What is Tocaya Modern Mexican?
Tocaya Modern Mexican is the counter-service Mexican restaurant on the outside of Scottsdale Fashion Square’s luxury wing, at 4712 N Goldwater Blvd, Suite 1210, on the Goldwater side of the mall near Neiman Marcus. It opened as Tocaya Organica with a grand opening on Sunday, May 5, 2019, the second Arizona store of a Los Angeles fast-casual chain that Tosh Berman of the Madera Group had started in Venice, California, in 2016. Its sister restaurant, the full-service Toca Madera, opened across the way that October.
The format is the whole idea. Every dish on the menu begins as a vegetarian base, a bowl, a salad, tacos, a burrito or a torta, and you add a protein and a cheese from a list that includes vegan versions of both. A 2019 review counted about ten proteins and six cheeses. That makes Tocaya the health-minded Mexican option in a mall whose other sit-down rooms are Nobu, Ocean 44 and Zinque, and it puts it in the same lane as True Food Kitchen and Flower Child elsewhere in the city.
The name changed in 2021, when the Madera Group merged Tocaya with Tender Greens into One Table Restaurant Brands and the new company said it would lean into “Tocaya Modern Mexican” as it expanded beyond California. Then the business nearly ended. One Table filed for Chapter 11 on July 17, 2024, with 15 Tocayas and 24 Tender Greens, closed eight restaurants across the two brands, and was sold to its lender. The Phoenix Esplanade store closed that July and the original Arizona location at Kierland Commons followed; the company’s locations page now lists seven restaurants in California and this one.
It is open 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day, with margaritas, a patio and the mall’s valet. The room is light and open, the food is brought to your table after you order at the counter, and the crowd is shoppers, Old Town office workers and families who want one meal in the mall that is not a food court or a $200 dinner. Our verdict: a good, reasonably priced lunch that survived its own parent company, and the only Tocaya left in Arizona.
Ordering at Tocaya
Learn the format first. You pick a base, then a protein, then a cheese, and each dish lists a chef’s suggestion so you can simply say yes. The menu runs bowls, salads, tacos sold by the piece, burritos, a house quesadilla, tortas, two soups and a short list of starters and desserts. The website publishes calorie counts rather than prices, so take the numbers below as the shape of the list, not a bill.
Order the bowls. The Chicken Al Pastor, the Fajita Del Rey, the Street Corn En Fuego and the Birria bowl are the most complete plates, and the Beyond Chicken Verde is the vegan one that has the most to it. The Sonora Steak Bowl and the Grilled Shrimp Bowl are the heaviest. On the taco side the Quesabirria is the richest, the Baja and the Tinga the lightest, and there are three vegan tacos, La Flor, the Taco Dorado and a Cauliflower taco. The 2019 opening-year review that first described the place for Scottsdale readers ordered a two-taco combo with guacamole and a margarita and praised the guacamole, which came with plantain chips, pepitas and pomegranate seeds; regular chips are available if you ask.
Soups, sides and sweets. The Tortilla Soup is vegan, the Red Pozole is not. Chips with salsa, guacamole or queso, a street corn and chicken flaquitas cover the starters, and dessert is a fruit cart, churro bites in a vegan and gluten-free version or a standard one, and dulce de leche or double chocolate cookies. The kids menu is a burrito, a quesadilla, tacos or chicken strips.
Drinks. There is a bar. The margaritas come in Tocaya, guava, spicy and passion fruit versions, each on Espolón Blanco or Sabe Blanco, with a short California and Arizona wine list and Modelo, Dos Equis, Pacifico and Corona in bottles. The housemade non-alcoholic list is the better one: matcha horchata, horchata, strawberry basil, cucumber mint, hibiscus ginger and tamarindo.
Timing and parking. Hours are 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. The lunch rush is the mall’s, so 11:30 or after 2 is quiet. Park in the garage on the Goldwater side or use the mall valet, which the restaurant lists as an option, and sit on the patio in any month but June through September. Walk-ins only; there is no reservation system. For where it sits among the city’s Mexican rooms, see our Mexican guide, where it is the fast-casual entry, not the destination.
The California chain that outlived its parent
Tocaya was born in Los Angeles. Tosh Berman and Amrou Manaseer founded the Madera Group in 2013 and opened Toca Madera, a dark, loud, full-service modern Mexican room, in West Hollywood the next year. Tocaya Organica came in 2016 as the daytime, fast-casual version of the same ideas: organic ingredients, a vegetarian base, proteins and cheeses added on top, and vegan options everywhere. By the spring of 2019 the chain had a dozen California stores and was telling the trade press that 2019 was “a year of rapid growth.”
Arizona was the first state outside California. The Kierland Commons store opened in November 2018, and Fashion Square followed on May 5, 2019, one of the first restaurants to open on the exterior of the mall’s redesigned luxury wing, in a wave that brought Ocean 44, Nobu, Toca Madera, Zinque and Farmhouse to the same stretch of Camelback Road between 2018 and 2020. A third Valley Tocaya opened at the Esplanade in Phoenix. The mall’s bet on the 2010s restaurant boom was that shoppers would eat somewhere other than the food court, and Tocaya was the affordable end of it.
The corporate story then turned. In August 2021 the Madera Group merged Tocaya with Tender Greens to form One Table Restaurant Brands, keeping Berman as an adviser and announcing the name Tocaya Modern Mexican. The merger consolidated the debt both chains had taken on to expand between 2017 and 2019, and as Los Angeles office traffic stayed down and delivery commissions ate into margins, it became unmanageable. The bankruptcy filing of July 17, 2024, put the numbers on the record: Tocaya’s average unit volume had fallen from $3.4 million in 2019 to $2.1 million in 2023, third-party delivery was 30 to 40 percent of sales at commissions of 15 to 18 percent, and an exclusive Uber Eats and Postmates deal had, in the company’s telling, made delivery cheaper than dining in. Eight restaurants across the two brands closed. The Esplanade store went in July 2024; the Kierland store is marked closed on every listing we found, one dating it to December 2024; the brands were sold to their lender, Breakwater Management, inside the bankruptcy.
What the record does not say is how the Scottsdale store performed through all this, or who runs it; it is a company store under a California holding company, and the press we found never named a manager or a chef. What we can say is that it is still there: a March 2026 television listing gave its address, and the mall still lists it in its dining directory.
Honest assessment: Tocaya is not a destination and does not pretend to be one. It is a well-run counter lunch with a real bar, a patio and a menu that treats vegan eating as a default rather than a concession, in a part of Old Town where the alternatives are a food court or a $60 entrée. The 2020s have been unkind to its category and its owners, and the fact that this one survived while two Valley siblings did not is the clearest review it has.