For nine months, the storefront at the corner of East Sunrise Drive and North Kolb Road sat dark. The patio furniture was gone, the windows were blank, and the parking lot that used to fill up for Sunday brunch stayed empty. Commoner & Co., the upscale restaurant that had anchored that corner since 2015, closed in July 2025 when its owner, Nathan Ares, moved his restaurant group to Gilbert. For a neighborhood that had gotten used to having a serious kitchen on that exact spot, the silence was hard to miss.
Then, this spring, the lights came back on. And what moved in tells you more about how the Foothills has changed this year than any single opening could on its own.
The Corner That Waited
That 3,500-square-foot space at 6960 E. Sunrise Dr. has held a restaurant since 2010, when a spot called The Abbey moved in and stayed four years. Commoner & Co. took over in 2015 as the more upscale sibling to Ares's breakfast spot Prep & Pastry. When Ares finally left for the Phoenix market, the corner sat vacant long enough that regulars started to wonder if anyone would take it.
The person who did was Ray Flores, president of Flores Concepts, the family group behind El Charro Café, the nation's oldest Mexican restaurant still run by the same family since 1922, along with Charro Steak & del Rey and downtown's all-day cafe The Monica. Flores didn't need convincing about the location. His family already runs El Charro Ventana one door down at 6910 E. Sunrise, on the same intersection. He called the corner "one of the best looking corners" in the Tucson market, and instead of parking a new concept somewhere untested, he put it right next to a restaurant his family already owned.
The result, which opened this spring, is The Hills by Monica: a full-service, all-day restaurant with a brick oven, a full bar, and a wine and coffee program, seating a combined 140 guests inside and on the patio. Flores has said the goal was value over polish. "We're not trying to be high end," he told the Arizona Daily Star. "We want to be in that $20 to $30 plate range if not even less for lunch and brunch." That's a specific, stated pricing decision from an operator who has run restaurants in this market for decades, not a guess.
Two Bets, Same Road, Three Months Apart
The Hills wasn't the only new business to land on Sunrise Drive this year, and it wasn't the first.
| Business | Address | Opened | What it replaced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Presta Coffee Roasters (4th location) | 4700 E. Sunrise Dr. | January 2026 | Former Starbucks |
| The Hills by Monica | 6960 E. Sunrise Dr. | April 2026 | Former Commoner & Co. (vacant since July 2025) |
In January, Presta Coffee opened its fourth Tucson location in a former Starbucks building at 4700 E. Sunrise, a couple of miles from where The Hills would open three months later. Presta isn't a new company testing the waters. Founder Curtis Zimmerman started the business with a small coffee cart in the lobby of St. Mary's Hospital back in 2014, and Presta grew from there into locations at San Agustín Mercado, First Avenue, and Ninth Street before landing in the Foothills. The new location serves Barrio Bread and pastries from Houlden's Rise Above alongside its usual pour-over and espresso menu.
Two established, decade-old Tucson food and beverage operators, working independently of each other, chose the same road within three months of each other. That's not a coincidence a resident needs a spreadsheet to notice. It's visible from the driver's seat.
The pattern wasn't limited to Sunrise Drive, either. Up the hill at La Encantada, the Skyline and Campbell shopping center already anchored by Apple, Crate & Barrel, and Anthropologie added a EILEEN FISHER store, which also carries a resale line of gently used pieces, and a wellness studio called The Tox opened there on February 28, 2026. Different intersection, different category, same season.
What a Value-Priced Menu Actually Signals
It would be easy to read The Hills' pricing as a minor detail. It isn't. Flores runs restaurants across price points, from the century-old El Charro to the steakhouse-style Charro Steak & del Rey. Choosing to price The Hills at $20 to $30 a plate, with lunch running lower, was a deliberate call about what this specific neighborhood needed rather than what it could support at the top of the market.
That distinction matters because the Foothills already has expensive food. Resort patios in the neighborhood have never had trouble filling tables for a special-occasion brunch. What the corridor hasn't had, according to Flores himself, was somewhere to eat on an ordinary Tuesday without planning for it. "Catalina Foothills is a great neighborhood, it's a great community, but they don't have restaurants that serve everything," he said when the restaurant was announced. The Hills, with its pizza, pasta, salads, and full coffee program, was built to be the answer to that specific gap, not a new luxury option layered on top of the ones that already existed.
The Family Didn't Diversify. It Doubled Down.
There's a version of this story where a national chain notices Foothills demographics and drops a concept into whatever space is available. That's not what happened here. Flores Concepts already had a restaurant on the same intersection it chose for its second concept. Adding a competing option next door to your own restaurant isn't a company spreading its bets across the city. It's a company betting more heavily on one specific corner it already understood.
The design choices back that up. Flores brought in murals from Tucson artist Joe Pagac and décor referencing the work of Southwestern artist Ted DeGrazia, whose gallery sits elsewhere in the Foothills. Those aren't generic finishes a corporate real estate team picks off a list. They're references a longtime Tucson operator makes when he's building something meant to feel like it belongs to this specific stretch of road, not a replicable concept that could open anywhere.
What This Actually Changes on an Ordinary Saturday
None of this requires a special trip to notice. If you wanted a serious pour-over before this year, the honest answer was to drive toward San Agustín Mercado or downtown. As of January, that's available at 4700 E. Sunrise. If you wanted a full-service dinner with a real wine list on a weeknight, without booking a resort table, that option didn't exist on this stretch of road until April. If your closet needed a refresh with a well-known label, or you wanted to walk into a wellness studio without leaving the neighborhood, La Encantada picked up both categories by the end of February.
None of these are one business's decision. They're four separate calls, from at least three different companies, made across a four-month window at the start of this year, all landing within a few miles of each other. Read individually, they're just new spots to try. Read together, they're the reason the drive downtown for anything that used to feel elevated is now optional for a lot of ordinary weekends.
Ernie Hernandez and the team at The Oden Group work this same stretch of Tucson every week, which means paying attention to which corners sit empty and which ones don't. If you're curious what a specific change like this means for your own corner of the Foothills, or you just want a straight answer about what your home is worth in the current market, reach out any time.
