What is Los Sombreros?
Drive south on Scottsdale Road past the resorts and the car dealerships, and the best Mexican food in the city is hiding in a house older than the city’s charter.
Los Sombreros opened in 1994, when chef Azucena Tovar took over a little 1930s-era house at 2534 N Scottsdale Rd and started cooking the food of interior Mexico — moles built from long ingredient lists and longer afternoons, lamb adobo that falls apart at the suggestion of a fork, enchiladas stuffed with butternut squash instead of yellow cheese. In a Valley where “Mexican food” mostly meant Sonoran combo plates, this was quietly radical. The critics noticed almost immediately. The awards have never really stopped.
Eating there feels like being invited somewhere. The house’s small rooms hold a handful of tables each, the patio wraps around under strings of lights, and the margaritas arrive with the confidence of a place that has been making them the same way for thirty years. It’s date-night worthy without being precious, and cheap enough that regulars treat it like a neighborhood spot — because for south Scottsdale, that’s exactly what it is.
Tovar eventually returned to Mexico and passed the restaurant to longtime staff, and the remarkable thing is how little that changed. The lamb is still the lamb. The house is still the house. Three decades in, Los Sombreros remains the standing answer to the question of where Scottsdale’s real Mexican cooking lives.
How to order at Los Sombreros
Start from this premise: you are not here for burros enchilada-style. The menu is built around interior Mexican technique, and the kitchen’s greatest hits have been stable for decades.
The lamb adobo is the franchise. Slow-cooked until it surrenders, sauced in a dark, spiced adobo, it’s the dish that made the restaurant’s name and the one to order on a first visit, no debate. The butternut squash enchiladas are the co-headliner — sweet, earthy, and good enough that carnivores order them as a side. Whatever mole is running deserves a spot on the table too; this is one of the few Valley kitchens that treats mole as a craft rather than a squeeze bottle.
The margaritas matter. They’ve collected their own best-of nods over the years — order one on the rocks and resist the urge to upgrade into novelty flavors. The rest of the drink list is short and correct.
Logistics: the house is genuinely small, so weekends without a reservation mean a wait. The move is the patio in the cooler months — October through May, under the twinkle lights, is south Scottsdale outdoor dining at its best. Summer pushes everyone into the cozy interior rooms, which have their own charm, all low ceilings and old-house intimacy. Prices sit comfortably in the middle: this is special-occasion cooking at Tuesday-night cost, which explains the crowd of regulars who treat it as both.
Come hungry, order for the middle of the table, and leave room for whatever dessert involves chocolate — the kitchen’s sweet tooth is as Mexican as its savory one.
The little house that changed Scottsdale’s Mexican food
To understand why Los Sombreros mattered in 1994, you have to remember what surrounded it. The Valley had wonderful Sonoran-style institutions — Los Olivos had been feeding Old Town since the Corral family’s early days, and Frank & Lupe’s held down the combo-plate tradition with honor. What it didn’t have was much representation of Mexico’s interior: the moles of Oaxaca and Puebla, the adobos, the regional cooking that treats sauce-making as an inheritance. Azucena Tovar cooked that food, in a converted 1930s house, on a stretch of south Scottsdale Road nobody was calling a dining destination.
The gamble worked because the cooking was undeniable. Food writers made the pilgrimage, best-of lists followed, and Los Sombreros became the reference point — the place cited whenever anyone argued that Scottsdale’s Mexican food could be more than tourist fuel. A generation of Valley restaurants that now casually offer mole and cochinita pibil are operating in territory the little house helped clear. When a newer wave arrived in Old Town — Barrio Queen with its street-food maximalism, the modern cantinas along the entertainment district — they were building on an audience Los Sombreros had spent fifteen years educating.
The ownership transition could have been the end of the story; it usually is. When Tovar returned to Mexico in the late 2010s, longtime staff bought the restaurant rather than letting it drift to an operator, and the continuity shows in the food. Other locations have opened and closed around the Valley over the years — expansion has never been the point. The point is the original house.
There’s also something fitting about its location. South Scottsdale is the city’s most interesting neighborhood right now — old motor courts and mid-century strip malls slowly filling with breweries and studios — and Los Sombreros predates all of it, a 1930s house that watched the 1990s revival come and go and simply kept cooking. Thirty years of lamb adobo is its own kind of historic preservation.