What is Simon’s Hot Dogs?
In 2021, when Yelp published its national list of the hundred best places to eat, the highest-ranked restaurant in Arizona wasn’t a resort dining room or a chef’s tasting counter. It was a hot dog shop in a strip center off Drinkwater Boulevard.
Simon’s Hot Dogs serves Colombian-style hot dogs, perros calientes, from a small storefront at 4280 N Drinkwater Blvd in Old Town. The owners, Felipe and Marcela Roldan, spent five years selling them out of Oak Creek Brewery in Sedona before moving to Scottsdale at the end of 2015. The signature build is the one Colombian street carts are known for: pineapple, mozzarella, mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup, finished with crushed potato chips. It sounds like a dare and tastes like it was always meant to be that way: sweet, salty, creamy and crunchy at once.
You choose the sausage — beef, pork, vegetarian or vegan — and then the toppings get stranger. Tokyo Madness adds wasabi mayo, onions and seaweed. Sides include salchipapas, sliced sausage and fries under Simon’s sauce, and maicitos, corn with cheese, bacon and chips. The vegan menu is long enough that plenty of customers come for that alone.
Yelp’s 2021 ranking put it fifth in the country. The shop didn’t change because of it. It’s still a counter, a few tables and a family running it, and one of the cheapest good meals in Old Town.
How to order at Simon’s
Start with the classic. Order the Colombian dog with all the standard toppings before you start customizing. The pineapple and the crushed chips are the point, and you need one as designed to judge the rest of the menu.
Then go sideways. A second dog is normal here. Try Tokyo Madness or one of the other house builds, and add salchipapas or maicitos for the table. If anyone in your group is vegan or vegetarian, this is one of the easiest meals in town to share: the vegan sausages, vegan chile fries and vegan ceviche are proper menu items, not afterthoughts.
Mind the hours. Simon’s has always kept short hours, opening late morning and closing in the early evening, and it has recently been closed on Tuesdays. Treat it as a lunch or early-dinner stop rather than a late-night one, and check the current schedule first.
Park and walk. It’s in a small strip center on Drinkwater just north of Indian School, with easier parking than most of Old Town. From here it’s a short walk to the Civic Center and to Frasher’s Tavern at the corner, and a little farther to the bars around Stetson. For more cheap eats, see Scottsdale on a budget.
A Sedona brewery stand that topped Yelp’s list
Colombia’s hot dog is one of the most elaborate in the world: a street-cart dog layered with sauces, cheese, fruit and crunch. The Roldans brought it to Arizona the long way. For about five years they served it at Oak Creek Brewery in Sedona, where tourists and locals got used to pineapple on a hot dog over a pint.
The move to Scottsdale at the end of 2015 gave them a 1,500-square-foot space of their own and room to expand the menu with fries, salchipapas and vegan dishes. The space they found is in a strip center on Drinkwater Boulevard, the northbound half of the one-way loop around downtown, rather than a storefront in the bar district, a few minutes’ walk from City Hall, the Civic Center and the hotels on Indian School Road.
What happened next was mostly word of mouth. Simon’s built up years of reviews praising the unusual toppings, the vegan range and the family behind the counter, and in February 2021 Yelp’s annual Top 100 put it fifth in the United States and first in Arizona. Local news covered it as the unassuming hot dog shop that had outranked every other restaurant in the state.
The honest assessment: it’s a hot dog shop, and it will never be anything else. But in an Old Town increasingly full of expensive concepts, Simon’s is a family business serving food you can’t easily get anywhere else in Arizona, for about ten dollars. That’s worth more than a ranking.