Mariscos Playa Hermosa is Like a Party in Your Mouth
5 Yumpoints | Tied for #45 in Phoenix | Tied for #14 in Downtown
If your view of Mexico is through a Tex-Mex lens, you probably think of the food as pretty simple. You’ve got carne asada and pollo asado, and you put it in a tortilla in various configurations, cover it in sauce and cheese, then serve it up with refried beans and rice. Then add that weird obligatory side of shredded lettuce and tomato—like anyone eats it. But if you look at Mexico on a map, you’ll see a huge amount of coastline. And predictably, where there’s a coastline, there’s seafood. That’s what they’re serving up at Mariscos Playa Hermosa. MPH is a celebration of ceviche and camarones, oysters and scallops, spices and sauces. It’s awesome. You’ll wish all seafood places were this exciting.
Where: Downtown (Calle 16)
Website: mariscosplayahermosa.com
Reservations: On their website
Reviews, Articles, and Awards
+1 Yumpoint | MAR 8, 2024 / NIKKI BUCHANAN
Eater: 18 Essential Mexican Restaurants in Phoenix
It’s always a day at the beach at this 16th Street stalwart, Phoenix’s favorite Mexican seafood restaurant painted in eye-popping colors. The multi-page menu featuring 25 appetizers alone offers every Mexican seafood classic imaginable — raw oysters, shrimp cocktails, seafood tostadas and soups, grilled or fried fish — as well as a slew of surprises, including mango habanero aguachile, hot lava steak, paella brimming with grilled shrimp, grilled octopus and mussels, and El Peligroso, a pricy seafood challenge amped up with fiery Carolina Reaper and ghost peppers that earns diners a t-shirt if they can eat it.
+1 Yumpoint | FEB 29, 2024 / TIRION BOAN AND SARA CROCKER
Phoenix New Times: The 10 best Mexican restaurants in metro Phoenix
While the name Mariscos Playa Hermosa suggests this restaurant is similar to many of the seafood-filled spots in town, it really offers a little of everything. Sure, there are giant platters of shrimp, mouth-puckering aguachiles and whole fried fish on the menu, which are worth a visit on their own. But the options here go far beyond the sea.
+1 Yumpoint | FEB 13, 2024 / NIKKI BUCHANAN AND CHRIS MALLOY
Eater: The 38 Essential Restaurants in Phoenix
The Maldonado family has been making the party happen for over 20 years at this cheerful, brightly colored cantina, which draws crowds for its excellent Mexican seafood and oversized, lavishly garnished bevvies. The huge menu features just about everything oceanic you can think of: raw oysters, fried calamari, ceviches, aguachiles, seafood soups, shrimp dishes of every description, lobster enchiladas, fried red snapper, tacos (the octopus are fantastic) on and on for pages and pages. The hard part is narrowing it down to one thing. By the way, there are turf options for the seafood-averse.
+1 Yumpoint | FEB 1, 2024
Phoenix New Times: The Top 100 Restaurants
The second-best part of Mariscos Playa Hermosa is the dining room and patio. The Sinaloan-style Mexican seafood restaurant was established in March 2002 by Jose and Maria Maldonado, both originally from the small colonial town of Guanajuato, Mexico. The scenery of their hometown shows in this beautiful, loudly decorated eatery. Chairs are bright pink and blue, with technicolored sky and landscapes painted across the walls and chair backs; nearly every color in the rainbow is represented in the decor here. The food stands on its own, though.
+.5 Yumpoints | Jan 30, 2024 / Asonta Benetti
Eater: Phoenix’s Essential Seafood Restaurants
Fun, bright, and colorful, for over 20 years Mariscos Playa Hermosa has been serving up seafood dishes with flavors from Mexican beach towns. While most Mexican restaurants in town have some kind of seafood component, the affectionately known MPH specializes in it. The large menu is overflowing with options; it would take multiple visits to get through all of the aguachiles and ceviches alone. There are shrimp and fish dishes to satisfy every palate, specials like lobster or crab enchiladas, and even a whole grilled octopus.
+.5 Yumpoints | DEC 23, 2023 / CRAWFORD SMITH
Tasting Table: 15 Best Mexican Restaurants In Phoenix
If you're looking to ball out with an order that will make other patrons envy your table, Mariscos Playa Hermosa's novel-length menu has options for you. La Grandiosa is a particularly impressive seafood tower laden with two kinds of oysters, three kinds of shrimp, two ceviches, and crab legs. The restaurant excels at raw seafood dishes doused in aguachile (lime juice, cilantro, and chiles) and cooked specialties. If you want to try a bit of everything, a molcajete is a good bet — you'll get your choice of cooked proteins heaped in a stone dish and topped with salsa.
+.5 Yumpoints | JUN 22, 2023 / LAUREN MILLINGTON
Female Foodie: 10 Best Mexican Restaurants in Phoenix
While you may not expect a landlocked state to offer great seafood, Mariscos Playa Hermosa may make you momentarily forget you are in the desert. The menu is massive and includes almost every kind of seafood you can think of, so the molcajete with green sauce is our favorite way to sample several of their specialties.
+.5 Yumpoints | JUN 21, 2023 / NIKKI BUCHANAN
Eater: 15 Top Taco Destinations in Phoenix
This lively, brightly colored cantina is one of the best places in town for fresh, well-prepared mariscos. The huge menu, divided into multiple categories to keep everything straight, features 16 tacos. Besides the usual seafood tacos suspects — grilled fish, breaded and fried fish, and shrimp — there are lobster tacos, excellent mar y tierra tacos (combining grilled steak, shrimp and mozzarella) and messy but good grilled octopus tacos overflowing with tender, caramelized octopus, melting mozzarella, tomato, onion, red cabbage, crema, cilantro, queso fresco, and spicy zarandeado sauce.
