Deep into my nine-course tasting menu at Ursa in Tucson—when I’ve already eaten cactus fruit and quail fudge, and sipped brittlebush tea and marigold liqueur—a stone bowl of reddish sorbet arrives. It’s made from an elusive desert fruit: the wolfberry, one of 400-plus edible native plants that grow in the Sonoran Desert. Crayola-red when ripe and teardrop-shaped, wolfberries grow unpredictably, sometimes going years without appearing. On hikes in the Metro Phoenix suburbs near our home, my kids and I have tried to enjoy them, but even when ripe, the berries can taste acrid, almost medicinal.
The sorbet at Ursa is different. It mutes all bitterness, letting low, hidden fruity notes shine.
“Ursa highlights heritage crops from the Southwest Desert,” says chef Aaron Lopez who founded the restaurant in 2024 as a pop-up in El Centro, California, with his wife June Chee, before moving it to downtown Tucson in October 2025. “We focus primarily on the Sonoran Desert, but we also look at the Great Basin, Chihuahua Desert, and Mojave Desert.”
Lopez and his team are part of a fringe dining trend taking root in Arizona whereby restaurants apply modern culinary techniques to ancient Sonoran ingredients. The movement has been building for a while. Twenty years ago, Kai opened just outside Phoenix on the Gila River Indian Reservation—serving up bison tenderloin sweetened with saguaro fruit syrup and Indigenous vegetables—and quietly planted a seed.
Aaron Lopez and June Chee founded Ursa as a pop-up in El Centro, California, before bringing it to downtown Tucson in 2025.
Courtesy of Ursa
Several Sonoran-sourced restaurants followed, hitting their strides between 2018 and 2020, before COVID-19 thinned the herd. Now, the movement is reviving. In Tucson, Bata shapes tortillas from heritage white Sonoran wheat and makes miso from tepary beans, a staple ingredient of the Tohono and Akimel O’odham peoples. And at Phoenix’s Valentine, you can enjoy a squash sticky bun alongside a chiltepin shakerato—a remix of chilled Italian coffee heat-kissed by the Sonoran’s mightiest pepper. And that’s just breakfast.
“The Sonoran Desert has the oldest cultivated land in America,” says Blaise Faber, owner of Valentine. “There are all these native ingredients people don’t know about. Most people just think of Arizona and this region as a sand-dune-covered no man’s land, but there’s much more.”
Lopez and Chee hail from the border towns of Calexico and Yuma in California. Following the success of the El Centro pop-up, they brought Ursa to Tucson, a city home to a tradition of continuous agriculture so ancient and rich that it snagged the United States’ first UNESCO World City of Gastronomy title in December 2015. “Ursa intertwines into the Tucson food culture,” says Lopez. “The streets are named after the terroir and plants. There are many foragers and seed-savers here.”
Indigenous ingredients like devil’s claw have sustained Sonoran communities for centuries and are now finding a new audience on Arizona’s restaurant scene.
Courtesy of Ursa
When you first sit down to dine in the restaurant—with its brick walls, high ceilings, and psychedelic rock playing on speakers—you’ll find a love letter from the restaurant folded into your napkin. It ends: “We invite you to journey with us through a rich landscape that is both ancient and alive.”
On the night I dine, my meal starts with a large woven basket. Inside, resting on wiry greens and yellow flowers, sits a tiny barrel cactus fruit. Normally yellow, this version is nearly black. It has been aged in ash and edited with Chinese-style XO paste made from chiltepin—a round, brightly spicy chili endemic to the Sonoran—and preserved chiltepin leaves. The fruit is packed with umami and is almost meaty. I demolish it in two bites.
From there, courses parade out the open kitchen. Richly mineral elk tartare, crunchy thanks to dehydrated elk chips and mesquite breadcrumbs; skewers of velvety quail torchon; cholla cactus buds that have a taffy-like chew and are glazed with a shoyu made from creosote; bison smoked over yellow-flowered brittlebrush shrub, served with brittlebush tea; tender wild boar machaca (dried, shredded pork) filling a cowpea-leaf dumpling beside glazed venison; cactus and squash, green and square like a Rothko, suggesting seaweed.
Sparse, precisely plated courses make use of game and Indigenous flora on Ursa’s nine-course tasting menu.
Courtesy of Ursa
The dishes whisk me through dusky, earthy zones of flavor that I struggle to find words to describe. With such experimental treatment of little-known ingredients, you taste flavors anew.
“We focus on pre-colonial crops [from North America], so no tomatoes, cucumbers, or radishes,” Lopez says. “We use Hopi corn, ha:l squash, tepary beans, amaranth, lamb’s quarter, ironwood, and jojoba seeds.”
Because Sonoran desert ingredients briefly flash in and out of season, many of these appear on the menu for just a few days per year. Ursa has a “fermentation dungeon,” a kitchen chamber of clear tubs and fizzing goops, where choice ingredients are fermented, dried, pickled, and preserved, morphing into koji, vinegar, miso, and garum.
“Since many desert ingredients have a brief season, the preservation program is essential,” Lopez says. “If an ingredient has one note, through fermentation we can achieve six or seven different notes and unique by-products.”
Ursa’s innovative menu extends to its drinks, with tipples such as the creosote cola infused with native desert plants and herbs.
Courtesy of Ursa
Ursa’s wild ferments often arrive in unlikely places. For one: dessert. A cake arrives made from brown tepary bean miso, darkened with blackened wildflower curd and cactus jam. Then, a caramelized squash gelato, sweet and buttery, beside leafy common mallow plant marmalade and single piece of raw ha:l squash.
Drinks are equally considered. Diners can enjoy kombucha, cocktails charged with acidified squash juice, and teas made from arcane forage. After dessert, meals end with a dusky bang: house-infused digestifs infused with pods, barks, and flowers. The flavors soar and pivot. It’s eye-opening and odd, like a first hike into the saguaro-studded wild.
“I’m excited that people are noticing Sonoran Desert foods, because they have sustained us forever,” says Brandy Button, who grows Akimel O’odham crops for Ursa and other restaurants at Ramona Farms on the Gila River Indian Reservation. “I would love for it to not be a fad. I would love for this to be a staple of Arizona.”
Enjoying my wolfberry sorbet, it feels possible. You can feel the magic of the land.
5 Arizona restaurants serving experimental desert cuisine
Valentine
- Location: Phoenix | Location on Google Maps
Open since 2020 for breakfast, brunch, and dinner, Valentine celebrates Arizona flavors in a midcentury dining room. At the attached Bar 1912, cocktails such as cactus vermouth martinis reflect Arizona’s diverse biomes.
Bata
- Location: Tucson | Location on Google Maps
Set in a 1930s-era warehouse, Bata cooks over an Arizona oak fire using ingredients sourced within a 400-mile radius. The menu straddles Asia, Mexico, and Europe, with a basement bar serving cocktails made from spirits infused with charred desert botanicals.
Kai
- Location: Chandler | Location on Google Maps
Perched overlooking the Sierra Estrella Mountains to the south of greater Phoenix, Kai serves as a culinary tribute to the Akimel O’odham and Pee-Posh tribes, the ancestral stewards of the Gila River Valley, and the menu honors the area’s ancient foodways, which date to the pre-Columbian Hohokam people. Don’t skip dessert: try the fry bread topped with whipped goat cheese and honeycomb.
Zio Peppe
- Location: Tucson | Location on Google Maps
Zio Peppe bridges Italian, Mexican, and Arizonan culinary traditions. Expect to find classic European comfort foods like pasta and pizza on the menu—only, they include Sonoran ingredients. Take the Wolf and Shrimp Linguine, which features a unique wolfberry pasta made from ground berries and durum semolina.
Shift
- Location: Flagstaff | Location on Google Maps
Chef Tamara Stanger draws on Arizona’s low and high deserts for imaginative dishes at Shift such as mesquite-glazed chicken and duck taquitos with a mesquite mole. Flavors are rooted in the state’s flora, with ample use of foraged plants like barrel cactus and sumac.
