Around noon on a weekday, the line at the deli counter inside Kaune's Neighborhood Market runs past the wine racks and back toward the produce bins. Butcher JD Duarte is turning chickens on the rotisserie for the dinner rush that hasn't started yet. Loryann Garcia is building salads to order at the Chop Shop counter, working through orders faster than the line grows. None of it looks like a business in transition. That's the point. Sometime in the last two years, Kaune's changed owners for the first time since 2003, and the lunch rush kept moving exactly the way it always has.
The market at 511 Old Santa Fe Trail, on the corner where the street meets Paseo de Peralta across from the state Capitol, has been a fixture for Santa Fe's east side for well over a century. Henry Kaune, a German immigrant, opened the original H.S. Kaune Grocery Co. on East San Francisco Street in 1896. The business moved to its current corner in 1951. For anyone who lives in the neighborhood that carries the same name, the store isn't a landmark you visit occasionally. It's the place where you already know the cashier, and the cashier already knows what you're going to order before you say it.
Twenty-One Years, Then a Handoff to the Register Line
Cheryl Sommer and her husband Kurt bought Kaune's in 2003 and ran it for 21 years. In August 2024, Sommer announced the store had been sold, not to a regional grocery chain or an outside investor, but to Leah and Rachael Chacon, identical twin sisters who had worked at the market since 2022. Both were 31 at the time of the sale and had grown up in Santa Fe. Rachael Chacon has said she remembers shopping at Kaune's as a child, long before she ever worked the register.
That detail matters more than it might seem. A lot of neighborhood retail turns over through private equity rollups or corporate acquisition, where the new owner's first move is a rebrand or a menu overhaul designed to justify the purchase price. Kaune's changed hands the other way. The buyers were already on staff. Sommer, announcing the sale, wrote that she and Kurt were glad the store would keep being run by women raised in the city it serves. It's a small distinction, but it explains a lot about what happened next, which was almost nothing.
The Remodel Locals Still Bring Up
Kaune's has been through disruptive change before, and the store's own history shows how that went. In an earlier stretch under Sommer's ownership, the market underwent a major interior renovation, widely reported as happening in 2013, that gutted the old floor-to-ceiling shelving in favor of open sightlines, new wood floors, and a redesigned Chopped Salad Bar. Sommer said at the time the goal was to draw in "a younger, new generation of customers" with money to spend on specialty items they wouldn't find at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.
Longtime customer Hervey Juris, picking up his usual tuna salad and coleslaw, told a reporter the new look was "a lovely new ambiance." Then he added the part that stuck: it took him a while to find anything. That's the tension every neighborhood institution eventually runs into. The upgrade that pleases new customers can quietly alienate the ones who've been walking the same aisles for years. Kaune's survived that remodel because the character of the place, the hand-cut meat counter, the curated small-vendor pantry, held steady even as the layout changed. But the friction was real, and it's the kind of friction a new owner watching from the sales floor in 2013 would remember.
"We Know It's Very Popular the Way It Is"
That's exactly the lesson the Chacon sisters appear to have taken from it. Asked about their plans after the sale, Rachael Chacon didn't talk about modernizing or expanding.
"We know it's very popular the way it is. We're going to assess how things are working out and then we might make changes, but it wouldn't be too drastic if we did."
Two years on, the specifics that made Kaune's what it is have held. The salad bar still blends ingredients in front of the customer rather than pre-packaging them. The meat counter still hand-cuts steaks, chops, and short ribs to order. Wine buyer Mark Rodriguez, who left corporate retail specifically to work somewhere locally owned, describes the sourcing model in plain terms: everything on the shelf is personally ordered by someone at the store, not selected by an algorithm or a regional buyer. The staff count, around 25 full and part-time employees, is roughly the same as when Sommer took over more than two decades ago. For a market this size, that kind of workforce stability is unusual on its own.
A Name That Already Belongs to the Neighborhood
The Kaune name doesn't stop at the market's front door. It also belongs to Kaune Elementary School, which serves families in the neighborhood immediately southeast of downtown. Whether or not it traces to the same family that opened the original grocery in 1896, the overlap is a reminder of how deep this surname runs in this pocket of the city. A store and a school sharing a name isn't a coincidence you'd notice on a map. It's the kind of detail only someone who's lived here would know to look for.
Positioned across Old Santa Fe Trail from the Capitol and within easy walking distance of state office buildings, Kaune's has always served a mixed crowd: legislative staff on lunch break, longtime residents doing a weekly shop, and out-of-towners who wander in and leave asking why every neighborhood doesn't have a place like this. That mix is part of why the store's owners, across three ownership eras now, keep landing on the same conclusion. The thing that makes Kaune's valuable to this corner of Santa Fe isn't scale. It's legibility. Regulars need to be able to walk in blind and find the rotisserie chicken exactly where they left it last week.
What Continuity at the Corner Actually Means
None of this means Kaune's will never change. Rachael Chacon left the door open to adjustments once she and her sister finish assessing what's working. But the pattern across nearly 75 years on this same corner points one direction. The store's growth periods have come from small, deliberate additions, a salad bar here, a wine program there, not from wholesale reinvention. Its ownership transitions have come from people who already worked the floor, not from buyers looking to flip the real estate or the brand. For a neighborhood built around a single-name anchor, that's a meaningful signal. The market isn't waiting to be discovered or repositioned. It's simply still there, at Old Santa Fe Trail and Paseo de Peralta, run now by two women who grew up shopping in it.
If this corner of the east side, and the market that anchors it, is part of what draws you to make a life near Old Santa Fe Trail, the team at Darlene Streit Team knows this stretch of the city block by block and can help you find your place in it.
