El Charro - A Follow Up

Founded in 1922, it claims to be the oldest Mexican restaurant in the United States that’s been continually operated by the same family. In that time, generations of chefs passed down and perfected some seriously delicious recipes. The most important menu items can dry in a dangling cage outside the restaurant daily.

The dangling delicacy is El Charro’s carne seca. The jerky-like product starts as thinly sliced beef marinated in garlic and lemon juice, then hoisted in the metal cage for a day’s worth of drying in the hot Sonoran sun. After baking further in an oven, the hard beef is shredded into pillowy mounds of meat that adorn dishes ranging from tacos to enchiladas to cheese crisps.

Long before it was a Tucson icon, El Charro was the brainchild of a stonemason’s daughter. Jules Flin came to Tucson from France after he was commissioned to build the city’s Saint Augustine cathedral in the late 19th century. There, he met and married Carlota Brunet, who was of Mexican and French descent, and the couple had several children. But despite the holy overtones of Flin’s occupation, his daughter, Monica, didn’t exactly grow up to be the pious, quiet type. Carlotta Flores, Monica’s great-niece and Charro’s current executive chef, told Biz Tucson that her great-aunt was a chain-smoker who “drank martinis from a teapot while playing card games during Prohibition.” That insatiability also applied to food. After briefly living in Mexico, Monica fell in love with the country’s cuisine. When she returned north of the border, she opened a restaurant named El Charro, a term for a Mexican horseman.

The restaurant had a slow start, and during a particularly difficult period, Flin had to relocate into the family home, which her father had built in 1896. This is the site of El Charro’s downtown branch on Court Avenue and its oldest location.