What is Taqueria Centro?
Taqueria Centro is the casual Mexican restaurant at the Omni Scottsdale Resort & Spa at Montelucia, 4949 E Lincoln Drive in Paradise Valley, set off the resort’s Kasbah Pool with Camelback Mountain filling the windows. The Montelucia opened in late 2008 as an Andalusian village of 293 rooms on the site of the old La Posada, with Prado as its Spanish dining room; Centro is the resort’s second kitchen, the one in sandals.
It serves what Omni calls “a modern, upscale take on Arizona-Mexican dishes”: street corn, chicken mole, carne asada fries, and tacos of blackened fish, carne asada, squash blossom and chicken tinga, with beef quesabirria added by 2021. The bar is built on tequila and mezcal with rum and whisky behind them, margaritas from a classic lime to house creations, sangria, and Arizona microbrews. Hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, lunch and dinner only, no reservations, casual dress, entrées averaging $10 to $20. The room is light, with white floors and floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, a nine-panel media wall for the game, and lounge seating that spills out to fire pits by the pool.
The kitchen’s story belongs to Laura Gonzalez. Raised in San Luis, a small Mexican town on the Arizona border, a Scottsdale Culinary Institute graduate and a Herb Box alumna, she joined the Montelucia in January 2014 as a cook at Prado, was promoted to garde manger sous chef the next year, and in 2017 became Centro’s chef, writing a menu from her upbringing with produce from Arizona farms. On September 18, 2018, she won Food Network’s Chopped (the “Wellington Woes” episode) before judges Chris Santos, Martha Stewart and Geoffrey Zakarian. Her later profiles place her elsewhere, and the resort now credits the menu to executive chef Marcos Seville, who joined in 2013 and has run the resort’s kitchens since 2016.
Who it is for: resort guests coming off the pool, locals who want Camelback at eye level without Prado’s prices, and the spring-training crowd watching the game on the wall. Our verdict: the best casual meal on Lincoln Drive’s resort row, with a view that would cost twice as much next door, and closing hours that are its only real flaw.
Ordering at Taqueria Centro
Go for the tacos and the fries. The blackened fish tacos are the fan favorite by the bar’s own account, the carne asada fries are the dish Food Network’s Phoenix guide chose, a plate somewhere between cheese fries and nachos that needs a fork, and the beef quesabirria tacos are the newest regulars’ order. Round it out with the street corn and, if the mole is on, the chicken mole, the one dish on the menu that takes the kitchen a day. The squash blossom taco is the vegetarian choice and the one you will not find at the taquerias in our Mexican-food guide.
Drink by the day. Centro has run weekly promotions for years: a Taco Tuesday, a “Thirsty Margarita Thursday” with a complimentary salsa trio for two margaritas, and a Sunday build-your-own Bloody Mary bar with a game-day menu of Maker’s Mark barbecue ribs, a barbecue chicken flatbread and buffalo cauliflower fritters, all from a 2019 account; the resort’s summer pool menu has put a passion-fruit margarita here. Confirm the current deals, which change, but assume the margarita is the house drink. The list runs tequila, mezcal, rum and whisky, with Arizona beers.
Watch the clock. The room closes at 8 p.m. five nights a week and 9 on Friday and Saturday, and more than one reviewer’s only complaint is that it closes too early. Lunch, from 11, is the easy seating; late afternoon, when the pool empties, is the best hour for the patio and the fire pits, with the mountain going orange. Dinner here is an early dinner. For a late one, Prado and its Mbar, with live music Thursday through Saturday, are a short walk across the plazas.
Where to sit. Inside, the three glass walls make every table a Camelback table; the nine-panel media wall is for spring training in March and football on Sundays. Outside, the lounge clusters by the Kasbah Pool are for drinks more than dinner. A private section seats ten. There is no dress code beyond casual, and no reservations; the direct line is (480) 627-3175.
Getting there. The Montelucia is on Lincoln Drive just east of Tatum Boulevard; use the main entrance and the resort’s valet or self-parking, and ask for the Kasbah Pool. Non-guests are welcome at the restaurant, and the resort sells pool day passes in season through ResortPass, which is the better way to combine lunch here with the afternoon.
The taqueria in the Andalusian village
The Montelucia was built as a fantasy of southern Spain, $335 million of bell towers, plazas and olive trees on the Lincoln Drive site where La Posada’s swim-up grotto bar had stood since the 1970s. It opened as an InterContinental in late 2008, straight into the financial crisis, went through bankruptcy, and was taken over and stabilized by Omni in the early 2010s. Prado, the Spanish room, was the opening restaurant; the resort’s lineup settled over the following decade into four outlets: Prado and its Mbar, Crave Café for coffee and a market, and Centro.
When Centro became a taqueria is the gap in the record. The resort’s chef profiles say Laura Gonzalez moved from Prado to Centro in 2017 as its chef, and a 2021 magazine profile of Marcos Seville described a taqueria as something added to the resort’s dining in roughly the previous four years, which points to the same period. Listings still refer to a Centro Lounge, which suggests the space was a pool lounge before it was a taqueria, but no press we found records the conversion. Experience Scottsdale’s listing describes a later “reimagined” room with a new menu from Seville, again without a date. We have left the opening year blank rather than invent one.
What is documented is the chef. Gonzalez’s Chopped win in September 2018 was the resort’s biggest food headline of the decade, and it came from a cook who had started on Prado’s line four years earlier and been handed the resort’s most casual room. Her menu was Sonoran and central Mexican, in Food Network’s phrase, from a childhood in a border town, with Arizona farm produce. By the early 2020s she had moved on, first to a general manager’s title at Centro, then to catering and a casino kitchen, per her later profiles, and the resort’s materials now credit Seville. The restaurant kept the dishes.
Centro’s place in the city is modest and clear. Lincoln Drive is the Valley’s resort row, and its restaurants, El Chorro, Lon’s, Prado, are special-occasion rooms. Centro is the one you can walk into in a swimsuit cover-up, which the row did not have before the Montelucia, and the one with a television. On the Camelback Corridor side of the mountain the equivalent rooms are hotel pool bars; here it is a real kitchen with a chef’s name attached, at least for a few years.
Honest assessment: Taqueria Centro is a very good resort taqueria and not a great taqueria. The tacos are correct, the fries are fun, the margaritas are resort-priced, and the hours are the wrong way round for a Mexican restaurant with a bar. What it has that no taqueria in Scottsdale can buy is the north face of Camelback through three walls of glass. Order fish tacos, sit by the fire pit, and go before eight.