What it means
Carne asada is Spanish for grilled meat, and in Arizona it means one specific thing: thin beef, salted and squeezed with lime, laid over a hot fire until the edges char, then chopped and folded into a flour tortilla. You will hear it as a dish (“two carne asada tacos”), as a cut at the Mexican meat counter, and as an event (“we’re having a carne asada Sunday”), which in northern Mexico means a backyard barbecue where the grill is the guest of honor.
The word does a bigger job here than it does elsewhere, because it stands in for a whole cuisine. Arizona’s Mexican food is Sonoran, the cooking of the Mexican state that starts a few hours south of Scottsdale. That kitchen runs on beef, pinto beans, green chile and large, thin flour tortillas, with smoke from mesquite and heat from the tiny wild chiltepin. When a local says a restaurant is “real Sonoran,” carne asada is the first thing they are picturing.
The what-to-eat guide lays out the canon and the Mexican restaurant guide sorts the rooms; this page explains the menu words.
Where you’ll meet it
On every taco list in the city, at the Sunday grill in any Scottsdale backyard with Sonoran roots, at Los Olivos on 2nd Street, where the Corral family has cooked since 1947, and in the “Sonoran” label that restaurants from Old Town to Jalapeño Inferno near Pinnacle Peak use to tell you what they are not.
Where the word came from
The dish came north with the people. Spanish colonization put cattle on Sonora’s open range, and ranching became one of the state’s defining industries, so beef over fire became its defining food. The regional record places carne asada’s origin in northern Mexico, Sonora and Nuevo León in particular, where the same two words name the gathering as well as the plate.
The tortilla is the other half of the story. Spanish settlers brought wheat to Mexico, and in Sonora it took: the grain has thrived there for more than 400 years, and cooks developed the large, thin flour tortilla as an everyday bread rather than a novelty. Tucson Foodie’s 2026 explainer describes the Sonoran version as nearly paper thin, made only of flour, water, fat and salt, with no leavening, a staple across northern Mexico that gets harder to find as you head south.
Arizona inherited all of it. Southern Arizona was Sonora until the Gadsden Purchase, and the families who built Scottsdale’s first Mexican restaurants came from Sonoran towns; the Corrals of Los Olivos came from Cananea. DiningOut’s Phoenix guide describes the cuisine as rooted in preservation, machaca and carne seca, and in the mix of Old World wheat and citrus with native corn, tepary beans and chiltepin.
Nobody coined “Sonoran style.” It is a description that hardened into a label as Arizona cooks needed a way to say what they were not.
What it is not
It is not Tex-Mex. That is the Texas border tradition: ground beef, yellow cheese, cumin-heavy chili con carne, crispy tacos and sour cream. Nothing wrong with it, but it is from a different border, and calling a Sonoran plate Tex-Mex is the fastest way to get corrected in a Scottsdale restaurant. It is also not New Mexican, the red-and-green-chile cuisine that Carlsbad Tavern and Frank & Lupe’s cook; see green chile vs. red chile for that line.
The fine print
A few menu words that trip up newcomers. Machaca is beef dried and shredded, then rehydrated with onion, tomato and chile; it is the Sonoran breakfast burrito filling and the classic chimichanga filling. Carne seca is the drier Tucson cousin. Sonoran enchiladas are not rolled: they are thick patties of masa, fried and stacked with sauce and cheese, which is why a Sonoran enchilada plate can look like a short stack of pancakes. The cheese crisp, a flour tortilla crisped flat and covered edge to edge in melted cheese, sometimes with green chile strips, is an Arizona habit so ingrained that longtime Valley families order it before they look at the menu.
The cut matters less than the fire. Skirt, flap and flank are the usual choices because they are thin and take a marinade fast; the heat is mesquite, which burns hot and leaves the smoky edge that the whole genre is built on. The newer Sonoran grill rooms in Phoenix, Bacanora among them, have made a point of cooking everything over mesquite, and the chef rooms on this site, the Mission and Barrio Queen, lean the same way.
One honest caveat: Scottsdale’s resort rooms serve a lot of excellent food that is not what this place tastes like, and the Sonoran institutions here are fewer than in Tucson or south Phoenix. For the old-school version eat at Los Olivos; for the street version of the same tradition, see the Sonoran hot dog; for the fried one, see the chimichanga, which Arizona claims and Scottsdale does not.