Bacanora Is the Most Exciting Restaurant in the Valley
Bacanora
Bacanora is, without a doubt, the most exciting thing going in Phoenix right now. Chef/Owner Rene Andrade just won the James Beard Award for Best Chef, Southwest. National mags are saying it’s one of the best restaurants in America. Local mags are saying it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Reservations are impossible, lines to get in are long, and it’s all totally worth the hassle. If you like big meats and bold flavors, this is your spot.
Per Rene Andrade in an interview with Phoenix New Times, “This is a very technical restaurant. I don’t have an oven. I don’t have a stove. I only have a grill. I have a 7-by-4 grill that is working just amazing. I wanted to take it back to that — the old-style cooking, the grandma cooking, the asaderos. Cooking with that love and the techniques I have learned, cooking very close to my heart.”
Downtown - 1301 NW Grand Ave
Awards + Accolades
James Beard Awards
2024: Best Chef (Southwest) | Rene Andrade - Winner
2023: Best Chef (Southwest) | Rene Andrade - Semifinalist
2022: Best New Restaurant - Nominee
AZ Central
2024: 100 Essential Restaurants
2023: 100 Essential Restaurants
Eater
2024: The 38 Essential Restaurants in Phoenix
Foodist Awards
2024: Top Mixologist | Moises Castro - Winner
2024: Best Dish in a Supporting Role | Baca Beans - Finalist
2023: Standout Signature Dish | Tomahawk Steak - Winner
2023: Exceptional Culinary Experience - Finalist
Reviews
Bacanora isn't your typical candlelit dinner, but it may cause a love at first sight situation. Or depending on how your heart works, love at first bite.
- Andi Berlin, AZ Central
Andrade, formerly of Ghost Ranch, does for Sonoran cuisine what Chris Bianco did for Venetian-style pizza at this classic, flatiron-shaped dining space on Grand Avenue, stripping away culinary pretense and revealing breathtaking essence.
- Greg Outhier, Phoenix Magazine
At the sit-down Sonoran restaurant Bacanora, on Grand Avenue in Phoenix, Nogales-born chef Rene Andrade shows off some otherworldly grilling skills that are firmly rooted in the traditions of this earthly one. The highlight is any plate whatsoever that contains his carne asada, easily one of the Valley’s best.
- Chris Malloy, Phoenix New Times
What to Get
Baca Beans - Best Dish in a Supporting Role - Finalist
Caramelo
Andrade’s elotes are nicely grilled and worth ordering for the sake of variety. But neither they nor the salad can hold a candle to a third small-ish plate: Andrade’s caramelo. Here, at last, on a crunchy flour tortilla at the center of a brown clay plate, beef appears. It is often Rovey Dairy meat, sourced from Glendale. It is darkly burnished and chopped into chunks, yet still a shade rosy and tender. It’s pure mastery from Andrade, though, as he told me in March, he views it more as everyday home cooking.
- Chris Malloy, Phoenix New Times
Carne Asada Burrito
For this regular menu item, Andrade starts with thick cubes of juicy, rare skirt steak and adds the plumpest of pinto beans before loosely wrapping it all up. By the time I reached the end, I was grabbing pieces of steak off the plate and out of the tortilla and popping them directly into my mouth. Pure decadence.
- Andi Berlin, AZ Central
Pollo Asado - The 101 Best Dishes in the Valley, 2022 - #2
Every dish on chef/co-owner Rene Andrade’s menu is a love letter home to Sonora – particularly his bewitching pollo asado, simply salted and cooked over mesquite, pecan and almond on a Santa Maria grill. The meat is impossibly moist and juicy, full of smoke and char, and made even more delicious by accompaniments of frijoles, potatoes and home-made flour tortillas.
- Phoenix Magazine
Ribeye
There’s a special kind of magic that happens when Rene Andrade begins to sling 46-day, dry-aged ribeye over open flames on a handbuilt steel grill.
- Kristin Scharkey, Sunset Magazine
Tomahawk Steak
While every dish on the menu is outstanding, the tomahawk is a true highlight of Chef Rene’s open flame Sonoran-style cooking, where meat often takes center stage. This hefty bone-in ribeye steak is cooked over a bed of desert mesquite wood, resulting in the most tender and juicy, perfectly-kissed-by-the-grill steak. It’s not cheap, at around $150, but it’s more than worth it.
- Mcconnell Quinn, Eater
