What it means
Mesquite grilling is cooking over the coals of the mesquite tree, and in Arizona the phrase carries a whole memory with it. Say “mesquite-broiled” to anyone who has lived here a few decades and they will smell it: the blue smoke drifting over picnic tables at Pinnacle Peak Patio, the porterhouse hitting the grate, the beans on the tin plate. On a modern menu the word is a promise that the fire is real, since mesquite burns hotter and faster than most hardwoods and leaves a strong, slightly sweet smoke that a gas broiler cannot fake.
The tree is everywhere. Velvet mesquite is the commonest hardwood in the Sonoran Desert, the thorny, feathery-leaved tree in every wash and on every golf course edge around Scottsdale; the desert plants field guide covers it as a plant and the mesquite entry covers it as a word. This page is about what happens when you set it on fire under a steak.
Where you’ll meet it
On menus that say mesquite-grilled or wood-fired, at the Sonoran grill rooms around the Valley where carne asada cooks the traditional way, in the backyards of longtime residents on a winter Saturday, in the lost-restaurant pages of this site, and in the smell that still drifts off Rawhide at its relocated home near Chandler.
Where the word came from
Mesquite was food long before it was fuel. The Tohono O’odham and the River Pima, the Akimel O’odham whose descendants are Scottsdale’s neighbors, harvested the sweet pods and ground them into flour, and the Pima calendar marked a mesquite-leaves moon and a mesquite-flowers moon. The University of Arizona’s arboretum notes the wood was also valued for construction and the inner bark for baskets, and that Southwesterners have long prized mesquite charcoal “for the delicious flavor it gives food on the grill.” Spanish ranching added the beef.
The pairing of mesquite and thin beef is Sonoran. In the ranch country of northern Mexico, carne asada means skirt or flank steak over mesquite coals, chopped into a flour tortilla, and the social event of the same name is built around that fire. Tucson Foodie’s history of the Sonoran flour tortilla credits “cattle ranching and mesquite wood abundant in northern Mexico” for the tradition, and the newer Sonoran grill rooms in Phoenix advertise their mesquite fires as the proof of authenticity. See carne asada for the rest of that kitchen.
Scottsdale turned the fire into an industry. From 1957, when a general store near Pinnacle Peak started grilling steaks for jeep-tour riders, through the 2015 closings, the city’s cowboy steakhouses advertised mesquite-broiled steaks as their reason to exist. Pinnacle Peak Patio, Reata Pass and Rawhide all cooked over it; so did a polished-casual generation that followed, led by Buster’s in McCormick Ranch, whose mesquite-broiled fish was the neighborhood’s signature for two decades. The cowboy steakhouse entry tells that story; the smell is its epitaph.
What it is not
Mesquite grilling is not barbecue in the Texas or Carolina sense. Barbecue is low heat and long smoke; mesquite is high heat and fast, used as coals under a steak or a fish, and its smoke turns acrid over hours. “Mesquite flavor” in a bottled sauce or a bag of chips is a chemistry project with no tree involved.
The fine print
A few facts for cooks. Velvet mesquite, Prosopis velutina, grows 30 to 50 feet tall where it finds water and stays shrubby where it does not; the wood is dense and slow-growing, which is why it burns hot and why mesquite furniture is expensive. Most bagged mesquite charcoal sold in Arizona is made in Mexico from related species, and Texas honey mesquite is the cousin that built that state’s barbecue. For grilling, lump charcoal is the right form: it lights fast, runs very hot, and gives the flavor without the bitterness that mesquite chips or green wood produce. Keep the cut thin, the cooking short and the lid off.
The tree is also a landscaping staple and a seasonal nuisance. Native and hybrid mesquites line Scottsdale’s parkways and golf courses, and the hybrids in particular blow over in monsoon storms, which is why a lot of free firewood appears at curbs in August. Seasoned a year, it is good cooking wood. Burn it legally: Maricopa County declares no-burn days in winter when the air is bad, and many HOAs restrict open fires.
Where the real fire survives in Scottsdale is a short list. Roaring Fork in Old Town runs a wood-fire kitchen. Lon’s at the Hermosa grills over a hacienda hearth that cowboy artist Lon Megargee built in the 1930s. The Sonoran asaderos in Phoenix, Bacanora among them, cook everything over mesquite and are worth the drive. And Rawhide, forty minutes south at Wild Horse Pass, still broils a cowboy steak over the same wood it used on Scottsdale Road from 1971 to 2005. The smoke moved; it did not go out.