Indigenous ingredients from near and far are the heartbeat of this hotel restaurant in the Gila River Indian Community. Chef Ryan Swanson and his team transform them into deeply Sonoran dishes: Bison steak with saguaro syrup, cactus “key lime” pie, octopus in a velvety sauce of jamon Iberico and wolfberries are just some of the stellar dishes coming out of this kitchen. For the full experience, opt for the “Journey” tasting menu. 

Goat birria. That’s all you need to know about this unadorned South Phoenix restaurant. Wide bowls of rich stew arrive with all the fixings: salsa, limes, chopped onion, chopped herbs. Many customers opt, additionally, to spoon into goat consommé laden with chickpeas. For Phoenix birria enthusiasts, Hola Cabrito tends to top lists. 

Mexican American cooking thrives at this beloved neighborhood eatery. South of downtown Phoenix in a stark white-brick building that seems to draw a crowd throughout the day, Carolina’s griddles flour tortillas to life before your eyes. These wrap proteins like machaca, beans, and eggs, which come as burros, chimichangas, enchiladas and more. 

Cassie Shortino captains the kitchen of Chris Bianco’s trattoria, which recently moved into a larger space downtown. The menu changes often, tracking the local micro seasons. Shortino shapes pasta using grains like farro and Bluebeard durum. Crudos, roasted chicken, and rich meats are all prepared minimally. The drink program offers house-made liqueurs, arcane amari, and thoughtful Italian wines. 

For nearly two decades, the Maldonado family has served Mexican seafood and oversized drinks. Mariscos Playa Hermosa is just as fluent with raw seafood (ceviche tostadas and oyster-shrimp aguachiles) as it is cooked (fillet divorciadas and molcajetes teeming with shrimp). Diners can go as big and party-sized as seafood towers or as small as tacos gobernador. 

This Garfield diner takes cues from the South and Southwest alike. Think: chorizo meatloaf and smoked pork over heirloom corn grits. Fried chicken rises from biscuits and fried green tomatoes fill sandwiches. For a diner, the cocktails have a sterling reputation, especially the hurricane. Folks sip on the wraparound patio deep into the night. 

The Breadfruit is a downtown institution. At its small but mighty Rum Bar, Jamaica native Dwayne Allen guides drinkers through pours, flights, and cocktails powered by his collection of more than 150 bottles. In the kitchen, Danielle Leoni deeply considers sustainable practices in cooking the staples of the island, like jerk chicken, pepper shrimp, and goat curry. Her motto: “where local meets tropical.” While temporarily closed until fall 2021, folks can still seek out a taste of the Breadfruit via the owners’ new drink line, Blue Marble Ginger Beer.

Many concepts co-exist within Jorge Ignacio Torres’s Palabra, an experimental space in downtown Phoenix. It’s an art gallery and, in back, a hair salon. But it’s also a Mexican coffee bar that serves thoughtful drinks like café de olla and espresso with cacao and piloncillo. Pasado, the space’s tiny kitchen, plates a rotating lineup of Mexican dishes like posole, tamales, and ceviche for just a few hours per day a few days a week.

The Sonoran hot dog has many possible looks and ingredients ingredients. One of Metro Phoenix’s undisputed favorites comes from El Caprichoso. Served from a cart until well after midnight, a plump dog appears in a wildly puffy char-marked bun, the meat nearly eclipsed under a tight zigzag of mayo. Fixings like pico and guac accent, but the secret is the chewy bun.

Near Downtown Glendale, this restaurant turns out platters heaped with lamb barbacoa. Though great versions of barbacoa can be found across the metro area, this relative newcomer has already won a place among the most esteemed. Slow-cooked sheep is the main event, yet there are plenty of other standbys, like huaraches and menudo.

One of the jewels in greater Phoenix’s robust Vietnamese food scene, Da Vang offers a seemingly endless menu of spring rolls, bun, pho, and other specialties. The banh mi are classic and priced well, just like the rest of the menu. Vietnamese hot pot and chao, long-stewed rice porridge, hit the spot even in the withering heat of the desert. 

A James Beard Award winner, Fry Bread House specializes in Indigenous preparations like stews and tamales. There is an emphasis on the Tohono O’odham recipes that the late founder Cecilia Miller grew up with, like c’emet, a wide flour tortilla cooked in the Sonoran Desert for centuries. It sidekicks soups and wraps burros. Frybread comes in both sweet and savory forms. 

Born mid-pandemic, this deeply modern Southwestern restaurant by Blaise Faber and Chad Price has food, coffee, pastry, and beverage programs that innovate and impress. Cocktails combine regional concoctions like cactus vermouth, Arizona gin, and creosote bitters. Much of Donald Hawk’s intricate cooking centers on desert crops like red fife, heirloom squash, and tepary beans, often using a smoker or woodfire. 

Peruvian restaurant El Chullo remains one of the best South American restaurants in greater Phoenix. Esperanza Luzcando and Jose Ramirez keep plates classic and cover plenty of ground, from seafood (ceviche, jalea) to beef (lomo saltado, skewered hearts) right on down to choclo (large-kennel corn) and the ubiquitous huancaina (smooth yellow pepper sauce).

Owner Gustavo Lom’s shop is a mainstay of the 16th Street corridor, a hotbed of great Mexican eating. He plates Mexican-style sandwiches with fillings like cochinita pibil and fried turkey tails. A fiery torta ahogada sees a bolillo roll stuffed with tender pork and avocado smothered in chile de arbol sauce. Lom also stocks a decked-out salsa bar. 

The Mexican food scene in Phoenix can be divided into two eras: before Barrio Cafe’s 2002 opening, and after. Silva Salcido Esparza, a classically trained chef who sold copper-pot-cooked carnitas out of her father’s bakery when she was young, lightly applies French cooking and other techniques to preparations from all over Mexico. Outer and inner walls swirl with painted art. Banana leaves leak cochinita pibil juices. Agave-based spirits brim in cold glasses. 

The Binkley’s dining experience, at least three hours and at least a dozen courses, unfolds in a small house that recreates the experience of a dinner party. You start on the patio for light drinks and bites, move to a bar for imaginative bar food, and finish in a formal dining room with a run of more formal courses. At any point in the meal, you can get up and browse the house, and even watch genre-bending New American chef Kevin Binkley in the kitchen. 

Chris Nelson summons impossibly fresh seafood to the desert from far waters of the world. What isn’t sold whole is sold as prepared food like lobster rolls and salmon banh mi. The rotating ceviche might feature Nantucket Bay scallops and blood orange, and John Dory and yuzu the next. Don’t miss the oysters or raw fish platters made using whatever’s fresh. 

Chris Bianco makes some of the country’s most fabled pizzas. He and his team source and mill ever-changing flour blends, hand-shape mozzarella, and top pies with tomatoes from his own California label. His style sets the focus on an intricate, shattering crust that calls to mind the ancient flatbreads predating pizza. It eludes standard category and is probably best defined by the crowds and giddy critics that have flocked in for decades.

For more than a decade, Charleen Badman has skillfully turned the Valley’s bounty into vegetable-forward plates that draw inspiration from a constellation of world cuisines. In 2019, she won a James Beard Award for Best Chef Southwest. The intensely local nature of her food is echoed by Pavle Milic’s ambitious beverage program, which puts a rigorously curated roster of common and obscure Arizona wines at center stage.  

Japan native Shinji Kurita curates omakase dinners, sushi journeys that begin with wildly creative marine preparations and end with long runs of nigiri. He tweezes and torches and tops iridescent slips of fish, slicing and molding and placing bites before you as modern instrumental music plays. The whole experience is pared with rare Japanese beers and sake. 

Chef Dom Ruggiero pulls from an arsenal of skills honed over the years, including butchery, meat curing, smoking, and handmade pasta at Hush Public House. His intimate-yet-unfussy New American restaurant plates novel dish after novel dish, the menu always changing. Staples include crab hushpuppies, date cake, and a riff on Chicago’s Italian beef that celebrates oxtail.

Scott Holmes’s indoor-outdoor barbecue joint by the airport platters Central Texas-style meats. On giant offset smokers welded from old propane tanks, Holmes smokes all of the major barbecue staples, sold by the pound and on sandwiches. His beef — fatty brisket, short rib, and pastrami — is local legend, as is the pecan pie smoked just like the meat.

Simply put, Cafe Lalibela is a classic Ethiopian restaurant that has long maintained a top-notch reputation. Tangy discs of injera heap with stews made from meats like beef and vegetables like lentils and split peas. Individual plates bring smaller-form options, like kitfo (raw ground beef) or fried lamb. An impressive Ethiopian coffee and tea program includes clay pot brews. 

Lulu Zhou and Sunny Zhao’s two Chou’s locations focus on Northeastern Chinese delicacies, but are unafraid to reach to provinces beyond. Noodles, soups, and stews abound. The main events here, though, are savory pies and dumplings. Dumplings are stuffed lavishly: mackerel, squash, pork, and pickled vegetables. 

Nadia Holguin and Armando Hernandez’s Chihuahuan-style specialties extend far beyond the taco despite their restaurant’s name. Fluffy gorditas enrobe picadillo and shredded beef and burritos are stark, packed with little more than al pastor or lengua, featuring tortillas shaped from freshly milled grains. At the downtown Mesa location, you can also post up at a bar and sip drinks.

On downtown Mesa’s Main Street, this tiny shop serves sandwiches that depart a little from convention. The signature is a fried chicken sandwich with honeyed Sriracha on soft ciabatta. Roasted pork, Calabrian turkey, and a roast beef jazzed with rotating giardiniera are some of the other favorites. Yes, they open for breakfast.

Justin Park’s Korean eatery in Mesa is built, to a large degree, for drinking. Diners knock back soju, soju cocktails, soju bombs, Korean beers from bottles and the tap, and numerous related libations from shareable towers. A “drunken munchies” menu section features YOLO orders like bulgogi nachos, kimchi pork fries, and a Korean take on elote. Tteokbokki, yang nyum chicken, and more traditional dishes are on offer, too.