The best breakfast I have eaten in my seven decades occurred one morning in 1985 in a home kitchen in Oracle, a tiny town on the back side of the Santa Catalina Mountains from Tucson. An elfin grandmother named Amalia Ruiz Clark, who taught Mexican cooking classes, had agreed to an interview for an article I was writing about alternatives to bland, insipid American breakfasts. I drove to her home, not realizing she intended to feed me. She had, in fact, started work on a stupendous spread the night before, making tortillas and salsa from scratch. After my arrival, she lightly fried the tortillas in oil, then topped them with eggs, salsa and a vivid garnish of avocado slices. Then came a fruit cocktail, literally, comprising grapefruit, oranges, strawberries and a generous splash of tequila to defuse any alertness her strong coffee might have provoked. There was a bottomless basket of warm buttered tortillas. It was a magnificent meal — piquant, vibrant, alive with fresh flavors and bright colors.
As I review my life in food, one of my undiminishing passions, I realize that most of my significant discoveries occurred during the 23 years I lived in Tucson, and that most of these involved Mexican food. I’ve been away now for a quarter-century, but the knowledge and appreciation I collected there remain. I just made my own huevos rancheros for breakfast, garnishing them with a small innovation I cribbed from a Tucson restaurant last year: a sprinkle of toasted tortilla strips over the top, providing a crackly counterpoint to the soft eggs, cheese and salsa.
Mexican food has always been a staple of life and an attraction in Tucson — the city’s oldest restaurant, El Charro, was founded exactly 100 years ago and remains in the original family today — but the hype has intensified over the past several decades. In 1987, Mayor Lew Murphy proclaimed Tucson “The Mexican Food Capital of the World and Elsewhere.” This provoked a challenge from other cities in the American Southwest and led to a cookoff judged by actual Mexicans, which Santa Fe, New Mexico, won. Murphy’s silly boast, though, floated free from its source and wafted spore-like into the desert air, becoming a kind of self-propagating slogan.
A substantial boost came in 1999, when President Bill Clinton dropped in to dine at Mi Nidito (to this day, there’s a line outside unless you arrive midafternoon). In 2015, Tucson became the first American city to win a Creative City of Gastronomy designation from UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural arm. It wasn’t purely because of Mexican food; rather, it was for its whole culinary culture and use of native ingredients (most of which, inevitably, wind up in Mexican-inspired dishes). The New York Times has explored Tucson’s culinary scene multiple times, and this year, National Geographic rhetorically wondered, “Is Tucson the best city for Mexican food in the U.S.?”
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the “best.” Hype aside, here’s what’s for sure: Mexican food is hugely important to Tucson’s cultural stew, it’s increasingly creative, and it’s delectable.
There are legitimate reasons to consider Tucson’s Mexican food culture uniquely distinctive. Several dishes either were born here — the origin stories are always murky — or are at least strongly identified with the region. One is the chimichanga, a concoction that several restaurants in assorted cities colorfully claim to have invented when a cook accidentally dropped a burrito into a deep fryer. More probably, its progenitor appeared in Southern Arizona early in the 20th century, as Yaqui people were fleeing Mexican persecution; they had long been eating chivichangas, fried tortilla squares filled with meat or potatoes. But I remember when a uniquely Tucson variation appeared in the 1980s: the chimichanga “enchilada style.” Dress the crispy missile in red chile sauce and melted cheese, and sprinkle with green onions. Best enjoyed when your dinner companion is an EMT with a defibrillator standing by, it is incomprehensibly delicious.
Thanks to its climate and, honestly, the low-density urban sprawl leaving numerous vacant lots, Tucson has a prolific food truck scene. Unsurprisingly, most offer Mexican food. The low investment of launching a rolling restaurant encourages innovation and specialization, and at this writing, you can find Mexican seafood, Mexican-Peruvian fusion, Mexican pizza, Sonoran hot dogs, mesquite-fired carne asada and a dessert truck that serves churros — deep-fried sticks of sugared dough.
But the deeper story of Mexican food here is about the realization that there’s so much more to it than the vision most Americans still conjure: a roster of combination plates, various configurations of tacos, enchiladas, tamales, rice and beans. It’s actually one of the world’s most sophisticated cuisines — more varied than French, more complex than Italian. If you had to pick just one culture’s food to consume for the rest of your life, it would be a fine choice. It might be mine.
When a New England bride named Martha Summerhayes accompanied her U.S. Army husband into Arizona in 1874, her first impressions were tainted with horror — and, frankly, racism. Arriving at the settlement of Ehrenberg on the Colorado River, she found “an unfriendly, dirty, and Heaven-forsaken place, inhabited by a poor class of Mexicans and half-breeds.” But while she never came to like Ehrenberg, her memoir, Vanished Arizona, documents a remarkable pivot in her attitude toward Mexican culture — with food as the engine:
Life as we Americans live it was difficult in Ehrenberg. I often said: “Oh! If we could only live as the Mexicans live, how easy it would be!” For they had their fire built between some stones piled up in their yard, a piece of sheet iron laid over the top: this was the cooking-stove. [Frijoles in a kettle] were boiled slowly for some hours, then lard and salt were added, and they simmered down until they were deliciously fit to eat, and had a thick red gravy.
Summerhayes went on to wax rhapsodic about carne seca, chile verde and the very act of making tortillas: “It is the most graceful thing to see a pretty Mexican toss the wafer-like disc over her bare arm, and pat it out until transparent.”
It’s partly concealed there, but an undercurrent of condescension, a romanticization of the primitive, trickles through her narrative. I recognize it because I had it. For some years after I arrived in Tucson in 1973, I would pontificate that a good Mexican restaurant had to be a dive — cheap, dark, salsa stains on the menu. One day, a colleague at the Tucson Citizen, the now-defunct afternoon newspaper where I worked as a reporter, told me this was racist as hell. I turned that thought over in my mind for some time, struggling to square it with what I believed about myself — enlightened liberal, grew up on the Mexican border, spoke Spanish, thoroughly comfortable with Mexican culture — and realized my colleague was right. It was a way of posing as a hip, clued-in connoisseur while simultaneously belittling the object of that connoisseurship. I vowed then to become a better class of connoisseur. And a more respectful neighbor.
The Mexican restaurants in Tucson at the time were nearly all akin to each other, offering similar menus derived from Arizona’s neighboring Mexican state of Sonora. Each seemed to have one specialty that it executed especially well, and many of us developed a habit of making the rounds and ordering the same thing every time: green chile enchiladas at Mi Nidito, chiles rellenos at Tia Elena, machaca at Micha’s. There was a hole in the wall downtown called El Rapido. Founded in the 1930s, it offered takeout only, but its red chile burritos were so good that I would happily drive 10 miles downtown to score one; walk a couple of blocks to the Tucson Museum of Art complex, which comprises several 19th century adobe homes; and sit in a quiet courtyard to eat lunch.
In 1987, a restaurant named Los Mayas opened with a spectacular challenge to this mellow and insular constellation. In place of tamales, enchiladas and chimichangas, Los Mayas presented dishes from central and southern Mexico such as pulpo a la marinera (octopus in a tomato, onion and chile sauce) and pollo pibil (chicken steamed in a wrap of banana leaves). I especially remember its huachinango a la veracruzana, red snapper braised in a complex tomato-pimento sauce. The flavors blended like an orchestra, oniony violins harmonizing with the silky red peppers and brassy olives. It was as richly complex as any classical French dish.
Since I was writing a magazine food column at the time, I had an excuse to interview the executive chef, and I came with a personal agenda: Learn how to make it. When the chef recited the ingredients for the sauce, it all seemed reasonable and intuitive until he came to the final one: cinnamon. Cinnamon! Dubious, I tried it at home. The snapper practically leaped out of the pan and sang an aria. It was a one-dish lesson in how richly creative Mexican food can be — and how dumbly we’ve been underestimating it.
Los Mayas shuttered after just three years. Tucson still had an expectation that Mexican food meant not only a deep connection to tradition but also a gentle bite at the credit card, and a 1987 dinner at Los Mayas with a splash of wine would run 50 bucks, or $130 in 2022 dollars. Tucson natives and visitors would have to learn to think about Mexican food in new ways.
We were doing it; Los Mayas was just ahead of the curve. In 1986, a Guaymas, Sonora, native named Suzana Davila had launched a tiny, six-table restaurant with a deceptively ambitious menu of guisados (stews) and moles (dishes using chile-chocolate sauces) that she wrote on a blackboard and changed daily. It was both inexpensive and creative, and it grew into a big hit, enjoying international publicity. Café Poca Cosa folded in 2020, a victim of the pandemic, but at this writing, Davila’s daughters carry on with a similar downtown place named The Little One.
The French-trained Janos Wilder also had an impact even though Janos, the downtown restaurant he and his wife, Rebecca, opened in 1983, was not Mexican. That restaurant was among the pioneers of “nouvelle Southwest” cuisine, a marriage of French traditions and regional ingredients. But as Wilder’s cooking evolved, Mexican ideas increasingly filtered in and got themselves spectacularly transmogrified.
“I just went nuts,” Wilder recalled in a conversation with me a couple of years ago. “What would be the ideal chile relleno? What kind of batter? Does the filling have to be cheese, or could it be anything you want? Because I was so enthralled with French cooking, I stuffed it with lobster and a triple-cream brie, then made a super-light batter, almost like tempura, and then a French Nantua sauce according to Escoffier. And then a little tower of jicama salad. It was a complex dish!”
Janos was high-priced and highly acclaimed. After some further explorations of Southwestern cooking at local resorts, Wilder opened Downtown Kitchen in 2010. Its menu delved deeply into Mexican and Southwestern traditions and terroir — that difficult-to-explain French concept of ecosystem that gives a wine its unique character. Wilder believed that the Sonoran Desert’s terroir could and should inform its cuisine. Thus, a meal at Downtown Kitchen might begin with a Sonoran chile and squash soup garnished with Oaxaca cheese, proceed to a pork chop basted with red chile honey, and end with a bread pudding with mezcal-plumped raisins. Downtown Kitchen
was successful for a decade but closed in 2020, another pandemic victim.
Still another foretaste of Tucson’s emergence as a culinary crossroads came with the arrival of an irrepressible Texan named Richard Lara and a homemade wooden trailer that looked like a kid’s playhouse on wheels. Lara was on his way to California when he stopped for the night in Tucson and got himself bewitched by the desert and mountains. He moored the trailer in a vacant lot near Broadway Boulevard and Craycroft Road, then launched a fajita stand that demonstrated a whole new level of food-truck fare. This was at a time when the fajita craze was sweeping the land and chains such as TGI Friday’s were introducing derangements such as Mu Shu Chicken Fajitas, with mushrooms and bean sprouts, and the whole idea of Mexican food seemed in danger of distortion beyond redemption.
Lara demonstrated the excellence of fundamentalism: skirt steak marinated for two days and slow-smoked over a mesquite fire, then swaddled in a tortilla with fresh pico de gallo (tomato, onion, jalapeño, cilantro). This was caballero campfire fajitas par excellence. It was also not a culinary adventure for the fainthearted: I was there one morning when Lara’s supplier delivered jalapeños in a 50-pound bag.
During these years, I was learning a lot about Mexican cooking, but I never was tempted to try opening a restaurant. My column involved spending occasional evenings in the kitchen beside professional chefs, and I could see it was much harder than journalism. But I became a decent amateur cook. Among the useful things I learned, which came along with the proliferating varieties of Mexican food available in Tucson, was that the macho posturing of seasoning food like dragon’s breath — yes, I’d been one of those — was just that: posturing.
Chiles contain flavors quite apart from their heat quotient, and a skillful Mexican cook can orchestrate blends for depth of flavor just as a French chef manipulates herbs. Start with New Mexican Chimayó for a rich and spicy foundation, then add Arizona Santa Cruz for a citrusy tang, pasilla for a plum-like note of sweetness and a dash of chipotle for a smoky shimmer. The mixture adds up not to hellfire but to a sauce that bathes an enchilada in a luxurious and complementary embrace. Then, throw in something unexpected — such as flecks of pineapple, which I discovered in a pork taco al pastor on my most recent Tucson visit — and you have a whole concert of flavors, all distinct but singing in tight harmonies.
It’s been a prodigious mistake to see Mexican food as simple peasant fare. Maybe the reason had to do with latent racism, or maybe it was simple naivete. Whatever the cause, it’s time to move on. Time to eat.
This exploration began as a mission to visit Tucson, eat nothing but Mexican food for a week and write it up — including, helpfully, a guide to some of the best restaurants. I made such a visit in January 2020. Less than two months later came COVID-19, which devastated restaurants and forced several in my article to close permanently. The article was shelved. In November, I returned for another week of Mexican food, and right on the heels of that came the omicron variant with more pain and uncertainty for the restaurant business. A second version of the article became obsolete. What seems possible and useful at this point is a more general guide to sampling Mexican food in Tucson. (The specific places mentioned are subject to change.)
The day, and any week of Mexican dining in Tucson, starts with breakfast. There are many specialties besides the familiar huevos rancheros; one of my favorites is huevos divorciados — “divorced eggs,” one with a green tomatillo salsa and the other with red chile. Cheese enchiladas are perfectly reasonable breakfast fare. I often appreciate the portability of a red chile burrito, with or without eggs. If a restaurant makes its own tortillas on the spot for breakfast or brunch, that’s an excellent sign. My go-to for breakfast in Tucson has long been Teresa’s Mosaic Cafe; it has a vast and varied menu and fresh tortillas. (Editor's note: Teresa's suffered a fire in October 2022, shortly before this story was published, and temporarily closed for repairs.) However, 5 Points Market & Restaurant, not a dedicated Mexican place, serves up the prettiest and most flavorful version of huevos rancheros I’ve seen since Amalia Ruiz Clark’s kitchen.
A Tucson Mexican food week should include at least some, and preferably all, of the regional specialties. You must, for example, have a cheese crisp. This is a large, thin, Sonoran-style flour tortilla griddled or baked to crisp with melted cheese and green Hatch chile strips on top. Carne seca is another popular topping. I have tried cheese crisps with revisionist additions such as fire-roasted corn and even arugula, and they’re not bad. Anchovies — ¡absolutamente no! But you should try a chimichanga enchilada style unless medically inadvisable; the finest I’ve had recently is at Rosa’s.
Four years ago, the Sonoran hot dog gained national fame when the James Beard Foundation bestowed its American Classics award on El Güero Canelo and named owner Daniel Contreras Tucson’s “leading hotdoguero.” The dogs, which migrated from the Sonoran capital of Hermosillo, feature a bacon-wrapped weenie tucked into a bolillo (a feathery Mexican bread that resembles a truncated baguette) smothered in onions, beans and salsa.
Seafood in Tucson is not an oxymoron, although when Mariscos Chihuahua opened with its specialties such as ceviche and fish or shrimp sautéed in butter and garlic, the restaurant’s own name was a sly joke: The Mexican state of Chihuahua has no seacoast. Tucson, though, lies just 200 miles from the Sonoran coast, and a good many restaurants now import fresh Mexican fish and shellfish. El Berraco’s bizarro submarine-themed decor sets the stage for an ambitious strictly seafood menu featuring dozens of excellent preparations of shrimp, octopus, scallops, tuna, marlin — it’s enormous. The best seafood I sampled on my most recent visit was Cocteleria La Palma, a food truck in a vacant lot at South Sixth Avenue and East 22nd Street. A ceviche tostada presented impeccably fresh shrimp, silky and limey, drenched in tomato, red onion and an avocado garnish. The fish taco embraced a filet of fried fish battered so delicately that it could have been tempura. La Palma’s menu is eye-poppingly ambitious for a rolling restaurant, and it includes various ceviches and seafood cocktails.
Tacos have come a long, long way since I was a kid on the borderlands, and it’s all to the good. Back then, they were predictably spiced ground beef in a crisped corn tortilla shell with grated cheese, lettuce and tomato. Today’s taco is a multiverse. The best I’ve recently enjoyed in Tucson were from food trucks or restaurants specializing in tacos, such as BOCA on Tucson’s ever-hip Fourth Avenue. Its taco options include grilled shrimp, chipotle barbecued shredded pork rib meat, and a vegetarian option of grilled cauliflower tossed in curry cilantro and orange oil. Seis Kitchen’s menu includes tacos from six different regions of Mexico — for example, achiote roasted pork from Yucatán and birria-style beef from Jalisco. The excellent tacos al pastor are an example of Indigenous Mexican cuisine historically intermarrying an immigrant culture — in this case, the Lebanese who streamed into Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their spit-roasted lamb morphed into Mexican pork for the sake of these shepherd-style tacos, and the red chile and pineapple bathing it yields a stunningly sophisticated triad of flavor — smoky, spicy and citrusy.
A week of Tucson Mexican food absolutely must include one or more of the famous standbys that have been around for generations. I can’t imagine a visit without dropping in at El Charro, where I’ve been ordering the same thing for almost 50 years: the irresponsibly vast carne seca platter, its shredded beef famously air-dried on a roof. Mi Nidito has operated in the same South Tucson location since 1952, and its specialty is a combination plate replicating the famous presidential order of 1999: bean tostada, birria taco, chile relleno, chicken enchilada and beef tamale. Mercy.
It would be a mistake to disdain the offbeat experiments and fusions you might find while poking around Google or driving the city’s streets. Some of them are delightful. Among the latter is Family Joint Pizzeria, a food truck serving Neapolitan-style thin-crust pizza charred in a mesquite-fired oven, with unlikely Mexican toppings such as carnitas, tomatillo sauce, tomato and red onion. Of course, not all culinary experiments work, but the fact that they’re occurring is a mark of a vibrant culture.
The high-end culinary trend started by Los Mayas has flickered on and off since the 1980s, and pandemic times have been tough on ambition in the restaurant industry. A few places in Tucson persist; I especially like Charro Steak & Del Rey, an offshoot of the El Charro family. Its Tequila’d Trout features a perfectly cooked fish with a chile rub and a tequila-Dijon reduction, with a farrago of roasted green beans, beets and crisp onions ladled over it.
My final stop in Tucson on the most recent visit was to collect three dozen impossibly thin, warm, Sonoran-style flour tortillas from Anita Street Market, a Tucson institution since 1984. It’s a tiny, family-run tortilleria in a neighborhood where fences are made of spiny ocotillo stalks and stucco walls are graced with sun-faded paintings of the Madonna. I’ll always think of it as the very soul of Tucson. In too many cities, “soul” is an elusive quality, but in Tucson, it’s never in doubt. It’s your next meal.