At the corner of East Sunrise Drive and North Kolb Road, a 3,500 square foot restaurant space sat quiet for most of last year. Commoner & Co., the upscale foothills spot that had anchored that intersection, packed up for Gilbert in the East Valley. For a stretch, the most photographed corner in the eastern foothills held an empty dining room and a "coming soon" sign.
That corner reopened this spring as The Hills by Monica, and the change is bigger than a single restaurant swap. Taken together with a new Presta Coffee down the road and the family's existing El Charro Ventana across the street, Sunrise Drive has quietly rearranged itself around a different premise: instead of a corridor of occasional-splurge dining rooms, it now reads as a cluster of everyday places, priced for a Tuesday, that happen to sit under the Catalinas.
For residents who have watched this corner for a decade, that is the story worth paying attention to.
The Corner That Changed
Nathan Ares, the operator behind Commoner & Co., had been signaling a move for months before pulling out last summer for the Phoenix area. The space he left behind sits at what Ray Flores, president of Flores Concepts and Si Charro, described in the Arizona Daily Star as one of the best-looking corners in the Tucson market. Flores stepped in.
What makes the move interesting is the geography. His family already operates El Charro Ventana at 6910 E. Sunrise Drive, on the same intersection. Rather than open a second concept somewhere new, Flores doubled down on Sunrise and Kolb, adding The Hills by Monica at 6960 E. Sunrise, roughly across the street. Two restaurants under the same ownership, one traffic light apart, both leaning into the neighborhood rather than tourism.
The lineage matters. Flores Concepts also runs El Charro Café downtown, the country's oldest Mexican restaurant continuously operated by the same family, and The Monica, the all-day cafe that opened downtown in 2022 as part of El Charro's centennial. The Hills is explicitly a foothills adaptation of that Monica concept, named after the Catalina Foothills High School athletic nickname.
What The Hills Actually Is
The specifics are what set the tone for how residents will use it. The Hills seats 120 inside and 20 on a patio with views of the Santa Catalinas, and the menu spans breakfast into dinner without a firm dividing line. There is a brick oven turning out pizza and focaccia, a pasta program, salads, a full bar, and coffee service pulled from the Monica's downtown playbook. Vegan hemp tamales, a Flores Concepts signature, carry over.
The pricing tells the strategic story more clearly than the menu does. Dinner plates are set intentionally in the $20 to $30 range, with lunch and brunch trending lower. Flores told Tucson Spotlight that mimosas are priced below what the surrounding resorts charge, which reads as a direct nod to who he thinks is actually walking in the door: residents on a Saturday morning, not hotel guests on an expense account.
"Catalina Foothills is a great neighborhood, it's a great community, but they don't have restaurants that serve everything," Flores told Tucson Spotlight in April 2026.
That framing is worth pausing on. The foothills has never lacked for restaurants. What it has lacked, in Flores's read of the market, is the middle. Tavolino, Wildflower, Vivace, Tito & Pep, and Redbird Scratch Kitchen + Bar all sit closer to occasion dining. Fini's Landing anchors the patio-and-happy-hour end. The Hills is being priced and staffed to fill the space between those two poles, with full service, an approachable check average, and hours that stretch from morning coffee through dinner.
Why 4700 E. Sunrise Matters
A mile and a half west of The Hills, another shift happened more quietly this winter. Presta Coffee opened its fourth Tucson location at 4700 E. Sunrise Drive, moving into a building that had previously been a Starbucks. The menu runs matcha lattes, cappuccinos, cold brew, and pour-overs from beans sourced out of Ethiopia and Colombia.
Presta replacing a Starbucks on Sunrise is a small piece of real estate news that says something larger about the corridor. Independent specialty coffee is now the tenant profile that pencils out on that block, not a national chain. For residents who used to drive to the Mercado District or downtown for that kind of coffee, the equation has changed.
Sunrise Drive, End To End
For neighbors trying to keep the current anchors straight, a rough map of the corridor as of summer 2026:
| Address | Business | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 3800 E. Sunrise Dr. | Westin La Paloma Resort | Resort dining, holiday programming, Sunday brunch |
| 4700 E. Sunrise Dr. | Presta Coffee (new, Jan 2026) | Independent specialty coffee, pour-over |
| 6910 E. Sunrise Dr. | El Charro Ventana | Sit-down Sonoran Mexican |
| 6960 E. Sunrise Dr. | The Hills by Monica (new, spring 2026) | All-day cafe, brick oven, full bar |
| Skyline & Campbell | Redbird Scratch Kitchen + Bar, Wildflower, Fini's Landing | Established Foothills dining cluster |
The corridor is not long. A resident living near Skyline can move between all of these on foot or in a five minute drive. What is new is that the eastern end of Sunrise, at Kolb, now carries as much weight as the western end at Campbell.
How This Shifts A Weeknight
The practical question for someone who already lives here is whether any of this actually changes a Wednesday evening.
A few things do. If you have out-of-town family staying at Loews Ventana Canyon or the Westin La Paloma, there is now a walkable-adjacent all-day option that is not the hotel restaurant and not a reservation-only dinner. If you have been driving to Presta's Mercado District location for a real cappuccino, you are done doing that. If you have kids and have been rotating between the same three foothills spots for the last five years because they will actually eat the food, a brick oven pizza program at a $20 to $30 dinner ceiling adds a fourth.
The Hills also fills a gap on the morning end. El Charro Ventana opens for lunch. Most of the sit-down foothills restaurants near Skyline start at dinner. Weekend brunch in the foothills has historically meant either a hotel dining room or a drive down to central Tucson. A neighborhood cafe with brunch service, on a corner most residents already pass, is a small logistical change with an outsized effect on how weekends actually get spent.
The Summer Backdrop
Summer programming rounds out the picture. The Westin La Paloma at 3800 E. Sunrise organized a full Fourth of July weekend around the country's 250th, with poolside barbecue, guided morning hikes, stargazing led by a local astronomer, and vantage points for Tucson's fireworks. Hacienda del Sol, tucked just off Hacienda del Sol Road, followed with a July 5 barbecue evening featuring The Xcelerators.
For residents, these are not tourist events so much as neighborhood infrastructure. When the summer heat pushes daily life indoors from midday to sunset, the resorts and the new Sunrise dining cluster are what turn an ordinary Saturday into a plan. A morning hike, a Presta cold brew on the way home, dinner at The Hills before the sun drops behind the Tucson Mountains.
The Larger Point
Restaurant openings come and go on any commercial corridor. What makes this batch worth writing down is the direction of travel. For years, the foothills has been characterized, fairly or not, as a place where you go home for dinner or you drive to a resort. The last twelve months of openings on Sunrise Drive push against that. A national coffee chain becomes an independent roaster. A high-check-average dinner room becomes an all-day cafe with a full bar and a brunch menu. Two of the three new anchors are priced for regulars, not for occasions.
That is a quiet reshaping of what daily life in the eastern foothills looks like, and it happened in one corridor over roughly a year. For anyone who has lived here long enough to remember the corner of Sunrise and Kolb before it had a restaurant on it, the pace is worth noticing.
If you have questions about how neighborhood shifts like this one factor into buying, selling, or simply understanding the corner of the foothills you call home, Lore Denny offers a personalized market consultation grounded in the Catalina Foothills she has worked in for years. Reach out when the timing is right for you.
