What it is
Pete’s Fish & Chips is the oldest fast-food business in Arizona that is still owned by the family that started it. Peter McLane Grant Jr. opened a roadside stand in 1947 with no running water and sold a basket of fried fish and chips for 35 cents; the company that grew from it has eight stands around the Valley today, every one of them a walk-up window with a few outdoor tables, every one of them cash only with an ATM beside the window. The menu is fish, shrimp and chips in a paper boat, a few extras, and the house hot sauce, a thin red sauce that regulars put on all of it and argue about. Grant was murdered in 1987; his daughters took the business over and have changed as little as possible since.
The stand at the southwest corner of Main Street and Mesa Drive, at the east end of downtown Mesa, is the one most people treat as the original and the one that matters for a visitor: a mile south of Hohokam Stadium, five blocks east of the Center/Main light-rail station, and the natural end of a downtown Mesa walk.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Not on its own; it is a fish basket thirty minutes away. As the postgame meal after an Athletics afternoon at Hohokam, or the last stop of a Mesa day, it is exactly right, and it belongs on the short list of Valley roadside survivors that our lost midcentury Scottsdale note mourns the Scottsdale versions of. Scottsdale kept the Sugar Bowl; Mesa kept Pete’s. Together they are the two places where the Valley of 1950 still takes your order. The budget note would add that two people eat here for the price of a Scottsdale appetizer.
The practical version
Thirty minutes from Old Town via the 101, the 202, Country Club Drive and Main Street east to Mesa Drive. Cash only; use the ATM if you forget. Order the fish or the fish-and-shrimp combination with hot sauce, eat at the tables or in the car, and do not try to carry it home. The Tempe stand on Apache Boulevard is a few minutes closer to Scottsdale if Mesa is not on the day’s route.
When to go
After a game at Hohokam Stadium in March, when the stand is a mile south and the line at the window is shorter than any line at the ballpark. A weekday lunch on a downtown Mesa day, as the eastern bookend to Worth Takeaway at the western end of Main. Any evening, since the stands keep long hours and the format was built for the car.
What to order
The fish and chips is the standard: battered fish, thick fries, a paper boat. The fish-and-shrimp combination is what regulars order. The hot sauce, the house’s thin red sauce, goes on everything; ask for extra. There are a few extras on the board, but the menu has been short for nearly eighty years and the short menu is the point. Prices are low enough that the cash-only rule rarely costs anyone more than a twenty.
The neighborhood
Main and Mesa Drive is the east end of downtown, where the storefronts thin out and the light rail’s Mesa Drive station sits a block north. West along Main are the restaurants, the arts center and the museums of the downtown Mesa guide; north on Center Street is the ballpark. The stand has watched all of that arrive from the same corner.
The story
In 1947 Pete Grant, a young man with a recipe and very little money, set up a fish-and-chips stand by a Valley roadside without running water and sold a basket for 35 cents. Fish and chips was an odd thing to sell in the desert and that was part of the appeal; the stand did well enough to become stands, and through the 1950s and 1960s, as Phoenix and the East Valley filled in, Pete’s opened walk-up windows along the main roads of Mesa, Tempe, Phoenix and Glendale, each one the same: a window, a short menu, a paper boat, the hot sauce, a few tables outside. The format never changed because it never needed to; the stands were cheap to run and the food was cheap to buy, and three generations of East Valley families learned to eat fish out of a boat on a tailgate.
In 1987 Grant was murdered, and the company passed to his daughters, who have run it since as the family business it always was. They have resisted most of the pressures a chain faces: no indoor dining rooms, no card readers, no change to the format. The eight stands in operation in the 2020s look very much like the stands of 1960, and the one at Main and Mesa Drive looks like the one Pete Grant would recognize.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale and Mesa both grew up on roadside food in the postwar years, and Scottsdale lost nearly all of it; the lost midcentury Scottsdale note is a list of the drive-ins and coffee shops that are gone. The Sugar Bowl, the 1958 ice-cream parlor on Scottsdale Road, is the city’s great survivor; Pete’s is Mesa’s, nine years older, and a visitor who does both in a day has eaten the Valley of the 1950s in its two surviving forms. The what to eat note covers what replaced the rest.
Getting there
The 101 south to the 202 east, exit Country Club Drive, south to Main Street, then east through downtown about a mile and a half to Mesa Drive; the stand is on the southwest corner with its own small lot. Thirty minutes from Old Town, thirty-five from the Camelback corridor. The Mesa Drive light-rail station is a block north, useful from Tempe; our getting around note explains why it does not help from Scottsdale.