Tallboys doesn’t look like much from the outside ... just a boxy white building where Pancho Villas Mexican restaurant used to be. But step in and you’ll see Ben Schneider’s dream restaurant: a clean but effortlessly hip hangout, with a chill vibe that might remind you of (gasp!) the Grill.
The late-night diner isn’t really the kind of place you’d expect to find on North Fourth Avenue, but that’s because there’s an interesting story behind it. Schneider has wanted to open his own restaurant for eight years now. He practically grew up working at Bentley’s coffee shop, even taking the business on when his mother, Jo Schneider, opened up a second venture, La Cocina.
The lifelong musician also played a central role in bringing the yearly Night of the Living fest to downtown Tucson, but it was beginning to grind him down.
“The music festival was really messed up for me, mentally, because you put all this energy into one day. So it’s like, ‘build build build build build!’ And the next day you have no phone calls, you have no emails. I still have a bunch of trash in my house from people working, and I have nothing now.”
He wanted to direct his energy toward opening a restaurant. But all of his prospective venues kept having “deal-breakers.” Ben was on the second day of a cleanse when Mark Erman from Ermanos reached out to tell him the Pancho Villas space was available once again. (After Panchos it was going to be a street food joint called Bodega Blu, but the concept never came to fruition.)
The space already had a liquor license and the right infrastructure. Ben jumped at the chance and brought his mom to see it, and they decided to go in on the business together.
“The idea is, we’re kind of filling the void that the Red Room (at Grill) had, minus the music. ... A place where musicians and artists can go to get a cheap meal at any hour of the day or night. It’s a place to bring your family also. It’s not a dive bar ... it’s multipurpose.”
He called it Tallboys Breakfast AF (yes, you read that right) because he “thought it was funny.” The name stemmed from one of Ben’s previous ideas to open a New York-style bodega with nothing but cans of tallboy beers. Ben was particular about everything: from the “Muted Tropical” color scheme to the Bat-Leg burger and breakfast poke bowls on the menu.
“I like diner food. I like it really simplistic,” he said. “My whole thing is: Mix fresh with greasy.”
He brought in musicians from local bands like Pork Torta to do the redesign, which feels fresher and more open, even though it’s got the same blue booths rescued from the District Tavern. (And also, a stereo receiver that used to belong to Sir Paul McCartney, a happy Craigslist accident.)
And unlike Grill, you can get cheese on your tots. Order them “Tallboys style” with cheese, green chili, bacon and crema on top for an extra fee. There are 50-plus varieties of tallboy cans on the menu, but the restaurant also has cocktails, beer on tap, and even virgin drinks that you can get spiked with hemp-based CBD oil for an extra $3. But Ben seems to be the most proud of this: His new restaurant has crushed ice, and RC Cola on tap!
