Trek On Over to Tucson

By Kris Grant

When you consider a trip to Tucson, you’re most likely to be drawn to the natural environment of the Sonoran Desert. Located just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, Tucson is a great place to experience the spirit of the Old West, with exceptional sunsets outlining rugged mountain vistas punctuated by giant saguaros, ocotillo and barrel cactus. Home to the University of Arizona. Tucson features a vibrant visual and performing arts scene. Bounded by mountains that were once ancient volcanoes with peaks that rise above 10,000 feet, Tucson is surprisingly also a winter ski destination, while down in the valley, guest “dude” ranches and the finest resorts and spas in the nation beckon visitors throughout the year. Now there’s an even better reason to trek on over to Tucson: In 2015, Tucson was the first American city to earn the designation World City of Gastronomy by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The designation recognizes Tucson’s history as the oldest continuously inhabited and cultivated area in the nation with archaeological records that showed crop cultivation going back more than 4,000 years, plus a 300-year record of orchards, vineyards and livestock ranching. Let’s meet four culinary leaders whose passion for their craft is evident in their offerings … and an over-the-top loyal client base.

Mother and son, Carlotta and Ray Flores, currently run El Charro restaurant.

Welcome to the oldest Mexican restaurant operated continuously by the same family, and a beloved institution of the local Tucson community.

El Charro’s matriarch Carlotta Flores took over the reins of El Charro Café from the founder, her great aunt, Monica Flin, in 1974. Carlotta’s son, Ray, serves as president, for all El Charro restaurants, which celebrates its 99th year anniversary this year.

In the late 1800s, Monica Flin arrived in Tucson from France with her mother, Carlota, and father Jules, a world-renowned stone mason, who was commissioned to build Tucson’s St. Augustine Cathedral. Jule’s work can be seen throughout much of old Tucson, including the Flin’s original residence on Court Street, which he built in 1896. Monica regularly cooked for her father and his workers, integrating the recipes of northern Sonora with favored foods of the “charros,” the Mexican equivalent of the American cowboy of the Southwest. “There really wasn’t a border between Mexico and the U.S. at the time,” said Ray, noting that Arizona didn’t become a state until 1912.

A century ago, lack of refrigeration created cooking techniques that allowed for longer-term storage, including curing meats, which continue to this day at El Charro. In the courtyard at El Charro Café, large cages continue to be suspended high in the air to allow sun-drying of beef, creating a flavorful Carne Seca used in many of El Charro’s recipes, including burros (burritos) and machaca. Monica is also said to have created the first chimichanga, when she accidentally dropped a burro into a vat of hot oil.

Like her Tia Monica, Carlotta finds it difficult to separate her personal and business life, but she likes it that way. “That’s part of the reward of the restaurant business: it becomes a melding pot of friends and friends of many generations.

“Our shipping guy’s daughter just received a Fulbright Scholarship. And just recently a customer introduced himself to me. He was a doctor and El Charro employee photo, circa 1940.

Monica and El Charro waitresses, circa 1950.

Monica Flin and her grandniece, Carlotta Flores, circa 1950.

It has been said that El Charro invented the Chimichanga.

he said, ‘Thank you for employing my mother.’ That really touched me.”

But one time period for El Charro Café was painful for Monica, whose first restaurant was at 140 West Broadway, the St. Augustine Plaza. She operated there up to the late 1960s, when the city took her property through eminent domain. “It was a time of much gentrification,” Ray said. “And a lot of Mexican families were removed from the homes they built. I believe the city paid her less than what the building was actually valued at. It was a time of cultural appropriation and crimes against women that I’m afraid still goes on today in the food business.”

To add insult to injury, the city then knocked down everything around the original El Charro and built the new plaza around it. “That’s when Monica moved the restaurant to her house. But the city then began referring to the old site as the El Charro building,” said Ray. “We had to sue the city for our name!”

The new mixed-used retail and office complex was renamed La Placita Plaza, but it never really took off, said Ray. “So now the city has demolished it and, this time, with our permission, the new developers are going to call it ‘The Flin.’ We think Monica would have liked that. She deserved the honor.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, downtown was dying because of urban sprawl. People began moving to the suburbs, but we kept downtown going. We kept our lights on.”

When Monica was in her 80s, her health began to fail, and she approached her niece and her niece’s husband, who were not that interested in taking on the business, but their daughter, Carlotta, was eager to step up to the plates.

Carlotta was then living in Los Angeles with her husband, Ray, and two young sons, Ray and Marcus. “I decided after two days that I wanted to come back to Tucson and this is where we would raise our family.”

Carlotta bought out her parents, and she and her husband found contractors to update and expand the family home. With only a beer and wine license at the time, they took steps to secure a full liquor license but in the interim introduced wine margaritas. That entailed biweekly trips to California to buy truckloads of a special margarita mix, the only mixer that Carlotta felt delivered a superior taste. And when Carlotta’s husband, Ray, died in 1977 of a heart attack, Carlotta became interested in heart-healthy cooking, and the restaurant ceased using lard in all recipes and now features many gluten-free menu options.

Today, the El Charro family of restaurants includes the original El Charro, plus locations in Oro and Ventana, and El Charro Steak, where executive chef Gary Hickey prepares grass-fed steaks, which are all cut inhouse, and cooked on a unique mesquite hybrid gas stove. There’s also the recently opened Barrio Charro, featuring Don Guerra’s Barrio Bread. El Charro also operates restaurants at four international airports (Tucson, Phoenix, Lexington, Kentucky and Baltimore/Washington), and a restaurant, Heche en Vegas, at the MGM Grand. Carlotta is also proud of “Carlotta’s Kitchen” where her “14 nanas” handcraft El Charro’s signature salsa and tamales daily. “You can taste the love,” Carlotta says.

Meanwhile, Ray Flores is busy on developments outside the El Charro family of restaurants that also impact the downtown Tucson food scene. He has been brought in by the developer of “The Hexagon Building” at Congress and Scott streets to develop a cafeteriastyle food hall. He isn’t releasing the name of the complex that has a targeted opening of early 2022, but promises it will include eight food concepts and that it will include Don Guerra’s Barrio Bread in the mix.

Thirty years ago Don Guerra, while on summer break from the University of Arizona, took a job at a Flagstaff bakery. It immediately brought back fond memories of his mother baking bread at home and the aromas that filled the household.

Don Guerra says he became obsessed with the idea of opening his own bakery, and began by reading everything related to bread in the Flagstaff library. He began traveling to seek out the best bread bakeries, visiting Acme Bread in the San Francisco Bay area and Bread Alone on the East Coast, “Those two companies brought European-style bread here – the crusty, sourdough method. People call it artisan bread, but that’s a bad title.”

After learning from master bread bakers while enrolling in an intensive course at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, Don wrote his first business plan and headed back to Flagstaff and secured funding. The young man had always been entrepreneurial. Beginning at age 8, he shined shoes at his father’s barbershop in Tempe, Arizona. That’s where he learned how to treat people, he said. “My father said, ‘Never let a customer open the door. Open it for them and greet them, and vary what you’re saying. Be genuine.’”

He contacted his former bakery and employers (“I always left on good terms, giving plenty of notice and suggesting others who could take over the job I did.”) and restaurant associates and asked if they’d like to buy bread from him. “I had 12 restaurants that said they’d buy my bread right away.” His first shop was successful and he opened a second in Ashland, Oregon. After ten years in business, he sold the company and moved back to Tucson where he returned to the University of Arizona and earned a degree in education. He taught PE, math and health classes for the Tucson Unified School District for seven years but missed the baking. So he built a makeshift bakery in his garage and for eight years baked bread for his fellow teachers. “People knew me as the ‘community-supported baker,’” he said, where members of the community pre-order bread. “I made 370,000 loaves from my garage over eight years.”

Then in 2011 he received a USDA grant to be a test baker for a study on white Sonoran wheat and whether it could be grown in Arizona. Answer: yes it can! “And I had an epiphany: this is my future, growing breads with local grains,” he said.

His Barrio Bread company features 12 varietals of wheat and 32 breads in his

Don Guerra shows off some delicious bread loaves made from local grains at Barrio Charro.

collection, all grown by local farmers. Each day, lines stretch down and around the block at Barrio Bread as customers vie for their favorite fresh loaves. In 2020 he was a semifinalist Outstanding Baker in the annual James Beard awards.

Don Guerra and Carlotta Flores were friends for years, admiring each other’s products and community-minded philosophy. In the midst of the pandemic, they launched Barrio Charro, where all sandwiches and other menu items are take-out friendly.

Now Guerra’s breads are also featured at Charro Steak. “Our Chef Gary Hickey makes a great prime rib,” said Ray Flores. “And Gary said to Don, ‘Dude! You put your bread with our protein.’ It can’t get any better!”

Ken Harvey has been with Loews Ventana Canyon Resort for 14 years, and believes it’s the most exciting hotel brand out there, which is saying something since he earlier worked with JW Marriott, St. Regis Luxury Collection and Ritz Carlton.

“This was Jonathan Tisch’s first hotel,” Ken said, referring to Loews’ now cochairman of the board of the 24-property hotel chain. “He flew over the entire 100 acres of the property and was so amazed by the 80-foot Ventana Canyon waterfall that was cascading down the canyon that he decided to reorient the entire hotel to face the mountains.”

The resort’s 100 acres feature not only the waterfall but a creek that runs through the resort, filling ponds along the way, including one just below the Flying V Bar & Grill. The Flying V is Tucson’s only waterfront dining, with entrees that run $50 to $60 each. In addition to the outdoor patio dining, the restaurant’s walls overlooking the pond and golf course beyond all fold back. Ken noted that The Flying V is sold out every day, with patronage that skews 80 percent locals, 20 percent visitors. “We’ve knocked down the barrier of hotel dining for our community,” he says.

And the primary reason for that, he says, is that Loews Tucson brings nature front and center to its culinary offerings.

“When I started here, they were doing brunch in the ballroom,” Ken said. “I mean, cliché, right?”

Instead, just a year into his tenure with Loews, Ken created an outdoors “Blues, Brews and Barbecue” Sunday Brunch; it will restart in October. “We partnered with the Tucson Jazz Society with popular guitarist Tom Walbank and Tasha Bundy on drums; they both started with us on day one. The brunch features smokers, grills, rotisseries Loews Ventana Canyon Resort Executive Chef Ken Harvey.

Loews’ Tubs are huge - I was so glad I brought bubble bath!

and planchas where all foods are cooked to order. “We have upwards of 800 guests each week; it’s always a sell-out.”

The hotel, like all Loews properties, has instituted a program called “Flavor by Loews” that features local culinary artisans in its food offerings. At Ventana Canyon, those artisans include Don Guerra’s Barrio Bread, Tucson Tamale (non-GMO, organic tamales) and Dragoon Brewery.

Ken says he forages much of Loews’ 100 acres in Tucson. “Each year we bring in a stone grinder to make mesquite flour from mesquite trees’ yellow pods. Natives used to make syrup from the fruit of the Palos Verdes; each year when the landscaping crew trims them, we have them save the wood, which we dry for about a year. The wood from the Palos Verdes actually cooks hotter than mesquite.

Each year, if a tree gets struck by lightning, Ken will put in a request for a tree that will be used at the restaurants; he’s added Bay trees, figs, and citrus, and special herbs. “We dry the leaves of the hibiscus to make agua frescas,” he says. “Saguaros are blooming now; we forage the flowers. After the flower dies, the fruit on the tree ripens and turns bright red. The fruit tastes like a combination strawberry and fig. “But the most religious thing we make is a saguaro syrup; it tastes between a balsamic and molasses. The saguaros bloom in May but sugars don’t ripen until June and July.

“The [Native Americans] believe that if you leave the red face of the fruit open to the sky, it will bring the monsoons,” said Ken. “And those waters are what keeps everything in this desert environment alive.”

Ken grew up in Kansas City, but later moved to Tucson, where his father lived after his parents divorced. “I first became interested in food when I worked at Basha (Tucson’s local grocery store) and became interested in produce.”

Shortly thereafter, Ken went to the Art Institute of Houston, where he received a degree in Culinary Arts. And in his tenure at Loews, he’s inscribed his mark on the resort’s culinary offerings.

The adult pool at Loews Ventana Canyon. The resort invites you to relax and enjoy nature.

If You Go

Loews Ventana Canyon Resort: (Be sure to book direct and ask for the Loews Loves Teachers special. For any two-night stay (or more) booked direct through Labor Day, Loews Ventana Canyon Resort will donate to DonorsChoose.org to help fund Tucson school projects for the 2021-2022 school year. Guests can also take advantage of a special summer offer “Live Like a Local” at Loews Ventana Canyon including a $50 daily food and beverage credit, waived resort fee and late checkout until 3 p.m. www. loewshotels.com

El Charro Café: www.elcharrocafe.com

Barrio Bread: www.barriobread.com