Tucson GastroPark wants to be ’culinary hub’

On Thursday, Sept. 24, the sprawling center of all things Tucson City of Gastronomy hosts its second major event, the opening dinner of the fifth annual Pueblos del Maíz.

Five years after announcing plans to create a food-centric homage to Tucson’s historic UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation, Tucson GastroPark is officially open.

“By restoring the historic (Bungalow Block), the gastro park preserves Tucson's architectural heritage … while establishing a home for creativity and globally recognized food culture,” said developer Peter Anadranistakis.

He said events there will range from fine dining to weekly taco trucks, largely focused on heritage ingredients that go back more than 4,000 years.

Like corn.

Thursday’s Pueblos del Maíz’s Sabores del Pueblo dinner will feature dishes from five rising star Tucson chefs, paired with local craft beer, wine and bacanora. With a price tag of $75 a person — half of what the festival charged for the event in 2024 — City of Gastronomy Executive Director Jonathan Mabry said he expects a couple hundred to attend.

“It’s an important fundraiser for the festival,” Mabry said. “To meet these chefs and experience their food, that’s a deal. We didn’t have this dinner last year, but we’re bringing it back and it’s more affordable than ever.”

The outdoor dinner will be held in the soon-to-be-named Chris and Jacque Sheafe Memorial Park in honor of the Tucson business leader and his wife who died in a Marana plane crash in April. The park takes up the back side of the Tucson GastroPark, the Rio Nuevo-backed reinvention of the historic Bungalow Block on the north side of Broadway.

The gastro park at 1601 E. Broadway, between Cherry and Warren avenues, has been in the works since 2021, two years after the public tax district behind downtown Tucson redevelopment acquired the bungalows from the city. The seven 100-year-old structures were set to be demolished to make way for the city’s years-long Broadway widening project.

Although some renovation work had been done in those early years, the project had largely stalled until Anadranistakis took it over last fall. Since then, renovation of the bungalows, ranging in size from 800 to 1,200 square feet, has been “substantially” completed, Anadranistakis said, including restoring original hardwood floors, replacing windows, fixing roofs, installing new HVAC and plumbing and painting interiors and exteriors.

Anadranistakis said there is still work to be done, including creating an outdoor kitchen and planting dozens of trees and native plants to create a shade canopy for visitors.

“When you come to the site, it feels like a park. There's these two massive mesquite trees that were saved, and some other greenery that was saved,” he said. “And we are planting all native Tucson plants. We're partnering with Mission Gardens to have a lot of the greenery that's edible. But for shade, we're going to be bringing in more trees.”

A perimeter fence circles the property, but there is no fence or barrier between the bungalows.

“It's just a long span, and it just feels like a park,” he said. “It just feels very welcoming and very natural. That's part of the reason we call it the Tucson GastroPark.”

Visitors can park in an adjacent lot that had been home to the original Diana Madaras gallery before it closed in 2016 — a casualty of the widening project —and moved to North Swan Road.

To date, Anadranistakis said he has lease agreements with at least four tenants, including Talega Coffee Roasters.

Tucson event planner Melissa Matrice and Mabry will have offices alongside the gastro park management in one of the larger bungalows that will be a coworking space by day and a space for food experiences at night, Anadranistakis said.

“That is where we can have different pop ups, guest chefs, somebody who is having a residency,” he said, adding that there also are tentative plans to create a distillery on site.

But at this point, none of the would-be tenants have begun construction, which is why Anadranistakis decided to activate the space in April with the Agave Festival and several smaller pop-up events including curated dinners by Tucson chefs Devon Sanner and Travis Peters.

“We didn’t want the space sitting there so we focused on making sure that it was activated.” he said. “It’s turned into a really great outdoor events space. Seven months out of the year it’s absolutely spectacular being outside. And it’s a large venue. We have parking next to the venue and it’s a whole city block.”

Tucson GastroPark will host the HSL Properties Tucson Jazz Festival’s new special event “Fuego y Ritmo — Fire, Food, Music” on Jan. 20. There are also plans to launch Tucson Taco Tuesdays and Sonoran Hot Dog Saturdays sometime in early October.

“We want this to be the hub for the culinary experience that makes Tucson so great,” Anadranistakis said. “This hopefully will be a place where the public will come when they come to Tucson for culinary tourism.”