Into the Desert
The desert has a certain draw. The extreme heat, extensive periods of drought, and seemingly endless dry, dusty expanses peppered with spiky plants form a landscape that is seductive and romantic. Those same extremes push your body to the limit in ways that clear the mind and pull what’s most important to the surface. Shelter, water, survival, certainly. One might assume that such an austere landscape wouldn’t yield much vitality, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a profound appreciation for simple pleasures: a sudden rain shower, vermilion blossoms springing out of an otherwise sand and sage green terrain, or ducking into a watering hole for an ice-cold drink, a glass beaded with condensation that you press against your forehead. The world’s most pungent herbs and spices come from desert landscapes, as plants concentrate the chemical compounds that increase flavor intensity into leaves and seeds in order to withstand arid conditions. The sunsets are spectacular due to these same conditions—light reflecting off mountains, dust particles, and high wispy clouds. The landscape’s extremities throw everything into sharp relief, and if you’re brave and resilient enough to tolerate it, the desert rewards you with a bounty of experiences and flavors.
I come from a different kind of heat. My island home, Puerto Rico, and my southern home, Atlanta, are both places that are known for it. But theirs is a juicy heat, a suffocating humidity so thick you swear you could slice through it. It also cultivates lushness and fresh, lively cuisines. I must like it hot because I keep traveling to and studying some of the hottest places on earth. And Tucson, Arizona, is a town that unexpectedly won my heart. The iconic saguaros, those many-armed desert sentinels, haunt my dreams, as do local dishes redolent with mesquite smoke complemented by the dank smokiness of agave spirits like mezcal and bacanora. Tucson’s mystique drew me back this year on a journey that revealed more of its magic and how its seeming austerity masks an abundance and way of life that reveals solutions for living well in an increasingly hot world.
The Desert Is the Future
It’s Sunday, 7:30 a.m. I drive down the Patagonia-Sonoita scenic road to meet Gary Paul Nabhan, a friend and mentor and among one of the foremost experts on desert terroir, to harvest prickly pear, a decades-long practice for Nabhan. He’s of Lebanese descent but grew up in Gary, Indiana. He moved to Arizona 51 years ago to work with a number of nonprofits and indigenous food projects before becoming a research scientist at the University of Arizona. Now retired, he is the author of more than 20 books on desert terroir ranging from ethnobotany to agave spirits, and today he travels the globe as a desert evangelist with one key message: The desert is the future.
I had repeatedly requested a specific address or pin for us to meet, but the best I got is a pull-off between two mile markers on a road that seems to have several different names and numbers. The meeting place looks much like any other expanse of road in the Sonoran desert, dusty taupe with various cacti and mesquite trees. At a distance many of these plants appear fluffy, with a bushiness that upon closer inspection reveals hundreds, likely thousands, of prickly spines. As we walk a little farther off the roadside, the bounty is revealed. Crowns of prickly pear adorn the tops of the same-named cacti, which range from waist to chest high, begging to be plucked. Nabhan is ready with tongs and baskets, but my inexperience gets the better of me, and like Sleeping Beauty drawn to the spindle, I’m hypnotized by the fruit and pluck one with my fingers. I quickly find it’s covered in imperceivable bristles. Lesson learned, I turn to tongs, looking for the ones with the deepest color, easily pulling the fruit—known locally as tuna—from the cactus pad, revealing its astounding magenta flesh. After scraping the spines from the surface, I taste one straight from the plant, which fills my mouth with extraordinarily sweet, thick, syrupy juice.
As with so many things in the desert, prickly pear season is a marker of time, arriving near the end of monsoon season (about late June to mid-September) when the area receives most of its annual rainfall. And so desert dwellers must make hay, harvesting and enjoying the fruit fresh or juicing and preserving them. This is the first stop on a full day with Nabhan. I first learned about his work 10 years ago, when Tucson was designated a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, a project he spearheaded with anthropologist Jonathan Mabry, making it one of two cities in the United States internationally recognized for its food heritage and cuisine at this scale.
Next we visit an area near his home in Patagonia to harvest amaranth greens, known locally as quelites. These innocuous greens look like weeds but taste better than spinach. Nabhan has harvested many meals worth of salads and ingredients for spanakopita—a nod to his Mediterranean Lebanese heritage—each week from this same patch. From there we head up a fairly steep rocky road to the home he shares with his wife, Laurie Monti, a cultural ecologist with extensive knowledge of plant medicine and a focus on Indigenous community health on both sides of the border wall. Trees leading up to their house bow with ripe pomegranates, and the air smells of herbs warming in the sun. He has cultivated 150 different kinds of desert plants in this garden—creating a resilient and self-sustaining ecosystem of desert offerings.
Nabhan is as committed to what he calls “conservation we can taste” as he is to a kind of Sonoran futurism that looks to the resilience of the desert in order to predict the world’s changing agricultural needs. Although his knowledge spans millennia, having studied and built community with Native peoples throughout the region and in other parts of the world, he very much lives in the present, seeing boundless opportunity in an environment that can sustain so much life amid austerity. “It’s about fomenting innovation,” he said.
Desert Hunger. Desert Abundance.
Tucson is in Sonora, a region that stretches beyond the so-named northern Mexican state to include southern Arizona, up to the Grand Canyon, parts of southeastern California, and the Baja Peninsula. Walls may slow the flow of people, but not nature. The majority of the planet’s biomes, or climate regions, are represented here, and Arizona is the only state to house all four of the nation’s deserts.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that the Sonoran palate is toasty: mesquite smoke, chiltepín chiles, grilled cactus pads, piquant minty oregano, and rich, nutty tepary beans. These flavors spring from native plants that have survived and thrived in this environment for thousands of years and appear far beyond the Mexican restaurants where you might expect them to include a locally made award-winning mesquite-infused spirt—Whiskey Del Bac—as well as pastas, pizzas, sandwiches, and lattes.
Mesquite trees sprout up in seemingly every corner of Tucson. Mesquite shrublands flank the highways, and saplings grow out of sidewalks, their sage, fern-like leaves softening the landscape. They are undoubtedly the most prominent flavor in Sonoran cuisine. When burned, the wood produces a rich, aromatic smoke due to high lignin levels, which imparts a more intense flavor than oak or hickory, with earthy cumin undertones and a mild sweetness. These trees also produce copious beans: sweet pale green seed pods that dangle from the branches and can be eaten fresh or dried and ground into powders. Like prickly pear, mesquite beans spring up during the hottest time of year and store well, making them a critical food for preserving life. Taste can vary, but they’re often described as having a sweet vanilla or cinnamon flavor.
To mirror the hot sun, the hot chile flavor of Sonora is the native chiltepín. It’s known as la madre de todos los chiles, or the mother of all peppers, because all capsicum can trace their genetic origins to this one tiny pepper. Slightly larger than a peppercorn, these chiles grow on bushes and are bright green, then red, and are often sun-dried once harvested. They’re fiery, though much like this environment, they’re initially intense and biting, then dissipate and don’t linger on the palate.
Nopales, the iconic pads of the prickly pear cactus, feature prominently in Sonoran cuisine and are prepared and enjoyed in a number of ways, including raw; blended into smoothies; boiled and chopped and added to soups, stews, or salads; or grilled whole and served like a vegetarian steak. The spines must be carefully removed, and they emit a liquid similar to okra, but a little practice turns this desert plant into an incredibly versatile and nourishing ingredient. And then there are tepary beans; similar in shape to crowder peas in white, brown, or speckled colors, they are rich and creamy. The lighter color is similar in flavor to navy beans while the darker ones have an earthy taste closer to lentils. White Sonoran wheat—derived from an ancient grain as old as 6,500 BCE and brought to the region by Spanish colonizers—is also primed for desert landscapes. It’s the key ingredient in the development of the region’s unique wheat tortillas, distinct from more typical flour or corn tortillas in their mildly nutty flavor and the way they crisp up when heated on a griddle.
Tucson is cattle country, so you’ll also encounter beef in various forms such as stewed into birria, as well as carne seca (also called carne machaca) or dried meat. This style of beef is dried using a variety of methods, then reconstituted before it’s added to dishes. But pork, particularly smoked pork in the form of bacon or twice-cooked carnitas, abound, a nod to Spanish colonial history, as well as a flavor profile that melds perfectly with the copious ingredients sourced from native plants.
I encounter these vibrant, intense flavors everywhere. Mexican food is predictably the most prevalent cuisine represented, though with Sonoran touches. Local favorite El Torero makes crisps: huge wheat tortillas toasted, then topped with green chiles, carne seca, cheese, salsa, and guacamole, like a Mexican pizza. At El Güero Canelo Restaurant or the food truck Ruiz Hot Dogs Los Chipilones, you’ll find the iconic Sonoran hot dog: a bacon-wrapped dog topped with beans, chopped green chile, cheese, and crema and served with a whole roasted chile on the side. At Amelia’s Mexican Kitchen, the region’s signature molcajete—a dish of meat or seafood cooked inside a large stone mortar typically used for making salsas and grinding spices—is served alongside mini chimichangas, which were possibly invented in Tucson at one of the oldest family-run Mexican restaurants in the country, El Charro Café. Among some of the most popular non-Mexican restaurants, Italian restaurant Zio Peppe makes calamarrones—fried calamari combined with chicharrones served over salsa macha with preserved orange. And in the summer Tito & Pep serves a hamachi aguachile with mesquite-smoked cantaloupe.
Tucson’s Garden Oasis
But perhaps the most beloved and fitting representation of the regional palate is the vegetarian restaurant Tumerico. Topping Yelp’s list of best restaurants in the nation in 2024, it springs from the soul of a Sonoran native. Chef Wendy Garcia grew up on the other side of the border wall in the Mexican state of Sonora. She’s the oldest of four children and was raised in an eating family. Her father was the family’s head chef, and he often prepared as many as five meals a day simply because he loved to cook. Or perhaps because both he and his wife were one of more than 10 children in their own families, struggling with poverty and having enough food. The meals of childhood were Sonoran staples: eggs and carne seca for breakfast (one of Garcia’s jobs was swatting flies away from slabs of meat as they dried in the sun), little meatballs made of chicken, beef, or venison (that her father would hunt); fried taquitos; and rice and beans, all served with plenty of fresh salsas or guacamole. She learned to make all of these dishes as a child. “My dad cooked. I’m the oldest, so I was his assistant. But I hated it,” she recalls. For her it was just work, and she would rather have been playing. When Garcia was 16, her father, Carlos, died. They were extremely close, and Garcia struggled to cope. Her mom sent her to Tucson to find her way, which she did—straight into the kitchen. She worked on the line for a number of years and, like many chefs, reached a point of burnout. She struggled with her health, which led her to develop an Ashtanga yoga practice and adopt a plant-based diet. Pulled back to cooking, she started making vegan tamales stuffed with her now signature jackfruit carnitas and selling them at farmers markets in Tucson. Those tamales became so popular that she decided to open Tumerico in 2016 as a love letter to the Sonoran flavors and homestyle dishes she grew up with, but with an intentional emphasis on soul-nourishing dishes with clean flavors that accentuate the quality of the locally sourced native ingredients at the center of her culinary approach.
Wendy Garcia’s energy is explosive. She’s petite in stature but walks into the room with confidence and determination. A quintessential chingona—the reclaimed Mexican term for a fierce, powerful, and intelligent woman. For years Tumerico has topped the ratings charts, rather shockingly for a largely vegan restaurant situated in cattle country. But once you eat there, it’s easy to see why it’s beloved. Garcia is often there, and if she sees one of her regulars from inside the kitchen or out in the dining room, she has a ready embrace. On the day I’m there, she leads her entire kitchen out to the dining room to sing “Happy Birthday” to an elderly man named Ramon.
Tumerico’s menu—which changes daily based on what’s on hand—feels like a warm hug for the body. It’s anchored by those same signature jackfruit carnitas tamales with fresh salsa, and chile relleno stuffed with creamy mozzarella served with vegetable turmeric rice and refried beans. Native tepary beans are cooked perfectly al dente with carrots and nopales and garnished with red chile sauce and salsa verde. Huitlacoche, a fungal delicacy that grows on corn (also known as corn smut), shows up on tacos and other dishes, as does flor de calabaza, or squash blossoms. And the refreshments have the same sumptuous yet nutritive vibe: hibiscus agua fresca, turmeric lemonade, prickly pear horchata, and mesquite lattes.
These dishes are all based on Garcia’s heritage and upbringing but are fundamentally an expression of love, her gift to the eater. Cooking is how she shows affection, how she cares for others. And it’s important to her. On another day we meet at her newer project, La Chaiteria, which serves meat in addition to her signature vegan and vegetarian offerings. I arrive on time, but she looks at me like I’m late. “Come, I’ve been cooking for you!” That wasn’t the plan, actually. We were going to sit and get to know each other. But I learned that Garcia doesn’t really sit. She’s always in motion, checking the restaurant, the customers, the register, and the kitchen. She asks questions in rapid succession, keeping the cooks on their toes. I’d barely sat in my chair when the first plate lands. A green chicken enchilada topped with red sauce and a fried egg, carnitas and ropa vieja tacos, a gorgeous vegetable plate with fresh figs, fried cheese, local pistachios, and cholla buds—the flowering bud of a cholla cactus that resembles a large asparagus tip and a delicacy due to the labor required to harvest it from the spiny cholla cacti bush. Soon tepary beans with queso fresco and fresh green chiltepín peppers follow. Next, beef and chicken tamales and another vegetable platter of locally foraged wild mushrooms, jackfruit ropa vieja, huitlacoche, and salad on a wide wheat tortilla. It’s overwhelming, and decadent, and a rich reflection of Garcia’s energy, vision, and affection for the landscape and the foodways that she knows best.
A Toast to the Desert
The intense Sonoran heat requires constant hydration. But it’s not just water that you crave. Surrounded by those long stretches of dust and cacti, the city of Tucson certainly feels like an oasis. The cool, dark interior of a bar provides a much-needed respite in the summer months, a place to relax and imbibe, to connect with friends or chat with a jovial bartender. Visit Tucson for the landscape and food, yes, but one of the most understated elements of Tucsonan culture is the nature of its people. Folks are warm and welcoming—what we call buena gente, or good people, in Spanish. The locals I encounter have never met a stranger and are genuinely curious and ready to give you their take on the best of whatever you’re looking for. This dedication to both promoting Tucson’s charm and attractions while insisting that the city’s culture not get diluted by growing populations of newcomers relocating there from across the country is in their DNA. Tucson is the borderlands, and the people here are long accustomed to roaming travelers stopping through.
As a result, Tucson has a great drinking scene. From dives to martini bars, you can find refreshment at any level, and to complement the abundance of Mexican cuisine, there’s a bounty of tequila, mezcal, and other spirits distilled from agave and similar plants. The Sonoran desert has a long tradition of moonshine agave spirit production predating Prohibition. Mezcal, like Champagne, has rules (controversial of late) in terms of provenance and production, but agave-based spirits have been produced across this desert region for generations. And in the nearby Chiricahua Mountains, a conservation effort to protect bats and pollinators that relied on overharvested native agave plants led to an international coalition to preserve heritage agave spirits. “Mezcal is not a fad. It is patrimony,” Gary Nabhan writes in his award-winning book Agave Spirits, which he coauthored with expert David Suro Piñera.
Next to tequila, mezcal is the best known and most popular of the agave spirits, which are among the fastest-growing alcohol markets on earth. In the US the Gen Z generation has made clear they wish to consume less than their predecessors, but they are the key drivers of mezcal’s growing popularity, in part because of an affinity for craft distillation culture. Although mezcal is more often associated with Oaxaca, it’s just one of many small-batch spirits with similar provenance. It’s produced with intention and a remarkable spectrum of flavor profiles ranging from savory and peaty to bright and almost creamy with notes of banana or vanilla. In addition to tequila and mezcal, there’s also raicilla and sotol, but most notable for the Tucson area is Sonoran bacanora. Typically, a bacanora has a lighter flavor profile than mezcal. It’s a little sweet and grassy with a milder smoke point.
Doug Smith is among the leading local experts on mezcal. He’s an Arizona native and cultural anthropologist and came to mezcal through a broader interest in Mexico, coffee, and collective small-production models. He and his wife, Amy, run Bar Crisol—the only dedicated mezcal bar in town. It shares space with their celebrated coffee shop Exo Roast Co. in a small adobe building on land that was once a corral in Barrio Viejo, one of Tucson’s oldest neighborhoods. Today it is also a music venue and serves bar snacks like tamales prepared by a local abuela.
Smith is not a bartender; he’s an educator. He offers courses and monthly mezcal tastings at Crisol, and on my visit I spent an evening with him tasting mezcals from across Mexico. Each bottle has a story, starting with a bacanora from just across the border wall in Sonora, then a mezcal from Puebla made with an old practice called bovine fermentation in which the spirit ferments inside a bag made from cowhide, and another from Oaxaca in a style called pechuga—named for the process of putting a raw chicken or turkey breast inside the still to impart certain flavors and balance. With mezcal, no two bottles, even from the same distiller, are exactly the same. And each bottle carries a discernible terroir—you can taste distinct styles and regions in every glass. Depending on the spirit, the agave plant’s maturation ranges from five to eight years. And unlike other fine spirits in this price range, for the cultures that produce them, agave spirits aren’t meant to be collected. “We don’t do that,” Smith recalls a producer telling him. They’re meant to be enjoyed as soon as they’re ready and shared widely to the last drop.
Beyond Crisol, I find agave spirits at every restaurant and bar I visit. The drinks list at Tito & Pep includes at least 30 different mezcals, and Penca is a pioneer in bringing small-batch agave spirits to the area. One of my favorite spots, The Owls Club—located inside a dark, roomy former funeral home—has a number of signature cocktails featuring mezcal and sotol, each with a unique flavor profile and presentation. And on a particularly memorable evening at Saguaro Corners on the outskirts of town, I enjoy a jalapeño margarita looking out at the edge of the Saguaro National Park, spotting a bevy of quail with cartoonish teardrop feathers sprouting from their foreheads, and a couple of javelinas—the beloved pig-looking native hoofed mammals who love prickly pear. These drinks feel like the final bridge to the landscape, that last suspiro, or sigh, at the end of a long hot day, evocative and inextricable from their surroundings.
Poet Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads.” Tucson embodies this idea, intersections and the spaces in between. The frontier brings adventure, and in this wonderful Arizona town you can taste potential and excitement. I leave this visit to Tucson as I do every other: inspired by the uniquely local, tough-yet-artful, resilient spirit of the place and in love with the roasty palate it evokes. The list of places to visit and people to meet grows ever longer, the pull of the Sonoran expanse confounding my oceanic island origins. But if the desert is the future, then perhaps my love affair with the desert is a part of my future, of my mind and body preparing to feel the sublime amid austerity.