The 2024 Sonoran Restaurant Week couldn’t come soon enough for some Tucson restaurateurs.
It’s been a tough summer for many.
For Ted Fisher, it’s been “slowish” at his two northwest-side restaurants, Dominick’s Real Italian on North Thornydale Road and Twin Peaks Pizzeria in Marana’s Continental Ranch community.
Inflation has definitely taken a toll.
“Our costs are tremendously higher,” he said. “It has been a tougher summer. Volume does take care of things, but we haven’t had the volume we need to take care of summer.”
Ted Fisher, the owner of Dominick’s Real Italian, takes a fresh lasagna dish out of the oven during lunchtime on Aug. 30.
Sonoran Restaurant Week offers Fisher and his fellow Tucson restaurant operators a bit of a reset. It’s a chance to remind Tucsonans about the city’s richly diverse culinary landscape that landed Tucson the nation’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation in 2015.
From Sept. 6-15, nearly 90 Tucson restaurants, from neighborhood pizzerias to destination Mexican eateries, will showcase three- and four-course prix fixe specials priced 25% below their regular menu.
There’s the spaguetti cacio e chiltepin at Bellissimo Ristorante Italiano at Casino del Sol that comes with a Caesar salad. Buendia Breakfast & Lunch Cafe on North First Avenue is pairing its sweet cinnamon iced tea or cafe de olla with special options for breakfast (huevos rancheros or chorizo and eggs) and lunch (tacos dorados or burritos carne con chile).
From small plates to elegant entrees, Sonoran Restaurant Week showcases Tucson's diverse restaurant scene.
Oro Valley’s Fork & Fire Smokehouse + Taproom is showcasing its ‘cue skills with barbecue pork, brisket and chicken on the lineup in various incarnations (sandwiches, plates), while Ermanos Bar on North Fourth Avenue is going meatless with its vegetarian lineup that begins with a housemade baba ganoush followed by beer-battered tofu dressed with a calabrian orange honey glaze and finishing with a chocolate mousse tart topped with honey tahini paste.
Scott Girod, chef-owner of Anello in the Warehouse Arts District on East Sixth Street, is using the opportunity to up his chefing game.
“I feel like it’s just an extra fun thing to do. I don’t know if fun is the right word, but it’s a chance to push out a new menu on the side,” said Girod, a protegé of James Beard Award-winning piazzola Chris Bianco. “We get to push ourselves a little more and do some things we don’t normally get to do.”
Girod’s Sonoran Restaurant Week menu takes a deep dive into local produce and heritage foods like tepary beans that he’ll use to create a roasted green chile dip to accompany sourdough crackers made from the White Sonora Wheat grown at Marana’s BKW Farms, which has focused on sustainable agriculture since the Wong family started the farm in 1939. Nopales and prickly pear, if he can get them, will be used in the seasonal vegetable ceviche and tomatillos, and E&R pork will top a pizza entrée. Honey from the small-scale Tucson producer Dos Manos Apiaries will be the centerpiece of a cake with burnt honey glaze and prickly pear whipped cream.
“These things are being grown here and should be appreciated, and people should eat them every day,” said Girod, whose restaurant will celebrate its seventh anniversary in October.
Italian food is well-represented on this year's Sonoran Restaurant Week lineup.
The restaurants participating in the 2024 campaign cover the culinary gamut of Tucson genres and flavors, from our signature Mexican food (25 restaurants, including the return early this year of the west-side Teresa’s Mosaic Café after a devastating fire closed it in late 2022) to Italian (17 including downtown’s Perche’ No Italian Bistro and several artisan pizzerias).
Chinese, American, Peruvian, Cuban, Japanese, Middle Eastern and Asian cuisine are well represented, offering breakfast, lunch and dinner specials priced from $25-$55.
This is the event’s sixth year. In its inaugural event in 2019, 30 restaurants participated as an answer to the statewide restaurant week. Founder Laura Reese of Storyteller PR felt Tucson restaurants were being overshadowed by their Phoenix-area counterparts. The event also boosted restaurants in early September, which operators say is their slowest time of the year.
Reese pitched the idea to Visit Tucson, which supports and promotes it. Last year, Tucson Foodie took over Reese’s organizing role.
“I think the best part of our local economy is our Tucson restaurants and I want them to succeed,” said Tucson Foodie owner Shane Reiser. “Local places are more interesting and local restaurants are more likely to buy from local growers and all that money” goes back into the local economy.
Several Tucson steakhouses are participating in the 2024 Sonoran Restaurant Week, celebrating Tucson's diverse restaurant scene.
Tucson Foodie has extensive experience hosting community events, including the popular Vegan Night Market that attracts thousands three times a year (the next one is Sept. 28). Reiser said Sonoran Restaurant week is now one of his bigger events because of its economic impact; a survey Foodie conducted with last year’s participants showed a $3 million revenue impact.
This year, Foodie added nightly dinners to the mix. The dinners, held at a different restaurant each night, is modeled after Montréal’s MTLàTABLE restaurant week, which runs Oct. 31-Nov. 17.
“I just handpicked some restaurants I love and they can put together whatever they want,” Reiser said.
Participating restaurants include JoJo’s Restaurant in the former LaCo space on West Washington Street downtown; Patricia Schwabe’s Penca on East Broadway; the Mejia family’s Chela’s Latin Cuisine on East Congress Street; Doug Levy’s Feast on East Speedway; Tyler Fenton’s Bata on East Toole Avenue in the Warehouse Arts District; award-winning chef Ken Foy’s Dante’s Fire on East Grant Road; and Sally Kane’s The Coronet on West Cushing Street near the Tucson Convention Center.
For a full list of menus and restaurants participating in this year's Sonoran Restaurant Week, click here.
Save room for desserts during the 2024 Sonoran Restaurant Week.
