What to Eat in Scottsdale: Sonoran Dogs, Chimichangas, Dates, and the Steakhouse Question

Scottsdale is a very good place to eat and a slightly confusing one. Most of the restaurants a visitor hears about are resort dining rooms, hospitality-group concepts, and steakhouses that could be in any rich suburb in America. Often excellent, but not what this place tastes like.

What this place tastes like is Sonora. The Mexican state starts a few hours south of here, and the food of southern Arizona is its food: flour tortillas, beef, beans, and green chile. Here’s the canon, and where we eat it.

Sonoran, not Tex-Mex

A few things to know before you order:

• Flour tortillas are the point. Big, thin, and soft. In Sonoran cooking, flour is the default, not the substitute.
• Beef rules. Carne asada, machaca (dried, shredded beef), and carne seca are the proteins the canon is built on.
• The enchiladas may be flat. A Sonoran enchilada is often a thick masa patty, not a rolled tortilla. If the menu says “Sonoran enchiladas,” order them.
• The cheese crisp is a birthright. A flour tortilla, crisped flat, covered edge to edge in melted cheese, sometimes with green chile. It’s an Arizona thing, and every longtime Valley family orders one before anything else.

New Mexican food, with its red and green chile, is a separate cuisine with its own fans. Carlsbad Tavern in south Scottsdale does it well, with a kitchen that runs late. Just don’t call it Sonoran.

The Sonoran hot dog

A hot dog wrapped in bacon and griddled, set in a soft bolillo-style roll, and buried in pinto beans, onions, tomatoes, mayonnaise, mustard, and jalapeño salsa. It came up from Sonora by way of Tucson, where a stand called El Güero Canelo won a James Beard America’s Classics award for it in 2018.

The best ones are still sold from carts and small stands in Tucson and in south and west Phoenix, not in Scottsdale. In Old Town, Diego Pops does an accessible version that’s a reasonable first date with the genre. When you’re ready for the real thing, drive toward the carts.

The chimichanga argument

A chimichanga is a burrito that has been deep-fried, and Arizona would like the credit. Tucson and Phoenix both claim to have invented it, and both origin stories involve a burrito, a fryer, and an accident. Neither is in Scottsdale, so we stay out of it.

Order a machaca chimi, and get it with sour cream and guacamole on the side. It is not light food. It is not meant to be.

The Mexican-food institutions

• Los Olivos. The Corral family has run it in Old Town since the late 1940s, in an adobe building from 1928 with a sculpted facade. Cheese crisp, Sonoran enchiladas, chimichangas, a margarita, the patio. This is the elder statesman.
• Los Sombreros. Chef Azucena Tovar’s interior-Mexican room in a 1930s house on south Scottsdale Road, since 1994. Lamb adobo, real mole, the twinkle-lit patio.
• Barrio Queen. Regional Mexican by the Old Town canal — cochinita pibil, birria, house-pressed tortillas — and a tequila list in the hundreds.
• The Mission. Modern Latin beside the Old Adobe Mission, and the tableside guacamole everyone copies.
• La Hacienda. The upscale Mexican dining room at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess, for when the occasion calls for a tequila library.

Dates and prickly pear

The Valley grew dates long before it grew golf courses, and Arizona still grows a lot of Medjools. Sphinx Date Co. started as a date ranch in 1951, the year the town incorporated, and now sells Arizona dates from a shop on Scottsdale Road. Order the date shake, drink it in the car, and ask whether Black Sphinx dates are in; they’re a Phoenix-born variety with a short season.

Prickly pear is the magenta fruit of the flat-padded cactus you see everywhere, and it ripens in late summer. The good stuff is the syrup, which turns up in margaritas and lemonade across town. Don’t pick the fruit barehanded: it’s covered in tiny hair-like spines that come out one at a time over several days. Our desert plants field guide explains why.

For the rest of Arizona agriculture in one place, the Old Town Farmers Market runs Saturday mornings from roughly October into early summer. Get there before 10:00 AM.

The steakhouse question

Scottsdale has cattle in its history and more steakhouses than it needs. The cowboy ones that fed generations of visitors at mesquite fires up by Pinnacle Peak are mostly gone. What replaced them is expensive and good, and at least one of them is actually from here: Mastro’s opened its first steakhouse near Pinnacle Peak in 1999 before exporting the formula to Beverly Hills and New York. Mastro’s City Hall in Old Town is the one to book, for the sizzling plates and the butter cake.

If you’d rather eat somewhere with a longer memory, El Chorro, just over the line in Paradise Valley, has served dinner between Camelback and Mummy Mountain since 1937, with warm sticky buns on every table.

Order like a local

• Start with a cheese crisp. The table will thank you.
• Ask for green chile. On eggs, burgers, and anything else that will hold it.
• In summer, eat late. Patios reopen after the sun goes down, and the misters do the rest.
• Save room for the Sugar Bowl. Old Town’s pink ice cream parlor has been on Scottsdale Road since 1958.

One day, eaten properly

1. Breakfast burrito with machaca, anywhere with fresh flour tortillas.
2. A date shake at Sphinx around 11:00 AM, as a matter of principle.
3. A late lunch on the Los Olivos patio: cheese crisp, Sonoran enchiladas, one margarita.
4. Dinner at Los Sombreros, or a steak if the group insists.
5. A Sonoran hot dog from a Phoenix cart, if your route passes one and you still can.

You won’t need dinner the next day. You’ll want it anyway.