For the better part of nine months, the corner of Sunrise and Kolb sat there doing nothing. Commoner & Co. had built a following in that space with an upscale, chef-driven menu, then owner Nathan Ares packed up for Gilbert in July 2025. The storefront went quiet. If you live in the Foothills, you probably drove past it more than once and wondered what was coming.
What came was The Hills by Monica, which opened this April at 6960 E. Sunrise Drive. It is run by Flores Concepts, the family behind El Charro Café, the nation's oldest Mexican restaurant still operated by its founding family. That pedigree matters here, because the choice to plant a second concept on that exact corner was not a leap of faith. Ray Flores, the company's president, already runs El Charro Ventana a few doors down at 6910 E. Sunrise, and when the Commoner & Co. space came open he called it one of the best looking corners in the Tucson market. This was a calculated bet by an operator who already knew the block, not a gamble by someone testing the neighborhood for the first time.
What the Foothills Actually Needed
Ask Flores why he built The Hills the way he did and he does not talk about views or ambiance. He talks about a gap. "Catalina Foothills is a great neighborhood, it's a great community, but they don't have restaurants that serve everything," Flores told Tucson Spotlight. That is a specific complaint about a specific kind of scarcity, and if you eat out in this neighborhood regularly, you already know what he means. Tavolino Ristorante Italiano on North Swan Road does an excellent anniversary dinner. Redbird Scratch Kitchen + Bar on East Skyline Drive knows how to make an evening feel like an event. Wild Garlic Grill will sell you an elk steak with a mountain view attached. Fini's Landing will let your dog sit with you on the patio while you order a cocktail. Every one of those places is built for a reason to go out. None of them is built for a Tuesday when you just do not feel like cooking.
The Hills is designed to fix that specifically. It runs brunch, lunch, and dinner with a brick oven pizza program, a pasta program, a full bar, and a coffee counter that opens well before dinner service starts thinking about itself. Dinner plates run $20 to $30, with lunch and brunch priced lower, and Flores has said the mimosas are intentionally priced under what the resorts nearby charge. That is not an accident of a casual concept. It is the whole point. A restaurant that wants to be a special occasion prices for scarcity. A restaurant that wants to be a habit prices for repetition.
The name itself comes from the neighborhood rather than a marketing meeting. "The Hills is a nickname given to all the teams up there," Flores explained. If you play for Catalina Foothills High School, you play for the Hills. It is the kind of detail that only lands if you already live nearby, which is a small signal of who this restaurant is actually trying to serve.
Inside, the room leans into that same local grounding. Murals by Tucson artist Joe Pagac cover the walls alongside vintage Tucson pieces, in what Flores calls a shabby boho chic look, a deliberate departure from Commoner & Co.'s more polished style. Seating runs to roughly 140 across the dining room and patio, with mountain views built into both. The concept borrows its format from The Monica, the family's downtown all-day cafe that opened in spring 2022 and takes its name from Monica Flin, the woman who founded El Charro in 1922. Flin ran the only restaurant in the area at the time and served a deliberately wide menu because there was nowhere else for her customers to go. A century later, Flores is applying the same logic to a different kind of gap.
The Other End of the Table Just Got Nicer, Too
While The Hills was filling in the everyday end of Foothills dining, the occasion end was getting its own upgrade a few miles up the road. Flying V, the signature restaurant at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, reopened this February after a two month renovation. The refreshed space brings a desert inspired interior, an expanded patio with canyon views, and a new private dining room, with the kitchen now led by Executive Chef Ryan Clark. This is not a restaurant competing for your Tuesday. It is a restaurant built for the night you want to make a reservation, dress up a little, and sit somewhere the canyon does the work for you.
Put those two openings next to each other and a pattern shows up that neither one reveals on its own. In the same six month stretch, the Foothills added a genuinely casual, repeatable, everyday table and reinvested in its most polished resort dining room. That is not a neighborhood losing its identity to one direction or the other. It is a neighborhood that had plenty of ways to celebrate something and almost no way to just eat dinner, and this year both problems got solved at once, by two very different kinds of operators making two very different kinds of bets.
What This Actually Changes About a Week Here
If you have lived in the Foothills for a while, your mental map of eating out probably had two settings: home, or somewhere you needed a reservation and a reason. The Hills adds a third setting. It is a place to get coffee on a Wednesday morning, bring the kids for pizza on a Friday without planning ahead, or catch a late brunch on a Sunday that does not require driving down to River Road or over to Sunrise and Grant. Flying V, meanwhile, stays exactly what it has always been, just sharper. If you want the good bottle of wine and the canyon view for a birthday, that reservation just got better without getting more complicated to book.
Neither restaurant erases the neighborhood's older favorites. Tavolino still does what Tavolino does. Redbird is still Redbird. What changed is the range. A neighborhood with only special occasion dining forces you to either dress the meal up or eat at home. The Foothills spent decades leaning toward the first option. This year, for the first time in a while, it built something for the second one too.
That kind of shift is easy to miss if you are not paying attention to which corner sat empty and why, or which operator decided to bet on it. It is the sort of change that shows up gradually, in how many nights a month you actually cook versus how many nights you just walk over to Sunrise and Kolb instead.
Stories like this one are part of why we pay close attention to what is actually happening on the ground in the neighborhoods we work in, not just what the median price says. If you are curious about the Catalina Foothills market itself, or you want a local read on any other Arizona neighborhood, reach out to 1912 Realty and book an appointment. We are territorial about real estate because we live here too.
