What it is
Bacanora is a Sonoran restaurant in a small building on Grand Avenue, the diagonal old highway that leaves downtown Phoenix to the northwest, and its whole premise fits in one sentence from its own website: everything is cooked over the open flame of a wood-fired grill. Chef Rene Andrade opened it in 2021. Within a year the James Beard Foundation had it on the Best New Restaurant list, The New York Times had it on its national restaurant list, and in 2024 Andrade won the Beard award for Best Chef: Southwest, the region’s top prize. It is named for the agave spirit of Sonora, which is on the menu and should be in your glass at least once.
The room is tight, the kitchen is a few feet from the tables, and the smoke is part of dinner. This is not a place for a quiet anniversary with white tablecloths. It is the place for the one dinner on a Scottsdale trip when you want to eat the thing the city is actually famous for right now.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has very good Mexican restaurants, and our best Mexican restaurants note names them, but nearly all of them cook some version of the Arizona-Mex and coastal menus that travel well to a resort town. Bacanora cooks the food of the state directly south of us: beef and mesquite, flour tortillas, the chiltepin pepper, whole fish from the Gulf of California. It is the regional cuisine of this part of the continent, and the restaurant everyone in the metro’s food world has been pointing to for five years is 25 minutes from Old Town. No restaurant on our what to eat in Scottsdale list does what this one does.
The practical version
Dinner only, Monday through Saturday from 5 PM, closed Sunday. Reservations through OpenTable, and you need one. Street parking on Grand Avenue. Budget a real dinner: the big cuts are priced like a steakhouse, the rest is fair. Twenty-five minutes from Old Town, 35 or more on a Friday, and a rideshare is the right call because the drink list deserves attention.
When to go
Any month, with two notes. In summer the fire in a small room is a real presence, and the patio is for October through April. In high season, January through March, when Scottsdale’s own restaurants book out weeks ahead, Bacanora’s weeknights are still gettable if you look a few days out; Fridays and Saturdays go first. A 5 PM Tuesday seating is the realistic last-minute table, and it is a fine time to eat here: the kitchen is fresh, the room is quiet, and the light on Grand Avenue is good.
What to order
Think in rounds, not courses. Start with the grilled vegetables and the salsa made over the fire, with tortillas. Share one of the bone-in steaks; the national press has written about the strip and the rib-eye, and the smoke is the point. Ask what fish came in. Finish with whatever the kitchen is doing with dessert that week. Drink bacanora, the spirit, at least once, neat or in a cocktail, and let the server steer the rest. Two people can eat generously for the price of a steakhouse dinner in Scottsdale; four people sharing is the best version of the meal.
With kids
It is a small, loud, smoky room with a serious menu and no kids’ menu we know of. Teenagers who like food will remember it; smaller children belong at Gallo Blanco across downtown, which has the same chef-driven care and a patio built for them.
The neighborhood
Grand Avenue is downtown Phoenix’s arts spine on the west side, a strip of old warehouses, galleries, bars and studios that comes alive on First Friday and otherwise keeps to itself. Before dinner, Bitter & Twisted is a ten-minute drive east for a cocktail in the old Luhrs Building; after dinner, The Nash on Roosevelt has late jazz sets with no cover on some nights. Our couples weekend note builds an evening around exactly that triangle.
The story
Rene Andrade cooked in Valley kitchens before opening Bacanora in 2021 in a modest space on Grand Avenue with a wood grill and not much else. The timing looked bad: downtown restaurants were still finding their footing after 2020, and the location was a warehouse strip most Phoenicians drove past on the way to somewhere else. The reviews came anyway. Esquire named it one of the best new restaurants in the country in 2021, the James Beard Foundation nominated it for Best New Restaurant in 2022, The New York Times put it on its national list of the restaurants it was most excited about, and in 2024 Andrade won Best Chef: Southwest at the Beard awards, the award that had been circling Phoenix cooks for years without landing on one of them.
The restaurant did not expand or move. The room is still small, the fire is still the whole kitchen, and the menu still reads like a Sonoran grill rather than a tasting-menu temple, which is a large part of why people love it. When the Michelin Guide finally reached the Southwest in August 2026 it gave Arizona no stars, which says more about the guide than the state, but it listed Bacanora as Recommended and handed Andrade its Young Chef Award, while his taqueria Huarachis took a Bib Gourmand. Any claim of a star for Bacanora is still wrong.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s restaurant history runs through Sonora more than most visitors know: the Mexican families who built the town’s first restaurants on the Old Town streets, the cattle and cotton that tied the Valley to the ranches south of the border, the carne asada culture that Phoenix’s west side has kept alive for a century. Bacanora is that lineage cooked at the highest level, and it is the restaurant that Scottsdale’s own chefs drive to on their nights off. If you want to understand why the metro’s Mexican food is different from Texas’s or California’s, this is the meal that explains it.
Getting there
From Old Town, west on Indian School Road past Central Avenue to Grand Avenue, then southeast on Grand to 13th Avenue; or McDowell Road west to Grand and a few blocks northwest. The restaurant sits on the northeast side of Grand with a small patio out front. Street parking on Grand and the side streets is free in the evening. Light rail does not reach this stretch of Grand, so it is a car or rideshare trip, and our getting around note has the rideshare math from each part of Scottsdale; from Old Town it runs about the price of one cocktail each way.