Mexican Food in the Phoenix Metro Beyond Phoenix Itself

Arizona carries 56 active Mexican restaurants and 54 Mexican and Latin stores in our directory. Phoenix itself accounts for 32 of the restaurants and 23 of the stores — which leaves a substantial remainder spread across the rest of the Valley, and that remainder is what this page is about.

The Phoenix metro is a single continuous urban area with a dozen city names in it, and a guide that stops at the Phoenix line misses a large part of the food. Mesa alone is the third-largest city in Arizona. Everything below is what our directory records in six of those cities, with Google's ratings where Google has them and blanks where it does not.

The restaurants, city by city

A caveat on that last column: Google has no rating in our data for 14 of these 16 restaurants. That is a much higher share of blanks than the national average, and it is the honest state of our coverage in the suburban Valley rather than a statement about the restaurants. Where the rating is blank, we are not implying anything.

The stores

The chain that defines grocery shopping here

19 of the stores in our Arizona data belong to one chain: Food City, the Hispanic-format banner run by the Arizona grocer Bashas'. It is the largest single-chain presence in our entire US store network, and it is concentrated almost entirely in this state — Phoenix, Tucson, Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Avondale, Glendale, Yuma.

Alongside it, 7 stores under the Los Altos Ranch Market banner, which belongs to the Cardenas group, and a handful of El Super and Cardenas locations. Between them these chains mean that in most of the Valley a full-line Mexican supermarket — butcher counter, tortillería, bakery, hot food — is a short drive away, which is not true in most US metro areas.

A note on what the chain names in that table are and are not. Food City is the Hispanic banner of the Arizona grocer Bashas'; Los Altos Ranch Market belongs to Cardenas; and the two Del Sol IGA stores in the table are independent Arizona grocers operating under the IGA cooperative banner — not the Canadian or Australian chains that share those three letters. The conventional US supermarkets in the same neighborhoods, Safeway and Walmart among them, carry a Hispanic aisle but not a butcher counter that cuts to order, which is the reason to choose one of the above.

What Sonoran food means here, and why it matters

The Valley sits on the Sonoran border, and its Mexican cooking is specifically Sonoran rather than generically Mexican. That shows up in three ways. Flour tortillas are the default, not the alternative, and the thin, enormous, nearly translucent sobaquera is a Sonoran form you will not find in Mexico City. Carne asada is grilled over mesquite and chopped, served with flour tortillas and salsa de molcajete. And the Sonoran hot dog — bacon-wrapped, in a bolillo-style bun, with pinto beans, tomato, onion, mayonnaise and a roasted güero chile — is a Hermosillo street food that crossed the line and became a Tucson and Phoenix institution.

Tucson is the other half of this story and sits outside the metro: our directory lists 6 restaurants and 9 stores there, and we have written about it separately.

The numbers, side by side

Using the directory

The full Arizona list is in our US restaurant directory and store directory, both filterable by city. Our guide to the four kinds of Mexican store explains what to expect inside a Food City versus a neighborhood carnicería.

For the Sonoran side of the cooking, our Carnitas Michoacanas and Molcajete Salsa recipes are the closest starting points in our collection, and the salsa is the one that matters most for carne asada.