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Preparing a Passover seder (festive holiday meal that includes a retelling of the Jewish people’s exodus from slavery to freedom) can be an overwhelming task. While recounting the story, participants taste certain foods that symbolize parts of the journey. For example, matzah represents the bread that the Israelites ate while fleeing slavery. All that to say, there are a lot of moving parts and different foods to prepare. Most grocery stores carry the basics, but if you’re...

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Last week, Pancho was taken from Chino Bandido.   It wasn’t a robbery – the 7,500-pound black granite bear statue was moved from the legendary Chinese-Mexican-Jamaican fusion eatery’s original location at 19th Avenue and Greenway Road to its new home at Bell Road and Third Avenue. After more than three decades in the same building, one of the Valley’s most beloved holes-in-the-wall is relocating.  “After 31 years, I knew it was time for a change,” says Eve Lee Collins, who opened Chino Bandido in 1991 with her husband, Frank...

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Great news for Downtown dwellers and the avant-garde peeps who appreciate Grand Avenue for its quirky coolness. Rene Andrade, the Nogales-born chef who garnered a following at Ghost Ranch, is opening his own Grand Avenue restaurant today in the tiny sunlit space that most recently housed Silvana Salcido Esparza’s Barrio Café Gran Reserva – and years before that, the historical Bragg’s Pie Factory and Bragg’s Pie Factory Diner. Andrade is calling his pie wedge-shaped place Bacanora, name-checking the little-known and underrated mezcal produced...

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The Valley has lost one of its culinary luminaries. This past weekend, legendary Italian chef/restaurateur Tomaso Maggiore died after a long battle with lung cancer. He was 73 years old.  Maggiore immigrated to the United States from Sicily as a young man and worked his way up the restaurant ranks in New York City before moving west. He and his wife, Patricia, opened Tomaso’s Italian Restaurant in the Camelback Corridor in September 1977. Their children, Joey and Melissa, grew up in the industry and joined their parents in running a...