There are as many ways to engage with Tucson’s food scene as there are Tucsonans. Everywhere, food is a crucial part of building community, but here, our identity can be especially tied to what we make and eat. Maybe it’s the nearly universal comfort of a warm, buttered tortilla. Maybe it’s that we are the best place to get flour tortillas in the States. As the food writer for #ThisIsTucson, I’ve been privileged to witness the people who create our quirky, ancient, hyperlocal, Sonoran culinary landscape.
In a squat ranch house on the south side, on a street named after a state, Matilde Santa Cruz is making red chile beef on her stove. It’s going into tamales she will steam over an open flame in her backyard. She might have ground the masa herself, using a hand crank that may be older than she is. She might have picked it up fresh from Food City. Her family was generous enough to let me into her house, like another kid from the neighborhood, and she’s the first among countless people I’ll remember after I leave my job this week.
Other Tucsonans are tied to our food scene by a favorite restaurant, like the regulars who will wait extra long in Mi Nidito’s lobby to get a table served by Roberto, or anyone you’ll find waiting in line in Barista del Barrio’s parking lot, but especially the people toting loved ones from out of town, ruining these visitors against the breakfast burritos they make do with wherever they come from.
Of course we have the people who visibly identify as foodies, toting their smartphones and digital cameras to new restaurant openings and documenting their experiences at highly rated restaurants on social media, Yelp and Google Maps. But the informal nature of Tucson’s food scene makes these scenesters intrepid: they might assiduously follow pop-ups you’d only find tucked away on social media, like Okashi’s dessert drops, Good Pierogi’s killer Polish food or Penelope’s after-hours pasta nights. Sometimes the people taking photos become cooks themselves, like the local celebrity Jackie Tran behind the counter of his standout food truck.
The work that makes the food we consume is time-consuming, body-consuming, money-consuming. No one can do their jobs forever, but cooks have a physical understanding that their time is limited. They’re reminded every day by the hurt in their feet and their joints, the cuts in their hands and burns on their fingers. I feel lucky to have been able to try the now-closed Deliciocho’s madcap creations — sour apple soda an undrinkable shade of toxic green that was inarguably delicious, a birria taco the length of my arm that didn’t sacrifice quality for quantity, a churro ice cream sandwich that required French patisserie — during their brief tenure.
I feel enormously privileged to have been able to interview and attempt to capture in writing the efforts of cooks, bakers and food truck operators working in their prime. Getting invited into someone’s life, how they make a living, for the duration of an interview is like watching the wall at golden hour, briefly holding the tender, reflected sunlight in your mind’s eye. Then I get to share that feeling with you.
Ellice Lueders seated outside L'imprimerie cafe in Brooklyn.
When those interviews are over, I’ve been sitting in a dark room alone.
I have spent the last nine years, a third of my life and nearly my entire adulthood, living thousands of miles away from my family, in pursuit of opportunities to be a writer. Homesickness has followed me everywhere.
To keep homesickness at bay, I’ve developed coping mechanisms I’m not proud of. I listen to podcasts whenever I’m alone, which is almost all the time. I’ve stopped reading because piercing loneliness lives in the quiet spaces between words and turns of a page.
The emotional dexterity I depend on for my work has been atrophying. When I reach for a precise feeling to share with readers, I stick my hand into a rat king of a heart: whatever I pull out is incoherent, selfish, snarling and hurt.
I’m scared to lose this job. I was damn lucky to get it in the first place. I’m leaping into the unknown, untethered to the career I sacrificed so much for. The one thing I am certain of in this free fall is that, at the bottom, I’ll be with my family. For now, that’s enough.
As my final note as the food writer here, I’d like to express gratitude for the moments when Tucson did feel like home.
Tucson felt like home in the front seat of my car in the Roadhouse Cinemas parking lot, when I first tried Indian Twist’s navratan korma and realized immediately that it would be my favorite Indian dish from now on.
It felt like home when I was driving alone down to Bisbee, just for one of Patisserie Jacqui’s croissants — an anchor of goodness and hope during a difficult breakup.
It felt like home in a narrow valley in the hills of Nogales. In sweltering heat I sat on the hood of my car and talked to people who had just come from the city pool. We ate Finitos shaved ice together, and I felt pure like the grass pushing through cracks in the asphalt beneath our feet. Summer here can be painful, but it can bring us closer, too.
It felt like home squatting under an awning at Mercado San Agustin on an empty, rainy night with a friend visiting from out of town. We needed somewhere to eat our St. Mary’s Mexican Food (I got what I always do, a #6 combo with cheese enchiladas and extra salsa) and even though we were soaked we mostly remember feeling awe at how delightful Sonoran food is.
I felt it in Empire Pizza’s vestibule that is not completely inside or outside, where I’d sit by myself or with friends and dunk a slice of pizza in ranch.
I felt it under the pop-up tent at Tacos El Cuate de Obregon on a Sunday, when everyone is dressed in their church clothes and something about the ribeye steak a little too big for its tortilla feels holy.
I felt it at Chef Kusuma Rao’s Aramsay dinner, when their parents opened their home to their guests. Kusuma’s dad is a prolific, photorealistic painter, and we got to see his works in the living room where he paints them, but only when the light is coming in exactly right through his window.
I felt it in Arizona Beer House’s parking lot, waiting for my Leberkase from Haus of Brats’ food truck. My Oma’s favorite restaurant in Sierra Vista may be closed, but its spirit lives on in sausages Haus of Brats imports from a German butcher in California.
It’s in Jane’s house, when we ordered Serial Grillers for the first time, and I was introduced to the Suspect Zero V2 chicken cheesesteak. It became my off-duty go-to for months. The sandwich comforted me so often it almost feels like a friend.
It’s in my house, but especially that one time when I scratched my car in Anello’s parking lot picking up a pizza to share with Jackie, who brought his crunchy cauliflower, and we feasted after he got off work way too late.
It’s in alegria or whatever else Buendia has going on in their kitchen. I got the recommendation for Buendia’s tamale-stuffed poblano from food writer John Birdsall on Instagram. It’s not just that the tamale tastes good (though it’s the best in Tucson). The people working there are so kind it’s hard to feel lonely.
It’s in a bygone Halloween night, under a floodlight in a parking lot on Nogales Highway. I was falling in love with a person and a city under the guise of filming an Instagram Story about Deliciocho’s festive specials. The restaurant and the relationship are over now, and I’m leaving Tucson, but how sweet it was to be there, to live in those moments.
