What is Cien Agaves?
The name is an inventory claim: cien agaves, a hundred agaves. Walk into the 1st Avenue room and the back bar makes good on it — more than 100 tequilas and mezcals racked like a reference collection, in a neighborhood where most taco spots treat tequila as margarita fuel.
Cien Agaves Tacos & Tequila opened in Old Town in 2007, early enough to watch the surrounding blocks transform into the Valley’s party capital, and stubborn enough not to transform with them. Its bet has never changed: make the Mexican food from scratch — tortillas, salsas, the works — and back it with an agave program serious enough that the bartenders function as librarians. In an entertainment district where “tacos and tequila” usually describes a DJ’s backdrop, Cien Agaves means it literally.
The outside world eventually noticed. USA Today readers have voted it among the best Mexican restaurants in the country, the kind of national nod that rarely lands on a neighborhood-scale Old Town address. And the concept has proven it travels: a second, far larger Valley location recently opened in Chandler, built around a 300-seat version of the same idea.
Eating at the original still feels like being let in on Old Town’s open secret. It’s lively without being a scene, priced like a regular’s spot, and staffed by people who can tell you why your margarita tastes better with the reposado they suggested. Nearly two decades in, that’s a durable kind of magic.
Eating and drinking your way through the list
Order tacos like the kitchen wants you to. The scratch-made approach means the difference between Cien Agaves and the neighborhood’s louder taco bars shows up in the details — tortillas with actual flavor, salsas made in-house, fillings that taste cooked rather than assembled. The right strategy is rounds, not a single blowout order: a couple of tacos, a lap of the salsa lineup, then back for whatever your neighbor’s plate made you jealous of.
Treat the bar as the second menu. The hundred-bottle agave list is organized to be explored — blancos for margaritas with edges, reposados and anejos for sipping, mezcal for the smoke-curious. The high-percentage move is conversational: tell the bartender your usual pour and your budget, and let them build you a flight. A margarita upgraded to a bottle you picked on purpose is the house’s quiet flex, and it costs less than you’d fear.
Timing follows Old Town’s tides. Weeknights are the regulars’ window — easy seating, unhurried bar staff, the room at its most neighborly. Weekends bring the district’s energy in the door, and March is its own season: the restaurant sits an easy stumble from the Cactus League spring training crowds that flood Old Town, so plan around game times or embrace the roar. Big event weekends like the WM Phoenix Open fill every chair in the neighborhood, this one included.
Know what it isn’t. There’s no tableside guacamole theater, no bottle-service mezzanine, no Instagram wall. Cien Agaves competes on cooking and inventory, which makes it the Old Town taco room you take people who care about the food more than the photo.
Outlasting the taco boom it predates
Consider the timeline. When Cien Agaves opened in 2007, Old Town’s Mexican dining ran to old-guard family rooms and tourist cantinas. In the two decades since, the neighborhood has cycled through an entire taco-industrial complex — design-forward newcomers like Diego Pops, chef-driven statements like The Mission, party machines like El Hefe, and value plays like Loco Patron. Concepts arrived with launch parties and left with liquidation sales. Cien Agaves just kept making tortillas.
Its survival strategy reads obvious in hindsight: pick a lane the trend cycle can’t commoditize. Scratch cooking is expensive and slow to fake; a hundred-bottle agave program takes years of buying and training to build. While competitors fought over the Saturday-night crowd, Cien Agaves accumulated the more valuable asset — Tuesday regulars who’ve ordered the same tacos since the Bush administration and bartenders who remember what they drink. The USA Today readers’ honor was the national market catching up to what the 85251 zip code already knew.
The recent expansion is the interesting second act. The Chandler location — a 300-seat production with tequila-temple ambitions — inverts the original’s scale entirely, and it puts Cien Agaves in the company of Scottsdale-born restaurant brands that grew into Valley-wide players. Whether the big-box version keeps the original’s soul is a fair question; what’s not in question is which room this guide prefers. The 1st Avenue original, with its human scale and its lived-in bar, remains the point.
Honest assessment: Cien Agaves is not the Valley’s most refined Mexican kitchen — for special-occasion modern Latin cooking, Old Town has flashier rooms. What it is, is the neighborhood’s most reliable one: nearly twenty years of doing two things well, a hundred bottles deep. In Old Town, longevity like that isn’t luck. It’s the tell.