El Torito

Stepping into another world that reminded me of Mexico, the Tacos were great and can not wait to get back for that large drink with the shrimp in it, that looks like a Bloody Mary with shrimp.

Excellent ceviche and crispy tacos… the grocery store is also fun

I see all these great reviews and i feel like maybe i was here on an off night. This was not authentic mexican food. The ingredients tasted cheap. Our food was smoothered in a red sauce and sour cream. There was SO much sour cream! Omg. The service also sucked. Our waitress was not friendly, she did not check on us. The boyfriend and I ate as quickly as possible, and then waited forever to pay. There was only 1 other occupied table while we were there, that probably ahould have been our first clue. I recommend you skip this place and try one of thw other resturaunts on this street.

Great Mexican, Central American & South American grocery store with everything you can get for your cooking needs.
They also have a little charming restaurant that you can eat at after a day of shopping or wandering around in Cherokee.
I’ve been here at least 3 times, but I plan to come here more often.

Nice Mexican grocer on Cherokee St. I only seem to get in there during the Cinco de Mayo festival but appreciate them nonetheless. I really like the notion of a cold soda on a warm day for less than a buck… hits the spot.
Either side of their entrance has a food booth that they staff. Tamales are delicious but the mango on a stick is a messy proposition without a lot value.

Yummy! Great vegetarian tacos and beans. Creamy guacamole. Attentive service. We will definitely be back!

Mas Chips, and cheap good Mexican food is all I can say about El Torito! Everyone in the area said this is the place to go! On a street with a Mexican dive on every corner, we went with what the locals were saying!
I dig that they do NOT use lard in the beans so little old Vegan me can enjoy the taste of the south while in the Cherokee area of St. Lou!
I had Veggie Burrito which was big, and beautiful, and full of all the right stuff! It filled me up and down and all around! They kept the chips coming as fast as we could eat them too!
Staff and place were all super nice! Our waitress kinda bailed on us when it was time to pay but then we realized that we needed to go up to the counter and pay!
Good spot to eat Mexican on a street with so many options!

This place is a hidden gem on Cherokee. Living in Benton Park, one of the few missing amenities is a great local grocer. My ideal place doesn’t have to be a grandiose mecca, just local, fresh, and reasonably priced items. I plan major shopping trips to Trader Joe’s and the like to buy the majority of my food, but love to be able to walk to get those forgotten and supplemental items. El Torito has been on my list for a while. My friend recently had an amazing fiesta with all the food from there, and it was like eating at a delicious local cantina in Mexico!
I wanted to see for myself, and we needed a few items for dinner last night, like butter, lemons, limes, and basil. We rounded up the doggies and took the 2-​mile round trip walk, a good length to count as exercise as well, but not be too far to go for groceries and haul back bags.
You can’t see inside El Torito, so we did walk right by before quickly noticing our mistake. BF waited outside with the dogs. This is the only thing that kept me from getting lost in this place! First, it is so big, the same size as a Trader Joe’s or Aldi’s type space. There is a dairy counter, butcher, and fresh bakery, with all things Mexican like chihuahua cheese, chorizo, and tres leches cake. Delicious sweet and spicy smells are abundant. There is a whole aisle of Mexican spices, dried herbs, and other interesting items (bag of dried shrimp, anyone?). Lots of beans, canned goods, Mexican sodas & juice, a snack aisle, and more. There are plenty of traditional American foods as well, so it works for general needs, too. In addition to the grocery, there is a section with toys, clothing, and various accessories from Mexico. I can tell they are traditional and authentic from my past travels.
The produce aisle is limited and targeted mostly towards Mexican style cooking with fresh product and great deals on items like limes, cilantro, avocado, garlic, tomatoes, prickly pear, tomatillo, plantains, coconuts, etc. I got everything I needed except the basil, plus a few extra goodies. Fresh coconut cookies? Yes, please! A small disappointment was spicy pumpkin seeds, or pepitas, that were stale and inedible when opened. Also, I bought a package of butter thinking it was four sticks and it was really a big one pound block, but I will certainly survive. I think it serves a lot of the Mexican restaurants on Cherokee, so the bulk portions make sense.
The folks working in the store were very courteous and patient as I tried my mediocre Spanish speaking skills on them. I appreciate the practice anywhere I can get it!

Went on Cingo De Mayo worst service ever, I felt like I was in a diner fighting for civil rights. We walked out

This place was another stop on my tamale run with my buddy yesterday. Starting at 9:30 on Saturday mornings, you can get fresh hot tamales for $ 1.00 a piece. That’s right for $ 1.00. The tamales had pork with green salsa. It was delish! Not toooo spicy. Just perfect. I was confused because I thought green salsa was spicy. Totally opposite here. No need to place orders in advance. Just come here & get them. They have plenty.

At the corner of Cherokee and California Streets, there are three Mexican restaurants with patios, where on a nice day, everybody can watch everybody else eating. Sitting in the El Torito Patio on a beautiful May day, it reminded me of Tijuana before the drug lords made it a war zone. I will add that no one tried to sell me those little packages of gum or get me to have my picture taken next to a donkey painted like a zebra.
El Torito has a pretty good reputation, so I was surprised to find it was the least populated of the three patios on that corner. The food was very good and the margaritas at least fair. Service was fine. Not sure why the crowds mirgrated to the other places — more flair, I guess. I had a lengua taco and a barbacoa tostada, which was off the menu — they only charged $ 1.99 for the tostada, so it was a bargain. The lengua didn’t taste very fresh, unfortunately. I also tried the al pastor and carniatas tacos, which were both excellent. Their chips come with mild (red) and hot (green) salsa. They were both good, although the red salsa had the consistency of ketchup, which was just weird for me.
This was my second visit to El Torito, the first being maybe 7 or 8 years ago. It was kind of meh back then, but they’ve fixed the place up and, apparently, hired a better cook. We really liked it.

Definitely in my top 3 Mex joints in STL. Great place to get spices, great chorizo in the butcher section and I really like the produce section, limes are crazy cheap unlike the big grocery stores.

My most recent cookbook purchase is Diana Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking. The cookbook is intense… full of complex dishes. But before starting any of them, you have to go on a scavenger hunt to find the ingredients. Luckily, I’ve been to El Torito before and remembered they have a large selection of dried Mexican spices.
I easily found the ingredients I needed, plus a few other items for my Cinco de Mayo party. You can pick up your own piñata, packs of tortillas, chicharones, prayer candles, and cowboy boots here.

Over the last few years, Cherokee Street has become one of my favorite areas in St. Louis. At the heart of it all sits El Torito, a Mexican grocery store. This place can easily be overlooked as you walk past, but I strongly urge you to step in to experience a Mexican food paradise. I love exploring international food stores, and I’ve got to say this is the most interesting one I’ve found in the St. Louis area. The size of the store and selection of items is surprisingly huge.
As you enter, feel free to light a candle or say a prayer at the Virgin Mary shrine, then continue on to explore huge aisles packed with every kind of dried chili you can imagine. Be sure to check out the colorful piñatas hanging from the ceiling as you wander down isles filled with various types of canned beans, sauces, seasonings, tortillas and just about anything else related to Mexican food. In the refrigerated section, you will find a large selection of tortillas and Mexican cheeses. I was surprised to find a cart full of fresh tortillas made in house and chicharrón or pork rinds larger than any I’ve ever seen before. The butcher counter offers a nice selection of fresh meats and you can also find frozen shrimp and fish. Other aisle consist of fresh produce, juices and sodas, baked goods, various cookware, clothing, shoes and boots, veladoras (religious candles), candies and snacks. Also be sure to keep an eye out for free samples of food items on the weekends. If you’re hungry, there is a restaurant/​taqueria located inside the market, but I haven’t sampled any of the food there yet.
5 stars for El Torito for being my new favorite market in St. Louis! It might not be impressive if you’re from Mexico or Southern California, but this is as good as it gets in St. Louis!

El Torito is an amazing place to go for Mexican staples.
I love going to El Torito and buying their ready-​to-​go carnitas and fresh made tortillas from their meat counter and an onion, cilantro, garlic, limes and avocados. Put it all together and you have an amazing meal of carnitas tacos with guacamole. It’s a dream come true for cheap!
They have a great selection of Mexican cheeses and chiles too.

Simply the best. I wish I could live here! I love to cook so when I am feeling like making anything Mexican this is my stop. The have great produce, especially avocados for super cheap. Their meat is also really good and they will butcher it in the Mexican fashion when you buy it so you don’t have to. They have all the hard to fine ingredients include just about every dried chile you could imagine. You can also buy carnitas already cooked. Pair that with fresh tortillas and salsas in the deli case and you have no need to go to a taqueria. This is a great Cherokee staple.

I love grocery shopping here whenever I’m on Cherokee Street. They also carry the Mexican version of my favorite shampoo, which was sadly discontinued on the US market. Now I can say that I buy imported shampoo from a specialty shop. Ha.

Oh my! I’d walked past El Torito more than a handful of times, but never knew what was past those frosted (and slightly scary-​looking) glass doors. Now I know!
This is a very authentic Mexican grocery — so authentic that I couldn’t read most of the labels on the products (see, I took French in high school and college, which is pretty useless when you live in the Midwest!). As soon as we walked in, a gentleman patron asked us, «Hablo Espanol?» and we were all like, «Uhhhh… no?» Thankfully, one of the people in our group is from Dallas-​Fort Worth and she was able to provide a little insight into what we had just gotten ourselves into.
Here’s a snipped of what you could find at El Torito:
— dehydrated Mexican spices
— fresh produce
— a variety of religious candles
— cowboy boots
— kid’s toys (made in China)
— fresh fruit ice cream
— home made tortas
There’s a TON of other things that you could buy here and it’s sort of a mish-​mash. And I didn’t end up buying anything, but it’s cool to just stop in and get a taste of how a different culture lives.

Down on the Latino/​art-​freak western half of the Cherokee Street strip, El Torito is a self-​contained universe of foodstuffs and dry goods from south of the border. There’s no better way to describe its fantabulous array of awesomeness than to do the checklist. Step inside past the window displays featuring mustachioed and bare-​midriffed mannequins to discover:
— An occasionally manned fresh fruit cart immediately inside the entrance
— A sheer cliff of Goya products, including approximately 74,000 types of beans (mad props for carrying the low-​sodium varieties of the black beans and garbanzos)
— A whole aisle of nothing but hot sauces and salsas, as well as, strangely enough, sriracha
— Fully staffed butcher shop, complete with non-​gringo friendly meats such as head, tongue, intestines, and big-​ass chicharrones in a display case.
— A dude selling homemade barbacoa from a small makeshift stand right in the middle of the dry goods area
— More votive candles (including ones for the Angel of Death) than one ever thought could exist
— Mexican football jerseys for kids and adults
— Housewares, including pots, pans, and cleaning supplies
— A cooler jam-​packed with every Jarritos product made (the fruit flavored mineral water is ace), Mexican Cokes, and the full range of Boing! brand juices and nectars
— Spices and dried chiles everywhere, along with weird bulk junk like dried, whole shrimp
— Fresh fruits & veg, some basic stuff like tomatoes, limes, onions, and lettuces, plus a lot of harder to find items like poblano peppers and cactus leaves
— A bewildering array of ginormous breads, cookies, and Mexican sweets, of both the candy and baked good varieties
— Gaucho-​centric jeans, western wear, and cowboy hats
— A Western Union transfer station
— Taking up the western ¼ of the building, a full-​service, sit-​down taqueria! It’s only open on weekends, and even then it doesn’t quite adhere to its set hours, but still. Check it out on Sunday around noon when it’s full of folks watching football matches, eating menudo, and hanging out with friends and family. There’s a full bar, too, as well as a small jukebox stocked with Norteño CDs, but it never seems to be on.
It’s worth checking in on a regular basis, as El Torito has a tendency to constantly carry new stock (and discontinue your old favorites). But that’s just part of the charm, making every weekend (and you really must go on a weekend afternoon to get the full effect) a new adventure to look forward to.

You want fresh rendered pork lard? I know you do. You can get it here. Fresh masa, too.
Mmmmm. Tamales!
Giant selection of hard-​to-​find Mexican foodstuffs. Say no more.

Located in the old Woolworth’s store on Cherokee Street, walking in is truly like being in Mexico. The first thing you see is a tiny, non-​English speaking Hispanic man with a white cowboy hat and a fruit stand. Here you can get a handcut $ 4 fruit cup or a $ 6 fruit tray of pineapple, jicama, cantaloupe, mango, chili powder and other seasonal choices.
On the right there is a full service Mexican market including a butcher, clothing, locally made corn tortillas, a Western Union, rows and rows of Mexican food, candy and a host of other items.
On the left is Taqueria El Torito Restaurant. It’s VERY casual and feels like a cross between a fast food restaurant and a cafeteria. I think they bought the seating from Subway. They specialize in authentic Mexican cuisine including killer tortas and they serve Menudo on Saturdays. Cheap! Cheap!