No Glitz Grub : Search for Road Food in and Around Phoenix Uncovers Cowboys, Burgers and Local Color

If I had to choose my last meal, I’d request the crema Catalan at the Scottsdale Princess hotel’s Marquesa restaurant. I might also order the lobster and roasted corn chowder from The Phoenician hotel’s Windows on the Green restaurant.

But I wasn’t near death, I’d blown half my vacation budget on two nights’ dining in Scottsdale’s upper-crust resorts and I still didn’t have a clue about the area’s real flavors. That’s when I turned to my friend Jim Vaughan and asked where I could find regional food seasoned with local color.

Vaughan is a Sonora Desert Huck Finn at 40; a self-educated wild man and local tour operator who roars along Arizona back roads in a van, country music tapes blaring.

Vaughan considers himself an expert on Arizona road food--the dining (and diners) he encounters as a local tour operator. He has his own way of rating restaurants and is slow to award his Five Beer Star rating. A place should have real food, he believes, not that fancy stuff. Lots of local color--miners, ranchers and cowboys. No line dancing. No wimps.

“And a place loses a notch if it has more than four Harley Davidsons out front. Nowadays, Harleys usually belong to Yuppies. But the place would get its rating back if they were real bikers,” Vaughan said.

It was Vaughan who introduced me to such “culinary attractions” as the Rusty Spur Saloon cowboy bar in the Old Town Scottsdale area, where the big enticement is “worm tequila” ($4.50) and buffalo burgers with green chili sauce ($5.50).

Any adventurer’s trip to Mexico includes an introduction to mescal, the tequila cousin that hosts a shriveled-up cactus worm in the bottom of the bottle. The Rusty Spur’s Dos Gusanos includes two such worms in alcohol so potent Trish Braun, the barmaid, warned me, “It’s not wise to light a cigarette while you’re drinking that stuff”--even though I wasn’t smoking. Ten to 15 cowboys a week get it down, dried out worms and all, and win the honor of having their names burned into the wall as members of the bar’s Rusty Spur Club. I was told it helps the high- stepping when the Western band starts up at 2 p.m.

Next stop on our tour was the Greasewood Flat Restaurant in the Pinnacle Peak area north of the ritzy resorts. “There’s only one Greasewood in the world,” Vaughan boasted, as we drove up the mountain.

When we slipped through the ranch gate into a paddock area that houses what was once a bunk house and is now the restaurant-bar, we found a long line of dusty pickup trucks interspersed with heavily chromed Harleys and spiffy new Mercedeses. I noticed bumper stickers on the backs of the parked pickups: “Shooting is my aim in life,” “An armed man is a citizen, an unarmed man is a slave” and “My gun killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy’s car.” Across the parking lot, tied to a hitching post, four saddled horses dozed in the sun, awaiting their owners.

It’s wise to make a first visit to Greasewood Flat at night. In full daylight it looks startlingly like a junkyard, surrounded as it is by prickly greasewood shrubs that bristle the dusty mountainside like 5 o’clock shadow. A wagon train of buckboards piled high with empty beer and liquor bottles encircles 100 or so weathered wooden picnic tables resting on hard-packed dirt.

But at night, gaslights and 10 or so huge metal fire barrels encourage a kinder, gentler feeling. With bonfires blazing, the country singer weaving his magic up on the stage opposite the bunkhouse, and all ages and income levels trading stories around the picnic tables, it’s the essence of Southwest camp-out.

On the Sunday afternoon we visited, most of the outdoor tables were empty, but inside the converted bunk house, imposing bikers in black leather jackets barely cleared the ceiling where they stood drinking at the bar. Every inch of wall and ceiling was covered with business cards, notes, drawings and autographed dollar bills. A service window to the kitchen carried a sign warning, “If you’re not prepared to wait for your food, please don’t order.”

Christine Johnson, Greasewood’s restaurant manager, makes a mellow green chili sauce that tops their thick, juicy cheeseburgers ($4.75.) “My chili recipe won a People’s Choice Award at a local culinary festival,” she bragged. “There’s no meat in it and it’s not really hot, just very flavorful. We go through 450 chili cheeseburgers on a Saturday night. A burger comes with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles and chips. One of those should do you unless you’re a big eater.” Regulars give her nachos with homemade salsa rave reviews, too ($4.25).

Greasewood Flat can accommodate up to 500 customers. The overflow heads for Toolie’s Country, a barn of a place on the west side of Phoenix with enough room for 850 cowboys and cowgirls to twirl and strut with abandon. Toolie’s Country consistently wins plaudits from the Country Music Assn. and the Academy of Country Music as one of the top five country music clubs in the United States.

For Friday night fish fries, Toolie’s is the place to go--$3.95 for a plate of fried fish and French fries delivered to tables that frame the enormous dance floor. Toolie’s also has free Western dancing lessons on Monday, Wednesday and Sunday evenings (6:30 to 8 p.m.). That’s when we can learn everything from the Arizona two-step to country cha-cha, West Coast swing to the shuffle. Most popular of all are the line dances--the Electric Slide, Achy-Breaky, Boot Scoot. Warning: No tank tops or Harley T-shirts allowed, according to the management.

The much smaller Handlebar-J, in north Scottsdale, has its own following of true cowboys (as well as the pin-striped suit crowd)--all drawn by cowboy hats nailed to the ceiling, barbecued ribs, steaks, a country band and high-gloss dance floor. The beef barbecue dinner--which locals devour with gusto--will set you back about $14.

The most sterile place Vaughan would go along with was Sam’s Cafe in the downtown Phoenix Arizona Center. The restaurant overlooking a palm-tree-shaded oasis surrounded by business offices is justly famed for its poblano chicken chowder topped with tortilla chips and mixed cheeses ($3.95 for a big bowl). The bunuelo-- a fried tortilla shell dusted with cinnamon and sugar that serves as a bowl for vanilla ice cream drizzled with hot caramel--was wonderful ($3.95).

We had to drive all the way to Cave Creek, a one-time mining town north of Phoenix near Carefree in quest of a “Navajo taco” in an unlikely setting. The Indian Village shop--just up the hill from the touristy Frontier Town, complete with a gallows in the parking lot--didn’t look like it could possibly contain anything authentic. We made our way through the shop’s vast souvenir collection to a snack counter at the back. There we selected from a menu on the wall, and watched tentatively as a ball of dough, thrown into a boiling kettle of oil, exploded into an eight-inch puffy crust. The choice of toppings was anything from beans and cheese to honey and powdered sugar. But the real deal was the Navajo taco: pinto beans, red chile sauce, shredded lettuce and chopped tomatoes on the puffy, eight-inch crust ($4.95). It’s the closest you’ll come to the Navajo tacos served on Native American reservations. I know this from experience.

On the way back into Phoenix, we stopped at Frontier Town, just long enough to check out the Black Mountain Brewing Co. chile beer at Crazy Ed’s Satisfied Frog Restaurant. Crazy Ed Chilleen is a Phoenix institution, of sorts. His beer--pilsener spiked with Serrano chiles--goes all over the world. Just the thing to wash down your 32-ounce porterhouse steak ($16.95).

I wanted to sample menudo so we headed for south Phoenix, though Vaughan was not turned on by the thought of what he referred to as “that stomach food.” (It’s made of honeycomb tripe--part of a cow’s stomach--simmered with dried corn, chiles and sometimes tomatoes.) Judging by the prevalence of the signs in restaurant windows, menudo is a hot seller on Sunday mornings, when it is downed as a hangover cure, according to my friend Vaughan--an authority on such matters.

Adrian Mosqueda, owner-chef at Adrian’s Restaurant, sells 80 gallons of menudo during an average three-day weekend, but it is in demand all week long ($4.50 for a big bowl), he said. Other offerings on his printed menu that boasts “Taste the Real Mexican Food”: beef tongue tacos ($1.40), goat meat barbecue ($5.75) and baked chicken in mole , served with rice or beans and tortillas ($5.75).

I ordered fish tacos at the San Carlos Bay Seafood Restaurant--two to a plate with rice and beans ($5.25). Strips of moist red snapper wrapped in a soft corn tortilla came topped by half a lime and the traditional garnish of chopped tomato and lettuce. (Yum.) Next time I’ll try the Seven Seas Stew, which looked and smelled marvelous: a huge, steaming bowl of snapper, crab legs, squid, octopus, abalone, carrots and green chiles in a tomato broth ($9.75). (Little English is spoken.)

Our next stop was El Tianguis en Guadalupe Plaza, one of Vaughan’s favorite haunts in south Phoenix, an area that is home to many Latinos. The park behind a whitewashed adobe church is an echo of a tranquil border town on a Sunday afternoon. An arcade of shops offers everything from pinatas to sombreros to guava paste. A couple of musicians with amplified guitars played for dancing on the plaza, and families sat at little tables outside El Taquito Restaurant, plates piled high with such delicacies as cabeza burrito ($2.50), marinated meat from the cow’s head; a Spanish sesos taco of stewed beef brains in a crisp corn tortilla ($1). I opted for more conventional fare and ended up with a generous serving of carne asada (strips of beef briefly marinated in a vinegary mix before grilling) with rice and beans on the side. It was terrific ($6.75).

Only a few blocks away, our last stop--and most fun because of a meeting with its owner-chef Victoria Chavez--was Los Dos Molinos. Chavez greeted us in her cooking clothes: a pert hat with a concho band, a stylish yellow, black and green floral print dress under an apron and comfortable shoes. The eyes behind the owlish red-frame glasses sparkled when we admired the distinctive adobe dining room with tile-topped tables that Chavez and her husband had created in what was once a chapel.

“My food is hot, Hon. I mean to tell you, it’s real hot. My chili comes from Hatch, New Mexico, and I buy it by the truckload,” Chavez said. “The best thing on the menu is the ribs marinated in red chili sauce-- carne adovada. That’s done in a homemade tortilla in one version ($5.25); in another, it’s ribs on a big plate with tortillas on the side ($6.95). It’s really good but I always warn people.”

Los Dos Molinos doesn’t advertise. “I’d rather just let people who have been here tell their friends so they’ll know what to expect. As it is, people have to wait around outside to get in and then they can’t eat the food. Then they get mad. I just give them their money back.”

I sampled her red chili sauce--just the tiniest drop on the end of a homemade tortilla chip. The burn started on the tip of my tongue, leaped to the back of my mouth, catapulted up my nasal passage and exited as tears in my eyes. Then I sneezed. Vaughan hooted. But I noticed he wasn’t touching the stuff . . . Five Beer Star rating or not.

When we paid our bill and were heading out the door, Chavez noticed my misty eyes. “Oh, Hon. You did try my chili!”

GUIDEBOOK: Desert Delights

Where to eat: Adrian’s, 2334 E. McDowell Road, Phoenix; tel. (602) 273-7957.

El Taquito, 9201 S. Avenido del Yaqui, Phoenix; tel. (602) 839-8170.

Greasewood Flat, 10981 E. Pinnacle Vista Drive, Scottsdale; tel. (602) 585-9430.

Handlebar-J, 7116 E. Becker Lane, Scottsdale; tel. (602) 948-0110.

Indian Village, 6746 E. Cave Creek Road, Cave Creek; tel. (602) 488-2827.

Los Dos Molinos, 8646 S. Central St., Phoenix; tel. (602) 243-9113.

Marquesa, Scottsdale Princess hotel, 7575 E. Princess Drive, Scottsdale; tel. (602) 585-4848.

Rusty Spur, 7245 E. Main St., Scottsdale; tel. (602) 941-2628.

Sam’s Cafe, 455 North 3rd St., Phoenix; tel. (602) 252-3545.

San Carlos Bay Seafood, 1901 E. McDowell Road, Phoenix; tel. (602) 340-0892.

Satisfied Frog, 6245 E. Cave Creek Road, Cave Creek; tel. (602) 488-3317.

Toolie’s Country, 4231 W. Thomas Road, Phoenix; tel. (602) 272-3100.

Windows on the Green, The Phoenician hotel, 6000 E. Camelback Road, Scottsdale; tel. (602) 941-8200.