"We're not trying to be high end. We want to be in that $20 to $30 plate range if not even less for lunch and brunch."
That's Ray Flores, president of Flores Concepts, talking about the restaurant his family opened this spring on what he calls one of the best-looking corners in the Tucson market. It's an odd thing to hear about a corner that has spent the last decade and a half building nothing but upscale, reservation-driven dining rooms. For anyone who has lived in the Foothills long enough to remember what used to sit at Sunrise and Kolb, that quote is the whole story.
The Corner That Kept Building the Same Restaurant
The intersection at East Sunrise Drive and North Kolb Road has been a restaurant address since 2010, when The Abbey opened there. It lasted about four years. When it closed, the space became Commoner & Co., the upscale sister concept to Nathan Ares's Prep & Pastry, and it held that corner for roughly a decade before Ares moved his restaurant group's operations to Phoenix's East Valley last summer.
Two tenants, one pattern. Both were dinner-forward. Both leaned on reservations. Both were built for the version of a Foothills night out that means dressing for it and booking ahead. For fifteen years, whoever controlled that corner made the same bet about what the neighborhood wanted from it.
What Actually Opened There This April
Flores took the space differently. The Hills by Monica opened at 6960 E. Sunrise Drive in April, and almost nothing about it matches what came before. It's a 140-seat restaurant, 120 inside and 20 on a patio facing the Santa Catalina Mountains, built around all-day service rather than a dinner reservation. The kitchen runs a brick oven pizza program alongside pasta, salads, a full coffee bar and a genuinely wide menu, the kind Flores describes as breakfast, lunch and dinner available at the same time, every day. Dinner plates top out around $20 to $30. Mimosas are priced under what the nearby resorts charge.
The name isn't marketing. Flores has said "The Hills" is the nickname the whole community uses for Catalina Foothills High School athletics, and the interior leans into that local specificity rather than away from it, with murals by Tucson artist Joe Pagac and work inspired by Ettore "Ted" DeGrazia scattered through what Flores calls a shabby boho chic room. This is a restaurant built to be walked into on a Tuesday without a plan, which is precisely what the corner had never offered before.
It's also not an isolated opening. Flores's family already runs El Charro Ventana directly across the same intersection at 6910 E. Sunrise, meaning one operator now controls both corners there. A few blocks up, Presta Coffee moved into a former Starbucks building at 4700 E. Sunrise Drive in January and opened its fourth Tucson location, pouring pour-over from Ethiopia and Colombia alongside the usual espresso drinks. Sunrise Drive between Kolb and the Ventana turnoff has quietly become a corridor rather than a collection of separate stops.
The Same Season, the Opposite Bet
Here's what makes this year unusual rather than simply a tenant change. While The Hills was pulling the corner toward casual, Loews Ventana Canyon Resort was pushing its own flagship restaurant the other direction, in the same season, less than two miles away.
Flying V reopened February 20 after a two-month renovation, and the new menu under Executive Chef Ryan Clark and Chef de Cuisine Tyler Lapotosky went further upscale, not less. Raw and small plates now include hamachi crudo and salmon-and-tuna seaweed cones finished with crème fraîche and caviar. The guacamole can be built out with roasted bone marrow or mezcal-compressed pineapple. Entrées run through filet mignon, New York strip and ribeye, and a new private dining room joined an expanded patio looking out over the canyon waterfall. Dinner service runs 5 to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, later on weekends.
| The Hills by Monica | Flying V | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | April 2026 | Reopened Feb. 20, 2026 |
| Service style | All-day, walk-in | Dinner only, reservation-oriented |
| Price signal | $20-30 dinner plates | Filet, ribeye, caviar add-ons |
| What it replaced | Commoner & Co. | Its own prior menu |
Two of the biggest Foothills restaurant stories of 2026 moved in opposite directions at the same time. That's not a neighborhood becoming more casual or more upscale. It's a neighborhood that had one register covered for a long time and was missing the other.
What This Actually Means on a Weeknight
For a resident, the practical shift is simple. The Foothills finally has a version of Tuesday night that doesn't require a reservation or a jacket. Order a pizza and a glass of wine at The Hills, be home in under an hour, spend under fifty dollars. Presta covers the coffee run on Sunrise without a drive down the hill. El Charro Ventana handles the family dinner across the street. And Flying V is still exactly what it always was for the evening that calls for canyon views, a fireplace, and a menu that leans into the occasion rather than away from it.
None of those options replaces another. That's the actual news here. The corner spent fifteen years assuming the neighborhood only needed one kind of night out. This year it built the other one.
The Same Logic Reaches the Trailhead
Sabino Canyon runs on its own version of this seasonal recalibration, and this is roughly the week it happens. Monsoon season in the canyon runs from July through mid-September, and Bear Canyon in particular turns into a genuine flash flood risk during that stretch, with the Forest Service issuing repeated warnings about hikers caught in fast-rising water. That window has just closed. What was a hike to avoid three weeks ago is about to become the best version of itself for the next several months.
A few specifics worth knowing if you haven't been up there since spring. The Bajada Loop Nature Trail, a short, flat quarter-mile loop steps from the visitor center, holds a genuinely rare crested saguaro that a Coronado National Forest spokesperson has described as one of the best examples of that mutation in the area, easy enough for a fifteen-minute stop before or after a longer hike. Phoneline Trail climbs the ridge separating Sabino Canyon from Bear Canyon and needs no shuttle at all. For Seven Falls, most visitors don't realize there's a separate Bear Canyon tram that drops you within about 4 miles round trip of the falls, rather than the roughly 8-mile round trip you'd get walking from the visitor center. One experienced Arizona hiker's best visit to the canyon was a quiet Tuesday in early November, 72 degrees, cottonwoods turning yellow along the creek, a great horned owl sitting on a bridge sign, unbothered. The main tram runs Thursday through Monday year round, with entry running about $8 a vehicle and the trams ticketed separately through the Coronado National Forest's recreation site.
The corner and the canyon are running the same pattern this fall. Both spent a season assuming one register was enough. Both just proved it wasn't.
If you're weighing a move to the Foothills, or already own here and are curious what the corridor and the canyon mean for the value of a home nearby, The Bonn Team knows this neighborhood at the level of a single intersection, not just a median price. Reach out anytime for a confidential market consultation.
