Offbeat Eats

I’ve gone on a rather large number of backpacking trips in Arizona over the years, and I’ve got a tradition that goes back a surprisingly long time (to the 1980s, in fact). Towards the end of every longer trip, you start to tire of backpacking food, and one of the more frequent trail conversations is food cravings for when we get back to civilization, and inevitably the exact same food item comes up: a cheese burger. Specifically, a green chile cheeseburger. It’s the perfect antidote to several days of trail food. Back in the day, this was usually the saloon at Tortilla Flats, but I haven’t been up that way for a few years (the Arizona Trail was out of commission for several years, which made Tortilla Flats a bit of an out-and-back experience not terribly close to most of the trailheads I use in the Superstitions). For some of the more recent trips, this has been Joe’s Farm Grill (which is getting ripe for a re-visit) or Fate Brewing (which between a logistically-good location, has an awesome Hatch chile lager to enjoy with your burger). So, after wrapping up our week hiking in the Grand Canyon, we decided that we needed cheeseburgers, and I know there was just the place for this in Flagstaff: Diablo Burger.

After meeting up with fellow backpackers Dan and Sarah in Phoenix, our Fitpacking trip to the Grand Canyon headed up north, stopping for dinner in Flagstaff. I’ve always enjoyed Flagstaff, between the cooler climate, the nice setting at the foot of the San Francisco peak, and the more laid back atmosphere, and look forward to trips when I can get that far north. And, in my experience, Flagstaff has always had a good dining scene, especially in the downtown area, with a lot of good restaurants and hang-out spots for nearby Northern Arizona University. But for this visit, we were aiming at a spot just a bit east of downtown on the old historic Route 66: El Tapatio.

In early December I flew out to the Phoenix area as part of a trip to go backpacking in the Grand Canyon, but had a few days before and after the trip to visit with friends and family in the Phoenix area. Like many of my Arizona trips, I met up with my friend Allyson for lunch, and this time we decided to go to Old Town Scottsdale. Old Town Scottsdale is mostly “fake Old West” and “fake Native American Trading Post” shops on the tackier-end of the scale, but there are a few gems hiding amongst the various “Trading Posts”. One of the them is The Frybread Lounge, an Indigenous-owned restaurant serving up Indigenous staples, primarily focusing on frybread.

One of those items is a proper Italian-American sub sandwich. London has almost uncountably-many good Italian places, including delis, but the “Italian Sub” (aka “Hero”, “Hoagie”, “Grinder”, “Maine Italian”, or “Wedge”, depending on exact location in the Northeast) is a distinct product of the Italian-American tradition. Back in the day when we were growing up, this would mean a trip to Guido’s Deli for subs, but the Mesa outpost of that venerable Chicagoans-moved-to-Scottsdale institution closed years ago, and we didn’t have time to go that far for lunch. Seeing that we were bouncing around Chandler doing various errands, I decided this was a great opportunity to head over to west Gilbert and check out Little Joe’s Italian Market (formerly “East Coast Joe’s Food Truck”).

One of the things that I enjoy about visiting the Southwest is that you can get a much broader menu of Mexican food choices. While a bit of determined scouting can yield some decent burrito joints and even taquerias up my way, if you are searching for, say, pozole or albondigas, you’re going to have to search pretty hard. But when I’m in Arizona, it’s actually pretty easy to chase some of these things down. In this particular case, I was looking for lunch after helping a friend clean out a fake server farm (Really! Backstory here, he bought the remains of the farm at auction), and decided that what I was really craving was a proper Mexican-style Torta. Since we were in the west Tempe/North Awatukee area, I had a plan: I was going to head up to the Guadalupe Mercado, a nice outdoor market at the corner of Guadalupe and Avenida del Yaqui in the small town of Guadalupe. There we found Del Yaqui in one corner of the Mercado.

One of the nice things about visiting my childhood home in Mesa, AZ is that there almost uncountably many good places with a 10 minute drive to score a really good Mexican breakfast (you can see my previous reviews of Amada’s in Mesa and Salazar Bros. in Tempe, for example). But I really like to mix it up and try new places when I can, so when we recently found ourselves heading down to downtown Chandler for a trip to Peixoto, we decided to check out another place on my potential breakfast burrito hit list: Taqueria Mi Casita.

As mentioned in the previous review, a trip to Arizona often involves meeting up with friends. For our second lunch outing with friends, we went to an old favorite, Culinary Dropout, that I hadn’t visited in a few year. Culinary Dropout is an Arizona-based chain, with the original location opening back in 2010 on Scottsdale’s “Waterfront” to good reviews, and now it has grown to over a dozen locations. We went to the relatively new Scottsdale Quarter location, which is one of the newer “outdoor malls” in North Scottsdale.

My visits to Arizona’s Valley of the Sun always involve a combination of trying to find the new and exciting places to dine, while occasionally indulging in an old favorite. In this case, we headed over to Tempe, AZ, where there, in a fairly nondescript strip mall a block east of Rural Road, sits Delhi Palace. Back in my undergraduate and graduate school days, Delhi Palace was the standard gathering place of not only my own friends, but my brother’s as well; a typical Christmas visit to Arizona could see as many as ten people gathering for the lunch buffet. But as folks age, move away, start families, etc, the annual gathering at Delhi Palace started to fade away, with my last visit with friends happening in 2015 (although a few of us migrated to a similar periodic gather at Haji Baba a few blocks away. This trip, however, I decided to call up my old friend Karla (a veteran of many previous Delhi Palace gatherings) and see how our old haunt was doing.

After concluding my business trip to Tucson, before heading north back to the Phoenix area to catch my flight home, I used this as an opportunity to indulge in another favorite, hitting up a good old-school Mexican cafe. Tucson is a particularly good town to accomplish this; while it has a handful of well-known places (including El Charro, who nominally claims to be the originator of the Mexican-American style deep-fried Chimichanga), if you’re really craving Mexican, head to 12th Avenue in South Tucson. In an approximate 3 mile stretch of 12th Avenue has an outstanding array of Mexican bakeries, taquerias, hot dog stands, and restaurants. And one of the longest existing places on that stretch is El Merendero, which has been in business since 1965.

One of the shortcomings of rural New Hampshire living is that we don’t have a lot of a great breakfast options. There are some breakfast gems both locally (like Lou’s in Hanover) or regionally (like Polly’s in Sugar Hill), but when I’m really craving a good, solid breakfast, I’m generally craving something Southwestern, and we don’t have a lot of good options that way. But I travel a lot, and I recently found myself in Tucson, Arizona, craving some sort of Southwestern breakfast, and also wanting to have breakfast at 6:30 in the morning. And there was one place in Tucson I know would meet these requirements: Baja Cafe.