What is Juan Jaime’s Tacos and Tequila?
Juan Jaime’s Tacos and Tequila sits at 20343 N Hayden Road, Suite 120, in Hayden Peak Crossing, the Fry’s-anchored center on the northeast corner of Thompson Peak Parkway and Hayden Road in North Scottsdale. It has been there since 2010, which makes it one of the older restaurants in a part of the city where most things date from after the 101 opened.
The business started in Chandler. By the restaurant’s own account, John James and Adam Dahlberg opened the first Juan Jaime’s on July 1, 2007: James had spent more than 20 years traveling in Mexico, often enough that his friends renamed him Juan Jaime, and Dahlberg had the bar background. The idea was the taco cart, the street stand that lines Mexican city streets, done as a sit-down room with a long bar and a shelf of tequila. Scottsdale came three years later, and when the Chandler original closed in May 2022 after the owners declined to renew the lease, this became the only one.
What you get is a taco shop that keeps bar hours. The kitchen is open from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days, the happy hour runs 4 to 8 every afternoon, and the menu is short and cheap by north Scottsdale standards: a two-taco plate for $12.50, a Taco Trio for $14.50, burritos, enchiladas, a self-serve salsa bar, a Kahlua brownie for dessert. The crowd is the subdivisions on either side, DC Ranch to the east and Grayhawk to the west, plus the people who work in the center.
Our verdict: not a destination and not trying to be one, but a dependable neighborhood taco bar that has outlasted a dozen flashier neighbors, and the only kitchen on this stretch of Hayden serving at 1 a.m.
Ordering at Juan Jaime’s
Order tacos, in threes. The Taco Trio ($14.50, three tacos with rice and beans) is the right order because the fillings are the menu: chicken, steak, carnitas, mahi mahi, shrimp or vegetarian, on corn, flour or whole-wheat tortillas. The mahi mahi is the one reviewers single out; the thin flour tortillas were the detail a 2011 reviewer remembered. The two-taco plate is $12.50 and a single taco a la carte is $4.50, which is how families with small children order. Burritos run $11.50, or $14.25 enchilada-style with rice and beans; the Juan, Dos, Tres (tostada, enchilada, taco) is $13.45, cheese enchiladas $12.95, and the grilled platter of steak, chicken or mahi $14. Starters are what you expect, chips and salsa at $4, queso $6.50, guacamole $6.75, nachos $7.25, a shrimp cocktail at $8.95, and the salsa bar is self-serve with several heats plus cabbage, radish and lettuce.
Drink the happy hour. It runs 4 to 8 p.m. every day on margaritas, beer, wine, sangria and 3 Olives vodka drinks. Off the regular list, the house De La Casa margarita is $7, the Skinny Juan (Tres Agaves organic tequila, agave, lime) $9, the prickly pear Javelina Juice with a chile-lime rim $10, the Cadillac with a Grand Marnier floater $12, a Mezcal Mule $11 and an espresso martini on reposado, the Agave After Dark, $13. Draft beer is $5 to $5.50, and there are a couple dozen bottles, hard seltzers and non-alcoholic beers. The restaurant’s name promises a tequila list; the published drinks page names the brands in the cocktails rather than pours by the glass, so ask at the bar.
Dessert. The Kahlua brownie with ice cream ($5.95) is the house dessert and once appeared on a local morning show; sopapillas are $5.75.
Timing and the room. Reviewers describe a lunch crowd, families at dinner, and a bar after 10. It is open until 2 a.m. seven nights, which puts it on our late-night food list for the north end, where almost nothing else serves past 10. There are no reservations; birthday and company parties are booked by phone, and catering covers 20 to 200 people from a separate menu. Parking is the center’s shared lot. The sushi bar Pure and Ling’s Wok Shop are neighbors if the table cannot agree on tacos. For the citywide field, see the best Mexican restaurants in Scottsdale.
The taco bar that outlasted its own original
Juan Jaime’s is a small business with a small record, and the record is mostly its own telling. The founding story, James and Dahlberg, the nickname, the taco carts, comes from the restaurant’s business profile rather than a newspaper; no Valley critic appears to have reviewed either location at length, and the press we found does not say who owns the company today or whether the founders are still involved. What the record does show is durability. The Chandler room ran from 2007 to May 2022, fifteen years near the 101 and Chandler Boulevard, and closed not from failure but from a lease the owners chose not to renew; Mouth by Southwest reported that Albuquerque’s Little Anita’s took the space. The Scottsdale room, opened in 2010, is now sixteen years old.
That matters because of where it is. Hayden Peak Crossing was a new center when Juan Jaime’s arrived, built by the Pederson Group at the corner where Thompson Peak Parkway meets Hayden, between the master-planned DC Ranch on the mountain side and Grayhawk on the other. By 2021, when AZ Big Media covered the arrival of Ling’s Wok Shop, the center was described as fully occupied and Juan Jaime’s was listed with Pure Sushi and Tavern Americana as the restaurants that defined it. In 2024, when Elvira’s was preparing to open at Market Street, What Now Phoenix counted Juan Jaime’s as one of only two Mexican restaurants in the whole Thompson Peak area, a reminder of how underserved the north end has been for the city’s most basic cuisine.
The taco-and-tequila format also marks a moment. Juan Jaime’s opened in the late 2000s, when tacos and tequila were becoming a bar format of their own, and it took that format to a grocery-anchored suburban center rather than Old Town. It kept the 2 a.m. close, which is why it still works as the neighborhood’s bar as much as its taqueria, and its menu, $12.50 for two tacos with rice and beans, prices like a neighborhood place.
Honest assessment: the reviews are mixed in a consistent way, with praise for the shrimp and mahi mahi tacos, the margaritas and the salsa bar, and complaints about uneven service and the occasional underdone tortilla. Judge it as a neighborhood bar that happens to make respectable tacos, a cheap happy hour and the only kitchen open at midnight for miles, and it is a good one. Judge it against the best Mexican restaurants in Scottsdale and it does not place. Both things are true, and the neighborhood has voted with sixteen years of lunch tabs.