What is Blanco Cocina + Cantina?
In the summer of 2008 the Borgata, Scottsdale’s charmingly improbable faux-Tuscan village of a shopping center, had an empty restaurant space: P.F. Chang’s had closed its Taneko Japanese Tavern there in July. The site went to the person Scottsdale always calls: Sam Fox.
Blanco Cocina + Cantina is Fox Restaurant Concepts’ polished cantina brand, born in Tucson as Blanco Tacos + Tequila and raised alongside the rest of the Phoenix-based Fox empire (which has operated under The Cheesecake Factory’s ownership since 2019, without visibly changing its hit rate). The first Blanco opened at La Encantada in Tucson in 2007, and the Borgata location followed in November 2008, giving the brand one of the most photogenic patios on lower Scottsdale Road.
The formula is Fox at his most commercial and most effective: short rib tacos, guacamole in quantities that suggest a supply contract, margaritas engineered for repeat orders, and a room styled to the last light fixture. This is Sonoran-style crowd-pleasing rather than regional scholarship — nobody at Blanco is going to quiz you about Oaxaca — and it executes that mandate with the consistency that has made Fox the Valley’s dominant restaurateur for three decades.
The bet paid off. The patio became one of the busiest on this stretch of Scottsdale Road, pulling Paradise Valley from one side and Scottsdale from the other, and it kept the courtyard busy through the years when the Borgata’s shops emptied out.
Margarita hour at the Tuscan village
Blanco’s menu rewards decisiveness, because the right answers are printed in bold.
Order the short rib tacos. They’re the brand’s signature for a reason — rich, sweet-savory, and the dish that separates Blanco from the taco-shop field it superficially resembles. The guacamole is the mandatory opener, the enchiladas and bowls cover the table’s moderates, and the kitchen’s overall register is precision comfort: bright plates, no heat that requires a waiver, portions calibrated to margarita consumption.
About those margaritas: the list runs from the flagship house version through seasonal and premium builds, and it is the restaurant’s true engine — this is as much cantina as cocina, and the drink program is where the energy concentrates. Happy hour, where offered, is the value window; ask.
The setting is half the ticket. The Borgata’s courtyard — bell tower, brick, the whole 1980s Italian-village fantasy now scrubbed and relit — gives Blanco’s patio a stage-set quality no strip center can match, and dusk is its hour. Book a patio table for golden hour between October and May and the place does the romancing for you. Summer moves the action inside, where the room holds the same polish at 74 degrees.
Logistics: reservations are wise for dinner and weekend brunch, especially in season when the Paradise Valley border corridor fills with winter residents. Parking at the Borgata rewards a few minutes of patience or an early arrival. Prices sit in the accessible-modern-Mexican middle — more than a taqueria, less than the resort Mexican up the road — and the service runs on the Fox house style: fast, upbeat, relentlessly competent.
Fox, the Borgata, and the art of the second act
Blanco’s Borgata chapter is really two Scottsdale stories intersecting: the town’s most prolific restaurateur, and its most eccentric shopping center.
The Fox story first. Sam Fox built Fox Restaurant Concepts into the Valley’s defining hospitality machine — Culinary Dropout, Flower Child, North Italia, The Greene House, the True Food Kitchen partnership with Dr. Weil — a portfolio so woven into Scottsdale dining that avoiding it takes planning. Blanco was one of his earlier brands, born in Tucson in 2007 and in Scottsdale by November 2008, and its evolution from “Tacos + Tequila” to “Cocina + Cantina” tracks Fox’s larger trajectory: concepts that begin as singles and mature into polished, scalable rooms. The 2019 Cheesecake Factory acquisition gave the group national capital while leaving the Scottsdale creative engine running.
The Borgata story is stranger and better. Built in the early 1980s as a replica Tuscan hill village — turrets, campanile, cobblestones, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert — the center spent decades as a beloved oddity sliding toward vacancy while Fashion Square ate the luxury retail market. Blanco arrived in 2008, in the space P.F. Chang’s had used for its short-lived Taneko Japanese Tavern izakaya (fall 2006 to July 2008), and the Fox cantina was the courtyard’s most reliable draw while the shops thinned out. The center’s later redevelopment flipped the thesis: stop fighting for retail, become a dining-and-gathering destination, and let the architecture be the amenity, with Blanco already in place. The nearby stretch already had gravity — El Chorro and Lon’s at the Hermosa hold down the historic end of the Paradise Valley border’s dining tradition — and Blanco gave the corridor its high-volume, everyday engine.
Honest assessment: Blanco is corporate Mexican food executed near the ceiling of the genre — you can find more soulful regional cooking in the Valley, and you won’t find a more reliable patio-margarita evening on this side of town. Judge it as what it is: the professional’s version of a good time, staged in Scottsdale’s most endearing piece of fake Italy.