Tucson was named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy in 2015, the first in the United States, on the strength of an agricultural history that runs back roughly four thousand years — the longest continuously farmed area in the country.
The Sonoran hot dog is the city’s best-known dish: a bacon-wrapped hot dog in a soft bolillo roll with beans, tomato, onions, mayonnaise and jalapeño sauce. It came north from Hermosillo and is now unmistakably Tucson’s.
Beyond it, the city’s Mexican food is Sonoran rather than generic — flour tortillas rather than corn, carne asada, cheese crisps. Heritage desert ingredients like tepary beans, mesquite flour and cholla buds have been revived by local growers and turn up on ambitious menus.