ARIZONA | THE WEST

The Best Mesa Restaurants: From Arepas to Pizza in the Valley’s Most Underrated Food Town

By Rebecca Thompson | Dec. 2, 2025

Que Chevere

AUTHOR BIO: Rebecca Thompson has held many jobs over the years, from daily newspaper writer to middle-school math teacher. As a restaurant critic, she’s reviewed everything from Michelin-starred fine-dining to barbecue counters in the back of gas stations.

In the years I’ve spent off and on in the Valley of the Sun, I’ll admit I thought of Mesa as the place that I wasn’t sure where its borders began and ended, a place without the clear identity of a Scottsdale or Chandler.

Lately, though, the food has caught up to the murals and museums. Main Street is now a crawl of serious restaurants, cider houses, and tiny family spots where the lime wedges are generous and the rent, miraculously, is still somewhat reasonable.

Spend a night walking from the cider bar that doubles as a pizza parlor, past a Venezuelan arepa shop and a high-end mariscos bar, and Mesa starts to feel like the Valley’s most surprising eating neighborhood. There are no corporate power dinners here, just chef-driven bistros, taco counters, pierogi, empanadas, and one very committed chicken sandwich. Here’s where I’d send someone who’s new to the idea that one of the valley’s best food scenes is in Mesa.

All Pierogi Kitchen & Market Mesa Arizona Best Restaurants

All Pierogi Kitchen & Euro Market

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All Pierogi Kitchen & Euro Market feels like you have pulled off Baseline Road and straight into a Ukrainian-Polish family kitchen. Owner Natalia Koshalko and her crew turn out sheets of pierogi by hand, plus cabbage rolls, smoked kielbasa, potato pancakes, and honey cake, while the attached market stocks jars of pickles, preserves, and Eastern European sweets to take home. You come for dumplings drowned in butter and sour cream and leave with half a bag of cookies you did not plan to buy.

Best for: Carb-loading like your Eastern European grandmother always wanted

Board & Batten

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Board & Batten sits at the end of a nondescript street, and then suddenly you are at a white farmhouse with a huge patio, string lights, and the feeling you have stumbled into someone’s backyard dinner party. Chef Tony Snyder’s menu leans modern American comfort: meatballs over silky polenta, a hulking pork shoulder chop riding on a green chile tamale with a side of mac and cheese, and a warm date cake that regulars treat like a mandatory course. It is the rare suburban restaurant where you can drink a serious glass of wine and still feel like you might run into your neighbors’ kids on prom night.

Best for: Celebratory dinners when you secretly wish you lived in this house

Daruma

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Daruma Sushi/Roll/Noodle sits in a Dobson Road strip mall, but inside you get a clean, modern room with light art, K-pop videos on the TVs, and a calm buzz from people who clearly know their ramen order by heart. The kitchen’s calling cards are deep bowls of black mayu tonkotsu and miso butter ramen, plus a long list of rolls that runs from the namesake Daruma roll to jalapeño-heavy Heart Attack and Vegas rolls. Service is the kind where someone talks you through spice levels, sake choices, and even gluten-free tweaks, so the place ends up feeling more like a neighborhood canteen than a generic sushi stop.

Best for: Slurping serious ramen and sharing rolls with a crew

Espiritu Cocktails + Comida

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Espiritu is what happens when the Bacanora crowd decides downtown Mesa deserves a coastal Mexican cocktail bar. James Beard–recognized chef Roberto Centeno cooks mariscos that taste like they got the red-eye from Sonora: aguachiles, ceviches, and a whole fried red snapper glazed in salsa macha that eats like the chicharrón of fish. It’s co-owned by Centeno and Armando Hernandez, and their bar sends out serious agave drinks in a space that feels more Mexico City than strip mall Arizona.

Best for: Date night when you want mezcal, mariscos, and mood lighting

Goat and Ram

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Goat and Ram lives inside Phantom Fox Beer Co., which is exactly the kind of thing you want to find tucked away in a brewery. The dough leans crisp and airy, topped with combinations that go from classic pepperoni cups with pools of orange fat to more cheffy options that change with the chalkboard. Between the tap list, the picnic tables, and a hot pie on a sheet pan, it is one of the more convincing arguments for downtown Mesa as a night out, not a compromise.

Best for: Casual nights when someone wants beer and someone else demands real pizza

Guadalupe on Main

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Chef Jhomeny Ramos took over his family’s longtime Main Street restaurant and turned it into the kind of place where pozole and birria tacos share the menu with birria-braised short rib over Mexican elote risotto and shrimp enchiladas in a red bell pepper–brandy seafood sauce. The room feels like a refreshed Mesa living room, all Southwestern art, big front window nicknamed “The Guad,” and a bar that sends out Buckhorn Baths cocktails, Dealer’s Choice creations in thrifted glassware, and plenty of agave. Gluten-free tortillas, queso fundido, pork carnitas, and pistachio tres leches make this one of the rare spots where the gluten-free crowd and the “order everything” people are equally happy.

Best for: Gluten-free Jalisco comfort food and serious cocktails

Myke’s Pizza

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Inside the Cider Corps taproom, Myke Olsen turns out some of the Valley’s best pies from a wood-fired oven wedged behind the bar. His naturally leavened dough ferments for about forty-eight hours, which you can taste in the chew and char, especially on the potato-and-bacon white pie with garlic cream, mozzarella, aged gouda, roasted fingerlings, and rosemary. You drink a mango-rosehip cider, burn your fingers on a blistered crust, and realize this is about as good as pizza-and-a-drink gets in metro Phoenix.

Best for: Pizza nerds who travel with a preferred hydration percentage

Original Blue Adobe Grill Mesa Best Restaurants

The Original Blue Adobe

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The Original Blue Adobe Grille is the Mesa standby that still feels like a discovery, a low-key adobe building just off Country Club Drive turning out New Mexican food that actually tastes like New Mexico. Chef and owner Jose Leyva leans hard into Hatch chiles and smoke with dishes like green chile corn chowder, carne adovada, stacked enchiladas, and that chorizo-stuffed chicken, plus a Blue Adobe Burger cooked over a pecan-wood grill. Strong margaritas, big booths, and crowds that span birthday parties to baseball teams give it the energy of a local institution rather than a themed Southwestern restaurant.

Best for: Hatch chile heat, pecan smoke and big-group dinners

Republica Empanada

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Republica Empanada sits in a mid-century building just off Main and feels like the living room of someone who really loves Latin American comfort food. The kitchen claims Arizona’s largest selection of South American–style savory empanadas, with fillings like the Cubano with slow-cooked pork, ham, mozzarella, and pickles, and the Boricua stuffed with ham hock and arroz con gandules, plus dessert empanadas like the Dizzy Fig made with Mesa-grown figs and dulce de leche. It is the rare place where you can order three or four different pockets of the continent, argue about which is best, and still have room for arroz con pollo.

Best for: Group dinners where everyone orders something different and steals bites

Tacos Chiwas

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The Mesa outpost of Tacos Chiwas brings Armando Hernandez and Nadia Holguin’s Chihuahua-style tacos to the east side, which is a public service. The menu runs long on classics—carne asada, lengua, barbacoa, papas con rajas—stuffed into griddled tortillas with just enough salsa and lime to make you forget the dining room is basically an upgraded taqueria. Prices are still low enough that you can order irresponsibly and justify it as “research.”

Best for: Tacos where you promise to stop at four and somehow hit seven

Que Chevere

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Que Chevere graduated from a Venezuelan food truck to a brick-and-mortar on Main Street, but it still feels like someone parked a party in the middle of downtown. Husband-and-wife team Orvid Cutler and Maria Fernanda send out tequeños, loaded arepas, and pabellón criollo plates with shredded beef, black beans, rice, and sweet plantains, plus patacón sandwiches built on fried plantains and corn-sweet cachapas. There is a small bar for rum-leaning cocktails, and if you catch the truck at a festival, the arepas taste just as good standing up in a parking lot.

Best for: Cheap-ish comfort food with enough plantains to count as therapy

Worth Takeaway

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Worth Takeaway started as a tiny grab-and-go shop; then everyone decided to linger, and owners Kelsey and Jim Bob Strothers had to knock down a wall and double the seating. The kitchen treats sandwiches like a serious genre, especially the crispy chicken sandwich with fried breast, house pickles, Sriracha honey, and mayo on their own ciabatta, plus a burger that routinely ends up on “best in Arizona” lists. It is equal parts coffee shop, neighborhood hangout, and reminder that a sandwich can be dinner if everyone stops pretending it cannot.

Best for: A “quick lunch” that you’ll want to extend to a leisurely afternoon