"When the opportunity came by, we came and saw the building and the history it has, and just the location and the way that it feels," said chef Armando Hernandez. "To tell you the truth, it felt like something that was kind of destined to happen."
Hernandez was talking about a burnt-adobe block building at 914 N. Grande Ave., the corner of Grande and Delaware, in the heart of Barrio Hollywood. Last month, he and his wife, chef Nadia Holguin, opened Tortillas Chiwas inside it. If you've walked or driven that stretch of Grande over the past year, you probably noticed the sign change, the paper on the windows, the slow buildout. What most people missed is that the building never had a gap in its resume. It has been making tortillas, in one form or another, since 1947.
That continuity is the actual story here, more than the fact that a new restaurant landed in the neighborhood. Hernandez and Holguin are the third operators to run tortilla production out of this exact address, and each one picked up where the last left off instead of starting from zero. Understanding that arc tells you more about why this corner of Grande Avenue matters than any list of new menu items could.
Three Owners, One Trade, Seventy-Nine Years
| Era | Years | Who Ran It | What Happened Inside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grande Tortilla Factory | 1947–2009 | Two generations of the Pesqueira family | Wholesale tortilla production for more than 60 years |
| La Tortilla | 2009–late 2025 | New ownership, same trade | Continued tortilla production for 16 more years |
| Tortillas Chiwas | 2026–present | Armando Hernandez and Nadia Holguin | Working tortilleria plus a 38-seat restaurant |
The Pesqueira family ran the original Grande Tortilla Factory for more than 60 years before closing in 2009. La Tortilla stepped into the same space and kept making tortillas for another 16 years, until it closed in late 2025. When Hernandez and Holguin took over earlier this year, they didn't gut the place and start over. They deep-cleaned it, re-epoxied the floor, and left the original tile work and a painted image of the Virgin Mary intact on the walls. The new additions are modest: light ash tables, a Moravian star and lantern pendant lights, and a painting of the two owners' grandparents gathered around a comal in a cornfield.
The building was also already outfitted for full nixtamalization, the process that turns whole corn into masa. Hernandez said the setup lets his team quadruple their previous tortilla output, which matters because Tortillas Chiwas isn't just feeding its own 38 seats. The masa produced in Barrio Hollywood will also supply the couple's six Phoenix-area restaurants, including the Tacos Chiwas locations in Phoenix and Mesa. They plan to buy yellow and blue heirloom corn directly from farmers rather than relying on a distributor, something the building's equipment makes possible at a scale their Phoenix kitchens couldn't match on their own.
If you've eaten at any of the Chiwas Hospitality Group spots in the Valley, Tortillas Chiwas draws its roughly 15-item menu from that same bench: dishes with roots in Espiritu Cocktails + Comida in Mesa, Cocina Chiwas in Tempe, and Main Burgers, also in Mesa. Expect a Caesar or cucumber salad to start, then protein-heavy plates built around chicken, fish, and dry-aged ribeye sourced from Vera Earl Ranch in Sonoita. The kitchen uses a yakitori grill fueled by binchotan charcoal and mesquite, a combination Hernandez likes for the high heat of the Japanese briquettes paired with the smoky character of local wood.
Two Blocks, Two James Beard Nods
Hernandez and Holguin aren't newcomers to recognition. Since opening their first restaurant, Tacos Chiwas, in Phoenix in 2016, the couple has built a group of six restaurants and earned three James Beard Award nominations. That track record is part of why their arrival in Tucson got attention beyond the neighborhood. But it's not the only credential on this block.
A couple of blocks up Grande Avenue sits Barista del Barrio, at 1002 N. Grande Ave. just south of West Speedway. Flavia Briones started it in 2017 as a food cart with her children, Ariana and Sergio, building the business one breakfast burrito and one cup of coffee at a time. By 2024, it had earned Briones a James Beard Award semifinalist nomination for Best Chef Southwest, on top of an earlier nod from Insider naming it Arizona's best burrito and a spot on Yelp's Top 100 Places to Eat in the Southwest. This January, the family opened a second location inside Borderlands Sam Hughes, a sign of how much demand had outgrown the original walk-up window on Grande.
That proximity is not incidental. When Hernandez and Holguin were scouting the Grande Avenue building, having an established, nationally recognized neighbor already pulling people to the same stretch of street was part of what made the location make sense. This is the part of the story that a quick news roundup tends to skip: Barrio Hollywood didn't get discovered by outside chefs looking for cheap real estate. It built a reputation first, one small operator at a time, and the reputation is what's now drawing in operators with James Beard nominations of their own.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you're planning a visit, a few practical details matter more than the menu description.
- Tortillas Chiwas opened with limited hours, Thursday through Saturday evenings only, while the restaurant waits on its liquor license. Hernandez expected that license to clear by September.
- Once the license is in hand, the plan is to move to fuller hours, Tuesday through Saturday, running from late morning into the evening.
- The dining room seats 38, and reservations go through OpenTable rather than walk-ins, given the size of the space.
- Barista del Barrio's flagship on Grande keeps morning-only hours: Wednesday through Friday from 7 a.m. to noon, and Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to noon. It's closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
Between the two, you can build a genuine morning-to-evening loop without leaving a few blocks of Grande Avenue: breakfast burritos and horchata-espresso drinks at Barista del Barrio, then dinner built around mesquite-grilled plates and fresh masa at Tortillas Chiwas once the sun goes down.
The Corridor, Not the Corner
It's easy to read a story like this as one restaurant opening. The more accurate read is that a specific stretch of Grande Avenue has quietly become the kind of place where a 79-year-old tortilla operation and a food-cart-turned-James-Beard-semifinalist can sit within walking distance of each other, and where a chef from Phoenix looks at that combination and calls it destiny rather than coincidence.
For anyone who already calls Barrio Hollywood home, that's worth knowing the next time you're deciding where to grab dinner or show a visiting friend around. The building on the corner of Grande and Delaware has been doing one thing, well, for most of a century. It just has better company than it used to.
If you want more of these neighborhood-level stories as they happen, Daniel Sotelo keeps a running account of what's changing across Barrio Hollywood and Tucson's other close-in neighborhoods on the Tusre blog. You can also browse the Barrio Hollywood neighborhood guide for a fuller picture of the area, whether you're a longtime resident or just curious about what's around the corner.
