The food scene was on fire. COVID-19 changed everything
Chef Stephen Jones wanted to escape this culinary hellscape. ● It was summer 2009 and Arizona was still reeling from the Great Recession, but Jones landed in Phoenix from Chicago, bright-eyed for the next kitchen adventure. ● Two weeks later he bought a plane ticket back to Chicago. It sounds harsh, but the shock from what he found in Phoenix was really that bad, he insisted. “I could not believe a whole city, as large as Phoenix, believed so heartedly in chain restaurants,” Jones said. “Chain restaurants were just so busy. I thought, ‘ What the hell did I do? Did I destroy my career?’”
After long discussions with his thenfiancee, Jones canceled his flight, deciding to stick it out in the desert.
About a decade later, the city he almost quit seemed like it was finally getting the recognition he, his peers and those that came before them were working toward.
The Valley was riding a culinary wave from 2019, when Charleen Badman of FnB Restaurant brought home the James Beard Award for best chef in the Southwest, ending Arizona’s 12-year drought for that accolade. The James Beard Awards, dubbed “the Oscars of food,” named 18 more semifinalists from metro Phoenix in 2020, which included Jones with his first nod and Barrio Cafe’s Silvana Salcido Esparza, an eight-time semifinalist who redefined Mexican food in Phoenix.
Jones pointed out other ways the Valley was gaining ground: Local food festivals were getting shoutouts in The New York Times, farmers markets multiplied, cocktail bars won national awards. Even celebrity chefs, from Scott Conant to Giada De Laurentiis, were investing in Phoenix and Scottsdale.
It would take a global pandemic to snuff out that momentum. Like many others, Jones didn’t see it coming.
Steve Chucri, head of the Arizona Restaurant Association, wrote in an Oct. 5 email that there were approximately 10,768 Arizona food establishments open in February 2020 and an estimated 9% to 11% of them closed during the new coronavirus pandemic. That figure includes restaurants, caterers, food trucks and bars and would mean around 1,000 food establishments have closed during that time.
“We were climbing that hill and making some serious name for ourselves,” Jones said. “This town was on fire, in terms of the food scene. I literally said to people, I’d put us up against anywhere, against New York, with our wealth of talent ... Then all of it came to a halt overnight.”
Now the thousands of people who make up metro Phoenix’s dining industry have at least one question: Where do they go from here?
Best known for his Phoenix restaurant The Larder + The Delta, Jones was 29 years old when he moved to Phoenix. Back then he already had years of experience at some of the most exclusive restaurants in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Tokyo, with Wolfgang Puck and Nobu Matsuhisa among the celebrated chefs he could list as his references.
Jones was supposed to help bring RPM Steak, an upscale Chicago steakhouse, to Scottsdale. When he arrived to the Valley, he learned that project had fallen through, but he stayed anyway. It was a struggle to find a job because he was considered “overqualified” for positions, he said.
“I thought that was a joke because how is someone overqualified to work at a restaurant?” Jones dismissed.
At the time, there were a handful of independent restaurants that interested him, including one that would become his future employer, Tarbell’s. But for the most part, the Valley was a resort town and outside the resorts, people seemed besotted with corporate chain restaurants, he lamented.
“The support for the local scene and local chefs weren’t here,” Jones said. “It wasn’t a concept-driven town. If there were big lights and TVs, people would go even if the food was garbage. People weren’t supporting local farmers as much.”
Go back 20 years prior to Jones’ arrival and the Valley food scene would have appeared even more “meat and potatoes,” according to Howard Seftel.
Seftel moved in 1990 from Los Angeles to Phoenix, where he worked as a dining critic for Phoenix New Times from 1992 to 1999, then for The Arizona Republic from 1999 to 2015. He ate at probably 5,000 local restaurants during that time, he estimated.
“This was the most white bread town you could possibly imagine,” Seftel said of his first impression. “People thought free-range chicken meant it didn’t cost anything. It’s a joke but it was essentially true. This was a 10th-tier dining town, except for a couple of resort restaurants and a couple independent places like Vincent’s and Christopher’s.”
It was a time when people considered vegetarianism “wacky,” regional Chinese cuisines other than Cantonese weren’t on the radar and he once wanted to weep because a restaurant served him cubed carrots from a can.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the driving force that’s shaped the evolution of Phoenix’s dining scene, but it’s likely a combination of factors.
Changing demographics, stemming from both immigration and people moving from diverse cities, helped usher in different palettes and a more sophisticated way of thinking about food, Seftel said.
Certainly, the Valley’s population has changed in recent decades. Phoenix topped the list for fasted growing U.S. cities, The Republic reported in May.
U.S. census data also shows that from 2014 to 2018, Maricopa County had an estimated net influx of nearly 11,400 people from four southern California counties, including Los Angeles and San Diego. Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is, also cracked Maricopa County’s top five sources of out-of-state transplants.
Changes in Phoenix’s dining scene could also reflect the changes happening nationwide. First- and second-generation immigrants are challenging the old ways of making their family’s food, while also shifting the idea of what’s considered “authentic.”
Scottsdale Community College and Arizona State University’s Prepped program have made culinary education more accessible. These programs helped entrepreneurs kickstart their food trucks such as Maya’s Cajun Kitchen, Phoenix Coqui and Sana Sana, who offer vegan po’ boys, mofongo and blue corn pancakes, respectively.
Somewhere along the way, things changed and Phoenix diners became more sophisticated.
“I think ‘sophisticated’ can kind of have a pejorative, snobby, elitist air,” Seftel said. “It could be something as simple as understanding this guy makes pasta fresh and this guy opens a box of Ronzoni … I don’t want ‘sophisticated’ to be understood as looking down on people. It’s about being more knowledgeable, and that’s a good thing.”
And that doesn’t necessarily mean fine dining. For Seftel, sophistication could mean appreciating the complexity of bastilla, the savory and sweet Moroccan meat pie served at Alzohour Market in west Phoenix. Or recognizing the homemade tortillas at Carolina’s Mexican Food, a south Phoenix institution.
As Phoenix grew, so did its dining options.
Veteran chefs such as Chris Bianco, Chrysa Robertson and Nobuo Fukuda embraced locally farmed ingredients and inspired a new wave of chefs to champion for local farms.
After the 2008 opening of Mekong Plaza in Mesa, Asian restaurants and cafes began flourishing near and along a two-mile corridor of Dobson Road, offering boba, hand-pulled noodles and Korean barbecue.
Mexican restaurants found success away from chimichangas, boasting regional specialties, such as Jalisco-style birria at La Marquesa to Puebla-style cemitas at El Rincon Poblano.
Farmers markets multiplied, sprouting from Peoria to Ahwatukee. Food festivals and pop-up dinners exploded, from Phoenix Night Market to Lom Wong, allowing up-and-comers without a traditional restaurant to flex their creativity.
From the mid- to late-2010s, Phoenix’s cocktail culture got a boost with the openings of internationally recognized bars UnderTow, Century Grand, Bitter & Twisted and Little Rituals.
Also around that time, a new crop of women chefs emerged in an often maledominated spotlight: Cassie Shortino showcasing fresh pasta at Tratto, Cat Bunnag pairing Thai street food with an eclectic cocktail menu at Glai Baan, Nadia Holguin slinging Chihuahua-style fare at Tacos Chiwas and Tamara Stanger introducing foraged ingredients to her dishes at Cotton & Copper.
By 2019, Los Angeles Times food critic Bill Addison posed the question, “When Did Phoenix Become a Great American Food City?” Addison, who previously worked for Eater as a national critic, admitted to largely ignoring Phoenix while on the Eater beat.
Phoenix, in other words, was killing it. Then the pandemic came shot it in the temple, Seftel said.
For chef Charleen Badman, rolling with the punches feels familiar. She opened a restaurant six months before the Sept. 11 attacks, about two miles from the World Trade Center. When she moved back to Phoenix, she opened FnB in Scottsdale on the heels of the recession.
Now she’s trying to keep a realistic outlook, while not dwelling on the past and what could have been.
“I kinda already had that experience of opening a restaurant to amazing reviews and business starting to boom, and for it to come to a screeching halt,” Badman said. “I know you just got to put your head down, buckle down, and be smart about making business decisions. That’s hard to say when you’re
putting your work in takeout boxes. It’s deflating a lot of times.”
When the James Beard Awards were canceled, finalist Silvana Salcido Esparza thought that was it: She was never getting it now.
She was nominated for Barrio Cafe Gran Reserva, a restaurant she permanently shuttered during the pandemic.
Discussion sprung up about whether it would be in poor taste to hold a celebration when the restaurant industry seemed to be falling apart. But as The New York Times later revealed, the cancellations came amid other turmoil — a slew of accusations against several nominees for employee abuse or unethical behavior.
There were also concerns over lack of diversity among the winners. In response, the James Beard Foundation announced it would rework its awards program to address systemic bias.
Esparza believes it was about time for the foundation to address its lack of representation. As a queer woman of color, she feels it’s her responsibility to make sure others like her can have opportunities to rise in the restaurant industry.
It speaks to a broader shift in thinking about food as part of a system, one that’s been long entrenched with inequities.
“People will say there’s no politics in food,” Esparza said. “How about the mistreatment of people working and toiling in the fields? ... Maria cutting your grapes, driving the tractor and packing your carrots? That is farm to table. And these folks don’t have documents. How can we eat food that’s handled by people without documents and pretend that doesn’t happen?”
“The chicken farms, look who’s getting sick, taking it home and making their abuelitas sick?” Esparza continued. “COVID is shining a light on what’s already existed. There’s always been politics.”
The late James Beard — a failed opera singer turned famous food authority — would likely approve of a shakeup in the restaurant industry, said former food critic and Tuscon resident John Birdsall.
Birdsall, a James Beard Award-win
ning author, penned the biography “The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard.” He described Beard as an amateur chef who rejected the snobby elitism of the gourmet food movement.
The James Beard Foundation was formed in 1986, a year after Beard died, and the awards were introduced in 1991. Despite being named after him, the chef ’s personal legacy is quite distanced from the foundation, Birdsall said.
“If the James Beard Awards are the pinnacle of the food industry and they’re not equitable, it’s a sign that the industry itself has major work to do to get to a place of equity, or get close to a place of equity,” Birdsall said.
While the pandemic has put restaurants in a financially precarious situation, it’s also given people the time to think about what they want the restaurant industry to look like in the future — not just in terms of new business models, but socially too, Stephen Jones said.
Coupled with the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s time to start having these tough conversations, he believes. He noted that much of the United States’ dining culture is built on the back of slaves and later maids, who cooked feasts for white people while making their own meals out scraps.
Jones evoked this history on his menu at The Larder + The Delta, where he has served his own take on hoecakes and Hoppin’ John.
For years, the contributions of Black chefs were ignored as their white peers won accolades in Southern cooking, Jones said. But times are changing and Jones feels that Black chefs are getting their voices heard.
“I’m not going to apologize for being Black anymore,” Jones said. “All African American chefs have felt like we had to apologize for being Black. Because we made a dish that was ‘too black’ for the establishment. Whether it was the way we communicate with each other. That’s done.”
Moving forward, Badman wants people to become more conscious of where their food comes from, what they’re supporting and where their dollars are being spent. It’s a conversation that’s been growing since before COVID-19, but for many the pandemic has only magnified these concerns.
A lot of the work begins with asking questions, Badman said. Before speaking at an event, Badman said she asks who else is invited: Are there people of color? Are there other women? She’s done with those days where she looked around and realized she was chosen as the token woman among a sea of men, she said.
Inequality goes back to who’s getting attention most of time, Badman added.
“We can go back as far as who’s getting funded,” she said. “A bank is going to fund his person, a male over a female, a white male over a male of color. Who’s able to get that attention, that backing, and it really comes down to the support level. The support of the Beard house, food and wine festivals, the food writers. Who’s writing about food? What are they looking to and who are they deciding to expose and bring attention to? It’s all our responsibility.”
How some chefs are innovating and finding success
Even if a restaurant opens to buzzy reviews, it won’t survive if the customers don’t follow. That’s the lesson Armando Hernandez learned after closing Roland’s Market Cafe Bar in 2019, the short-lived Phoenix restaurant he, his wife Nadia Holguin and Chris Bianco started.
Hernandez hoped Roland’s would push the boundaries of what a sit-down Mexican restaurant could offer, similar to what Barrio Cafe did, but maybe the location or timing wasn’t right, he mused.
Now he and chef Holguin are focused on their first restaurant, Tacos Chiwas, a counter-service taqueria that recently expanded to its third location in downtown Mesa. Hernandez thinks being fast-casual has made it slightly easier for them to adjust the takeout era compared to others who are more restricted by formality.
Fast-casual restaurants were already trending. Alex Stratta opened Stratta Kitchen, a build-your-own-bowl concept in Scottsdale, and the Clever Koi team announced a made-for-takeout version of their restaurant, Broth & Bao.
“The fully sit-down concepts are struggling more than others, like the Salad and Gos and fast things, like Raising Cane’s with the line out the door of cars,” Hernandez said. “I think you’re going to see a huge market in fast-casual and more the style that we already have.”
Nadira Jenkins-El, co-owner of Cutting Board Cafe in Mesa, believes cooperatives can be a way forward for small, like-minded businesses, which is why she started the Cosmic Vegans weekend market.
Jenkins-El leases a space with a commercial kitchen in Glendale, which other vegan food vendors can also use. Utilities, rent and food costs are shared so each individual business doesn’t have to survive on its own, she explained.
“I want to help my neighbor and make sure we’re all good, not just me,” Jenkins-El said. “The co-op, the communal space, isn’t a new concept. It’s just a concept we need to get back to.”
‘We need to burn down the house as an industry’
“Chains deserve to survive as well as local independents,” Esparza said. “However, at what cost? The cost of leaving America with subpar food? This is where people’s tastebuds need to be a priority attached to their money.”
“We need to burn down the house as an industry,” Esparza said. “Let it burn and let’s rebuild. The old way is gone.”