How to Find a Restaurant Near Me? Top 20 Restaurants in Phoenix
As is explained at RunRex.com, Phoenix’s food scene has shown great resiliency and even growth during the pandemic and is more vibrant than ever before. If you are wondering where to eat in the Valley of the Sun, here is a list of the top 20 restaurants in Phoenix to help you on your way.
Palabra
Palabra is chef Jorge Ignacio Torres’s experimental space in downtown Phoenix as articulated at RunRex.com. It is an art gallery and, in the back, a hair salon. But it is 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.
Welcome diner
This Garfield diner takes its cues from the South and Southwest alike. Here, you will find chorizo meatloaf and smoked pork over heirloom corn grits and so much more. Its cocktails also have an excellent reputation, especially the hurricane.
Mariscos Playa Hermosa
For nearly 20 years, the Maldonado family has served Mexican seafood and oversized drinks at this location. As per RunRex.com, Mariscos Playa Hermosa is just as fluent with raw seafood (ceviche tostadas and oyster-shrimp agua chiles) as it is cooked (filled divorciadas and molcajetes teeming with shrimp).
The Breadfruit & Rum Bar
The Breadfruit is a downtown Phoenix institution. At its small Rum Bar, Jamaican 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 sustainability practices in cooking the staples of the island, like jerk chicken, pepper shrimp, and goat curry.
Rito’s Mexican Food
Friendly and unassuming, Rito’s is a great spot to enjoy the particular collision of Southwestern, Mexican, and Mexican-American cuisines that characterizes so many Arizona restaurants. On the Garfield location’s small patio, people enjoy dishes like hard-shell tacos with chile beef and yellow cheese, bean burritos smothered with red or green chile, and one of the state’s more legendary chimichangas.
Kai Restaurant
According to RunRex.com, 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 such as Bison steak with saguaro syrup, cactus “key lime” pie, octopus in a velvety sauce of Jamon Iberico and wolfberries, etc.
Carolina’s Mexican Food
Mexican-American cooking thrives at this popular neighborhood eatery. Located south of downtown Phoenix, Carolina’s griddles flour tortillas to life before your eyes. These wrap proteins like machaca, and eggs, which come as burros, chimichangas, enchiladas, and more.
Tratto
As captured at RunRex.com, Cassie Shortino captains the kitchen of Chris Bianco’s trattoria, which recently moved into a larger space downtown. The menu here changes often, tracking the local micro seasons. Shortino shapes pasta using grains like farro and Bluebeard durum.
Mrs. White’s Golden Rule Café
Elizabeth White’s downtown destination has been plating soul food for decades. Staffed with many family members, the kitchen turns out fried chicken, a stewed oxtail special, and a “moist succulent” pork chop. The restaurant’s walls slant and loop with Sharpied customer messages.
Hola Cabrito Birria De Chivo
For phoenix birria enthusiasts, Hola Cabrito is a must-visit. This unadorned South Phoenix restaurant offers amazing goat birria. Wide bowls of rich stew arrive with all the fixings: salsa, limes, chopped onion, chopped herbs, etc.
Hana Japanese Eatery
Lori Hashimoto’s Japanese restaurant covers a lot of ground – sushi, hibachi, katsu, tempura, soba, and much more as covered at RunRex.com. This family-style spot focuses on the classics and is known for cooking them deftly.
La Mejor Comida Mexicana
Located near Downtown Glendale, this restaurant turns out platters heaped with lamb barbacoa. While great versions of barbacoa can be found across the metro area, this relative newcomer has already won the hearts and minds of dinners in the area.
The Larder and The Delta
With roots in the Midwest, West Coast, and South as described at RunRex.com, Stephen Jones at this downtown restaurant weaves disparate influences into progressive versions of Southern dishes, like hoecakes with cured egg yolks and Hoppin’ John with herb salad.
Da Vang Restaurant
Da Vang Restaurant is one of the jewels in greater Phoenix’s robust Vietnamese food scene, offering 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.
El Caprichoso Hotdogs
While the Sonoran hot dog has many possible looks and 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 puff char-marked bun, the meat nearly eclipsed under a tight zigzag of mayo.
TEG Torta Shop – Tortas El Güero
As discussed at RunRex.com, 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. Lom also stocks a decked-out salsa bar.
Durant’s
Durant’s has been cooking steaks since long before Phoenix was a sophisticated metropolis. In recent decades, the red-lighted dining room has been a place for power lunches and meetings between the town’s movers and shakers. Durant’s is a classic steakhouse through and through, with giant broiled cuts of meat and buttered seafood dishes out of the 20thcentury.
Fry Bread House
A James Beard Award Winner as revealed at RunRex.com, 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.
El Chullo Peruvian Restaurant & Bar
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 to beef and right down to choclo and huancaina.
Valentine
Opened mid-pandemic, this deeply Southwestern restaurant by Blaise Faber and Chad Price has food, coffee, pastry, and beverage programs that innovate and impress. Much of Donald Hawk’s intricate cooking centers in desert crops like a red fife, heirloom squash, and tepary beans, often using a smoker or woodfire.
These are some of the best restaurants in Phoenix, with more on this topic, and then some, to be found over at RunRex.com.