What was Taco Bell No. 31?
We do not usually write about fast food. This building outlived the mall, the dairy farms, the Motor Mile and every other Taco Bell in Arizona.
Taco Bell store No. 31 opened in the 1960s at 7847 E McDowell Rd, near Hayden, in the chain’s original mission-style cantina design: brick painted sunset orange and beige, a Spanish tile roof, and a curved belfry with no bell inside. Glen Bell had founded the chain in 1962, and Scottsdale’s store was among the earliest — a 24-hour stand on a road then lined with dairy farms, an A&W and light industry, half a mile from Los Arcos Mall.
Then it simply never changed. While the chain remodeled its hundreds of Arizona locations into beige boxes, No. 31 kept its 1980s yellow-bell sign, its 1970s tables in rich brown with blue, orange and red stripes, its teal swivel chairs on a pergola-shaded patio, its bathrooms around the side of the building. By the 2020s it was the last vintage cantina in Arizona and one of fewer than ten left in the United States, and people came to photograph it.
It closed on April 11, 2025, replaced by a new-build Taco Bell 300 feet east. Fans lined up for last meals, and in August 2026 Filiberto’s reopened the shell with the striped tables intact. Honest verdict: the food was Taco Bell. The building was south Scottsdale’s most honest historic landmark, and the neighborhood knew it before the chain did.
Crunchwraps in a time capsule
Eating at No. 31 was the same transaction as at any Taco Bell, which was exactly the appeal: the menu was corporate and the room was the 1960s.
The order was whatever you wanted — Crunchwrap Supremes, chalupas, the standard board — but in its final year the cantina got a menu worthy of its walls. For Halloween 2024, Taco Bell chose this location to launch its Decades Menu, one revived dish per era: the 1960s tostada (corn shell, refried beans, lettuce, red sauce, cheese, a founding item from Glen Bell’s first stand, at $2.19), the 1970s Green Sauce Burrito, the 1980s Meximelt, the 1990s Beef Gordita Supreme and a 2000s Caramel Apple Empanada. The company staged a “retro fiesta” with hot rods and decade-themed hoodies, and for a few months you could eat the original tostada in the original building.
The room was the show. Inside: three tables, digital kiosks amid 1970s decor, the striped tabletops a generation of teenagers spilled on. Outside: the patio facing McDowell under a pergola that cut the sun into slits, the swivel chairs in vibrant teal, and the sign with the old bell logo. The bathrooms were around the side of the building, a detail regulars mentioned with something like affection.
Timing was never a question. It was open 24 hours, which made it the after-hours anchor for the ranch-house grid — where the bar crowd ended up after last call and where high schoolers went because it was there.
For anyone reconstructing the McDowell corridor of the 1960s and 1970s — the Farrell’s birthdays, the Los Arcos back-to-school trips, the Motor Mile — No. 31 was the last piece still standing in its original form, and for $2.19 you could sit inside it.
The last mission bell on the Motor Mile
Glen Bell’s early cantinas, with their arches, tile and belfries, sold “Mexican” to postwar suburbs as a stucco fantasy of the Southwest. Scottsdale, busy selling itself as “The West’s Most Western Town,” was a natural fit, and store No. 31 landed on McDowell just as Los Arcos Mall was about to make Scottsdale and McDowell the retail heart of the city. The neighborhood around it — Coronado High, the ranch houses, the Motorola plants — gave it a customer base that renewed itself every four years.
Its survival was mostly accident. Operators remodel fast-food buildings when leases or franchise standards require it, and for whatever reason No. 31’s operator, Desert De Oro Foods, never did; the corridor’s long decline after Los Arcos closed in 1999 probably helped. So the cantina stayed frozen while Papago Plaza, the pueblo-style center a mile west, was razed in 2019 and the rest of the corridor turned into apartments. By the time redevelopment reached the block, Taco Bell itself was using the old building as a marketing set.
The end came from the same block. A larger, modern store — “millennial gray,” in one local description — rose on the east side of 79th Street with indoor restrooms, more seats and more parking, and the staff walked over. Phoenix New Times counted the closure among the biggest of 2025, alongside the Valley’s last Sizzler. It sat empty until Filiberto’s, the Tenorio family’s 24-hour drive-thru chain, in Arizona since 1993, took it in August 2026, repainted the brick red, kept the striped tables and teal chairs, and put two round-the-clock Mexican drive-thrus on one block.
Honest assessment: no one will argue the food at store No. 31 belonged in a dining guide, and the Old Town Tortilla Factory exists for anyone who wants Mexican cooking rather than a chain’s idea of it. But the building was real history — a 1960s roadside fantasy that outlasted the real thing — and its loss registered in south Scottsdale the way the mall’s did. That the belfry still stands, with Filiberto’s yellow sign beneath it, is the rare happy ending on McDowell Road.