What it is
Carolina’s is a cinder-block Mexican counter at the corner of 12th Street and Mohave, in what is left of the old barrio south of Sky Harbor, and it has been the standard for flour tortillas in Phoenix since Carolina Valenzuela opened her first restaurant in 1968. The tortillas are made by hand through the day, thin, soft and slightly blistered, and they come to the counter hot in plastic bags that steam up while you wait; a butter tortilla is on the menu as its own item and people order it as one. The machaca, shredded beef in a thick red or green sauce, is the dish: on a plate, in the breakfast burro with egg, beans and potatoes, in a taco in a flour shell. The rest of the menu is the Sonoran canon, done well and cheaply.
There is no decor, no music, no table service. You order at the counter, take a number and sit where there is room, next to a judge, a roofer and a flight crew, because the lunch line here is the most complete cross-section of Phoenix you will see on the trip.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because the tortillas in Scottsdale come from a bag, mostly, and the ones here are the reason people who left Phoenix drive straight from the airport before they go home. Our best Mexican restaurants note has the city’s good Sonoran rooms, Garcia’s among them, and none of them is this cheap or this exact. Carolina’s is the one meal in this guide that costs less than the parking at a Scottsdale resort, and it is better than most of what the parking buys.
The practical version
Twenty-five minutes from Old Town, ten from the airport; our airport note has it as the stop on the way in. Monday to Saturday, 7 AM to 5 PM, closed Sunday. Breakfast is quiet, the noon line is long and fast. Order machaca, say red or green, add a dozen tortillas to go. Everything fits in a budget trip, and our Scottsdale on a budget note leans on it.
When to go
Weekday breakfast, between seven and ten, is the Carolina’s regulars know: no line, the tortillas just off the comal, the machaca and egg burro at its best. Lunch from noon to one is the show, a line out the door that moves faster than it looks and a room full of every kind of Phoenician; go for it once. Saturday is busy all day. Sunday it is closed, which has stranded more than one visitor with a flight and a plan.
It works in any season because you are inside for twenty minutes. In summer it is the one restaurant in this guide where the heat changes nothing.
What to order
- Machaca and egg burro. The breakfast, with beans and potatoes inside, in a tortilla made an hour ago.
- Machaca plate. Number five on the combination menu, with red or green sauce, rice and beans and tortillas. The red is thick, oniony and the house’s own.
- Tacos. Flour tortillas folded and fried into crisp shells, which is a Phoenix thing, filled with the same beef.
- The Zarape Special. Three beef flautas under sour cream and guacamole, the regulars’ alternate.
- Tortillas to go. A dozen, hot, in the bag. Then a butter tortilla to eat in the car, which is the real reason to come.
With kids
A bean-and-cheese burro and a butter tortilla will make a child happy for less than a resort juice. The room is loud and nobody minds anything.
The neighborhood
South of the airport and east of downtown, this was a Mexican-American barrio of small houses and churches until the city bought most of it in the 1980s to clear the approach paths for Sky Harbor; Carolina’s itself was moved three blocks by the same program. What remains is warehouses, the planes, a few blocks of houses and this counter, which has outlasted the neighborhood it fed.
The story
Manuel and Carolina Valenzuela started in the 1950s selling tortillas, burritos and tamales out of their car, at wrestling matches and to farm workers in the fields that then ringed Phoenix. In 1968 they put $400 of savings into a small restaurant at 105 W Hilton Avenue and put Carolina’s name on it. By 1972 it had outgrown the building and moved to 1519 E Mohave Street, in the barrio south of the airport, where the lunch line began. Manuel died in October 1979 and Carolina ran it with her children.
Then the city came. In 1985 the City of Phoenix bought the Mohave Street property as part of a program that cleared the old neighborhood for Sky Harbor’s expansion, house by house, and the Valenzuelas moved three blocks west to the northeast corner of 12th Street and Mohave, where the new restaurant opened on July 4, 1986. Nothing else about it changed. Carolina died in May 2002, and the family carried the name outward, to North Phoenix, Peoria, Mesa, Glendale and Chandler through one set of children, and to Avondale from this counter through another; today there are two Carolina’s companies and one recipe. The Mohave Street original, with its Best of Phoenix plaques and its plastic bags of tortillas, is the one the city means when it says Carolina’s.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s Mexican food grew up on the same tortilla. The Sonoran flour tortilla, thin and large, is the Phoenix style, and the restaurants that fed Old Town in the 1960s and 1970s bought theirs from Phoenix tortillerias like this one or made them the same way. What Scottsdale could not keep was the price: a counter like Carolina’s survives on volume and a paid-off building, and both are impossible on Scottsdale Road. So the city’s Sonoran places became sit-down restaurants, and Carolina’s stayed a counter, and the thirty minutes between them is the distance between a good dinner and the real thing. Scottsdale people know this, which is why so many of them are in the line.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road or 64th Street south to the 202, the 202 west toward downtown, exit at SR 143 south or 24th Street, then west on Mohave Street to 12th Street; the restaurant is on the northeast corner at 1202 E Mohave, with a lot. Twenty-five minutes from Old Town with no traffic, ten from the Sky Harbor rental-car center, which is the route most people take. The Valley Metro light rail does not come close. Bring some cash; it is that kind of counter.