Talk:Sopaipa

"In New Mexico, they are frequently served as a side dish for the meal."

As a former NM resident, I've never seen sopapillas served as a side dish - always as dessert. (My NM restaurant experience includes Los Alamos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque; maybe in other places it is 'frequently' a side dish?)
 * My family is from NM and they used to eat sopapillas as a main dish all the time. (At home. I think it's true that at restaurants sopapillas are used served as a dessert.) In fact, we're eating sopapillas for dinner today. If it's at all useful my family is from a small town called Magdalena, west of Socorro. --Ortzinator 21:57, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
 * This article needs significant overhaul, not just for the side-dish/dessert issue, but since you asked: In northern New Mexico (Los Alamos, Taos, Española, Albuquerque, and of course Santa Fe), sopaipillas are encountered in three settings. One is as the side bread, taking the place of tortillas.  Another -- in my experience (30-plus years' worth), rarely -- is as a dessert.  A third, and characteristic of the region, is as part of a main course, the "stuffed sopaipilla."  The sopaipilla is opened from the top and filled with some combination of (ground beef, shredded beef, machaca, chicken, cheese, beans, lettuce), and usually topped with red or green chile.  The whole thing is served as would be an enchilada or burrito, usually accompanied by beans, rice and salad (and, not infrequently, additional sopaipillas on the side as the meal's bread).
 * For examples of places that serve stuffed sopaipillas, check out De Colores in Los Alamos, Michael's Kitchen in Taos, El Paragua in Española, the very popular Garduño's chain in Albuquerque (including at the airport) and elsewhere, and at about 50 different restaurants in and near Santa Fe, notably Tomasita's or Rancho de Chimayo, the two places most commonly considered by the dominant local factions to serve "definitive" New Mexican food. Incidentally, I have never, in those 30+ years, heard these things called "sopaipas," and would like to see the redirect reversed so that "sopaipa" points to the much more correct "sopaipilla" (with "sopapilla" a variant) rather than vice versa. -- Bill-on-the-Hill 00:48, 26 May 2006 (UTC)