Walk east on Sixth Street past Tucson Boulevard on any weekday morning and you'll see it: a line at the counter of a building that, eighteen months ago, sat dark. Order a coffee, and there's a decent chance the person handing it to you works for a business that already had one thriving location somewhere else in Tucson and decided, for reasons apparently worth the risk, that its second act belonged here.
That's not a coincidence anymore. It's a pattern, and if you live in Sam Hughes, it's worth understanding, because it's reshaping what a short walk down Sixth Street can get you.
The building that almost didn't make it
The building at 2513-2515 E. Sixth Street has a longer memory than most of its current customers. Its roots as Rincon Market trace back to 1926, and it spent decades as the neighborhood's grocery and gathering spot before the coronavirus shutdown forced a closure the market never fully recovered from. A later attempt to reinvent the space as Flora's Market Run pivoted toward more restaurant, less grocery, and still shut its doors abruptly on January 6, 2025, after roughly a year in business.
Two closures in short succession would normally be a bad sign for a piece of commercial real estate. Instead, within three weeks of Flora's exit, two young Tucson food businesses signed a lease to share the same 12,000-square-foot space rather than let it sit empty again.
Chef Rory Martin, who now runs the kitchen there, mentioned last year that the building was approaching its 100th year, a milestone it's reaching right around now. For a space that had cycled through operators, that's a notable amount of staying power. It just needed the right tenants, and it got two at once.
Two businesses, one kitchen
Sonoran House had only been open since August 2024, running a single coffee shop and market a mile away in Blenman-Elm. Redbird Scratch Kitchen + Bar had one location too, on Oracle Road, open since December 2023. Neither had run more than one restaurant before. Rather than one of them taking over the old Rincon Market building alone, they split it: Sonoran House claimed the dining room and market side for its coffee bar, curated goods, and eventually a full kitchen menu, while Redbird took over the back kitchen for its scratch-made burgers, tacos, and wings.
The rollout happened in stages through the summer of 2025. Sonoran House's bar opened July 14, its restaurant side followed on July 21, and a grand opening celebration wrapped it up on July 28. Redbird's doors opened September 1, which means this month marks its first full year in the neighborhood.
The space keeps finding new corners to use. Late last year, Sonoran House opened a hidden speakeasy called Old Pueblo Club tucked into the northwest part of the building. You get in by pushing through what looks like a wall of wine racks. No password required. The ceiling still carries the salvaged neon Rincon sign, a small detail that ties the newest version of the space back to the one longtime residents remember.
Executive chef Gabriella Alba runs the kitchen for Sonoran House's side these days, with a menu built around whipped feta with honey drizzle, bone marrow on charred sourdough, and truffle fries that have become a regular request. Mornings stay quieter, with espresso and vegan pastries from local baker Houlden's Rise Above, before the bar and full kitchen take over around 11 a.m. Redbird, meanwhile, leans on local purveyors like Mendez Bakery, Linda Tortillas, Barrio Brewery, and Dragoon Brewery, and the custom mural on its walls, designed by Redbird partner Thomas McCarthy and painted by artist Delsa Designs, is the kind of detail you notice on your third visit, not your first.
Sixth Street's other reopening
A few doors down, a second half-empty building went through its own transition. Borderlands, the longtime brewing company space, changed hands last August when new owners took over from the former Borderlands Brewing Co. and set about turning it into more of a neighborhood gathering place.
In January 2026, that space picked up an unusual roommate. Barista del Barrio, the James Beard-nominated coffee and burrito spot that Flavia Briones started with her children back in 2017, opened a second location inside Borderlands as what the owners describe as a permanent pop-up. Rather than splitting the building down the middle the way Sonoran House and Redbird did, Barista del Barrio and Borderlands split it by time of day. The coffee and burrito counter runs mornings, Wednesday through Sunday, and Borderlands takes over in the afternoons and evenings.
That's two different businesses, two different owners, using the same address at different hours instead of each shouldering the overhead of a stand-alone building. It's a different arrangement than the one down the street, but it's built on the same logic: sharing risk beats going it alone.
The next domino
The pattern isn't finished. Tucson Foodie reported in January 2026 that Unraveled Pasta + Bar was aiming for a spring opening somewhere in Sam Hughes, with house-made pasta, a European-inspired design built with a local architect and local vendors, and pricing the owners described as staying low to moderate. Planned hours were 3 to 10 p.m. daily. Whether that timeline held through the year is worth confirming before you plan a dinner around it, but the intent alone adds a fourth name to a list that's grown fast for one stretch of one street.
If you're keeping track, that's four separately owned, already-proven Tucson food businesses that chose this same short run of Sixth Street for an expansion within about eighteen months of each other. None of them needed to. Each already had a working concept somewhere else in the city. They picked Sam Hughes anyway, and most of them chose to share their space or their hours with someone else rather than take on a building solo.
Here's the current lineup if you're mapping out a walk:
- Sonoran House, 2513 E. Sixth St., mornings for coffee and pastries, full kitchen and bar from late morning on, plus the hidden Old Pueblo Club
- Redbird Scratch Kitchen + Bar, 2515 E. Sixth St., open daily for lunch through dinner, sharing the building with Sonoran House
- Barista del Barrio, inside Borderlands Sam Hughes at 2500 E. Sixth St., mornings Wednesday through Sunday
- Unraveled Pasta + Bar, planned for spring 2026 elsewhere in the neighborhood, worth checking on before you build an evening around it
What this actually means if you live here
None of this is about property values or market timing. It's about what your Tuesday morning coffee run looks like now compared to two years ago, when the old Rincon Market building sat empty and this stretch of Sixth Street was mostly a place you drove past. Now it's a place you can walk from a coffee counter to a speakeasy to a burrito window to a sit-down dinner without moving your car once.
Whether that keeps happening depends on whether these bets pay off, and that's genuinely uncertain. But for now, if you've been meaning to check out what's behind the wine racks at Sonoran House, or you haven't tried the version of Redbird that isn't the one on Oracle Road, this is the season to do it. The building spent a year being empty. It's spending this one being busy.
If you're curious about anything else changing in Sam Hughes, or you just want to talk through what's happening on your own block, Michelle Bakarich and her team spend a lot of time on these streets too. Let's Connect.
