become a space, Guerrero said, where Latinos and west siders can feel represented.

“You feel like … you’re home,” said Kayla Duran, a recent customer at Azúcar, adding that the cafe reminded her of when she was little and growing up with Mexican culture in Magna. “It takes you back in a good way — in a delicious way.”

‘Betting on ourselves’

For Guerrero and Sanchez, food is in their blood.

For Sanchez, it was seeing his grandma make handmade tortillas for upcoming catering events. Late nights for Guerrero, on the other hand, were set aside to prepare ingredients for her mom’s side business as a tamalera.

Even their first outings as a couple were spent distributing — in Spanish, “repartiendo” — the Guerrero family’s salsa-filled tamales across Salt Lake County and Park City on early weekend mornings.

Food, Sanchez said, kept a “roof over our heads.”

But while growing up with food, opening Azúcar wasn’t a path that Sanchez or Guerrero — or their immigrant parents — initially envisioned.

“I wanted to see something that represented me more,” said Sanchez, who left his corporate nine-to-five to start Azúcar with Guerrero. “Taking the risk, I had the goal in the back of my head that I was going to make an impact.”

“Not only are [we] breaking generational cycles, in terms of betting on ourselves, on our creativity,” said Guerrero, whose initial plan was to become an immigration or human rights lawyer. “[But] by entering this new space, … we’re breaking through.”

Today, the two spend their Saturdays at Azúcar. Guerrero pulls shot after shot of espressos that leave stains on her hands. Sanchez, at the cafe’s register, expertly makes small talk with customers as they wait for their drinks.

Each member of the Azcúar team has their strengths, Guerrero said. Her element is with her creativity — crafting the shop’s drinks and merchandise as its creative director.

The Gansito latte — a mocha that plays off the strawberry and crème notes of the Mexican snack cake — was the first drink Guerrero made for Azúcar Cafe.

The treat is also one of Guerrero’s favorites. She said she developed her taste for the sweet from her mother, because Gansitos were her mom’s craving, or “antojo,” during her pregnancy with her daughter.

“Most of these drinks are made based off of what I like in my small world,” Guerrero said, laughing as she looked at Azúcar’s menu. Other drinks play off her experience, she said — like the Azúcar cappuccino (a vanilla soy, Guerrero’s “consistent coffee order”) and the tiramisu latte (which Guerrero’s mom “always orders” when out to eat).

“Everything,” Guerrero said, “might not be Mexican, but I’m Mexican and it’s within my Mexican experience.”

It’s a “chicano” twist, another barista said as she passed Guerrero in Azúcar’s back of house kitchen.

“It’s hard not to ingrain our culture into things,” Guerrero said, while continuing to stir a hot steel pot of cafe de olla, a Mexican coffee spiced with cinnamon and piloncillo (unrefined cane sugar similar in taste to brown sugar). Cafe de olla is traditionally served warm, but Azúcar also serves it cold — iced, with a layered top of vanilla cold foam.

For Yasmine Ruiz, a shop regular who was raised in West Valley City, Azúcar is a personification of her identity as a Mexican American.

“Our culture is being represented,” said Ruiz, 27. “It’s not 100% authentic. But it’s combining the two things that we like — American breakfast [and] coffee — and combining that with Mexican food.”

“That’s the vibe I got,” said Duran, who accompanied Ruiz at Azcúar for the first time. “It’s like a super mix of two cultures.”

Making the west side ‘a little sweeter’

“The Azúcar girls,” as Guerrero calls her all-women barista team, have gotten to know the small “web” of Utah.

From first dates (and ensuing breakups) to study hangouts and birthday celebrations, barista Jade Mulato said she has seen Azcúar become a “third space,” especially for West Valley Latinos.

“It’s brought something to West Valley that you never really saw,” said Mulato. Born and raised in the west side suburb, Mulato said Azcúar brought “something local” to West Valley’s commercialized space.

“That’s what was missing,” Mulato said. “A sense of community.”

A recent interaction with Sanchez cemented Maria Andrea Mora’s belonging at the shop.

“Sonaste muy mexicana,” Sanchez jokingly told Mora, a barista who’s from Colombia, in Spanish. “You sounded really Mexican.”

“At that moment, I felt really happy,” Mora said in Spanish. When she moved to Utah, she said she left behind friends and family in her home country. Working at Azcúar, she said, helped her realize that she could “have friends” and a “stable life” in her new home.

At Azúcar, there’s no language barrier for Spanish-speaking West Valley residents — since all the baristas speak Spanish and English.

“Who would we be if we are profiting from our culture, if we don’t invite them in here?” said Guerrero. In curating the Azcúar space, its drinks and food, Guerrero and her team think of their Latino parents and “the way they enjoy food.”

As the coffee shop’s popularity grows — word of mouth and popular seasonal drinks enticing more and more customers into the shop — Guerrero said she sees her young Latino customers, among the first to make the space their own, as Azucar’s “forefront fighters.”

“They’re the ones who pioneered,” said Guerrero of her regular Gen-Z clientele. “It’s like a seed. If they feel pride in us … they see themselves within that and want to be part of that culture that was created.”

Azúcar means “sugar” in Spanish, and is a word customers sometimes mispronounce, Guerrero said. The word has a double meaning at the cafe, she said.

“Azúcar makes everything in your life a little sweeter,” she said. “And not even specifically sugar, but within us as people.”

“This is who we are,” Guerrero said of the Spanish word. “And we’re proud of it.”