How the #1 restaurant from Yelp’s Top 100 speaks volumes through food
Tumerico in Tucson, Arizona, ranked #1 on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat in 2024.
Check out the rest of the eateries that made this year’s list and catch up on stories of past winners.
At the inventive, vegetarian Mexican restaurant Tumerico, the food speaks for itself. Chef-owner Wendy Garcia changes the menu daily based on her current inspiration, drawing on family recipes and seasonal produce to create salsas with locally grown chiltepin chiles and pitaya (Mexican dragon fruit), her grandmother’s tamales with jackfruit carnitas, or nopalitos made from prickly pear cactus in the summer.
“If you see me [in person], I am very shy, so food is the way I talk to people,” said Wendy, a 2023 James Beard Award semifinalist and owner of the #1 and #68 restaurants on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat in 2024.
For Wendy, the kitchen is her comfort zone, as well as her place to experiment—and she’s dedicated her career to ensuring guests feel comfortable too. “I love my customers. I love my regulars,” she said. “It’s all about making them feel like family, like home, because that’s the feeling I used to have when I was growing up. I want them to have that feeling too.”
From her childhood spent cooking with family in Mexico, to her storied rise through Tucson’s food scene, Wendy has always been motivated by the desire to build connections and show care through food.
Yelp users say you can feel that warmth instantly when you step inside Tumerico, a small cafe adorned with colorful murals and art by local artists with Latino music blasting in the background. The plates themselves are full of color and flavor, and Wendy’s signature jackfruit carnitas take the place of meat in popular dishes like Cuban Tacos and Frida Kahlo Tostadas.
“[Tumerico is] a place where you bring friends or meet new friends at the communal tables. That’s what [Wendy’s] food does—inspires like-minded people to share a moment together,” said Yelp Elite Alex C. “Wendy is a great chef and a great soul,” said Gina R. “You can taste the love she imparts to her food.”
This year, Yelp reviewers who have followed Wendy’s career since she was selling tamales at the farmers market nominated Tumerico (#1) and sister restaurant La Chaiteria (#68) for Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat.
“I love my customers more than ever because they’re the ones that made this happen. If it wasn’t for my customers, all the Yelpers, all those reviews, and all the people that leave the restaurant happy, we wouldn’t be on the list. After so many years, all this hard work is paying off, and I still have the best customers ever,” Wendy said. “It’s a very big feeling of love and being grateful to them, and that keeps us going.”
A family tradition
Chef Wendy grew up cooking on her family’s farm in Hermosillo, Mexico—everything from salsas with homegrown vegetables to her dad’s signature machaca barbacoa (shredded beef). A favorite were her grandmother’s tamales, which Wendy and her cousins made for the whole family at Christmas.
“I never went to cooking school,” Wendy said. “Everything that I do at the restaurant, it’s just what I learned by heart with my mom and my dad and my grandma.”
In Wendy’s family, food was a form of connection and a way to show care, like when her mom would welcome Wendy home from school with homemade enchiladas. “[Having] food at the house was always the way for my mom to tell us, ‘I love you,’” Wendy said. “Some Latino ladies, my mom especially, don’t say, ‘I love you’ to you, but they say, ‘I love you’ when they make food in different ways.”
Food is the way. Food is my way to talk to people. It feels good to feed people.
—Wendy Garcia
At Tumerico, Wendy carries on this legacy by recreating treasured family recipes with a vegetarian twist. After going vegan later in life for health reasons, Wendy learned how to adapt her childhood favorites using meat substitutes like jackfruit carnitas, which Yelpers say taste “like the real deal.”
“When I opened Tumerico, I just wanted people to try traditional Mexican food, but vegetarian and vegan,” Wendy said. “It’s all about those recipes that I used to make with my mom, my dad, and my grandma—tamales, chilaquiles, enchiladas, barbacoa, whatever Mexican dish you can think of, we can make [a vegetarian version] at Tumerico.”
Finding her voice
After moving to Arizona at 18, Wendy worked her way up from dishwasher to chef at fine-dining spots such as Feast and Primo (now closed), where she made a name for herself in Tucson’s food scene. When she needed a break from the grind, she quit her job and turned to a trusted, comfort recipe: her grandmother’s tamales. “I was burned out so I started making tamales and selling them at the farmers market,” Wendy said.
The gap in Wendy’s restaurant career ended up teaching her an important lesson. While vending at the farmers market, she had to rely on her customer service skills not only to make sales, but to make connections. From a folding table and a cooler full of tamales, she found her voice—and began to build lasting relationships with customers who still frequent Tumerico.
“I was really shy in the beginning, but I had to learn how to talk to my customers. I needed to make money, so I had to talk to people,” she said. “Some of the people that I met at the farmers market are still my regulars.”
After three years on the farmers market circuit, Wendy amassed a large enough following to open a restaurant of her own in 2016, where she still sells tamales, among other vegetarian favorites. Her loyal customers flocked to the brick and mortar—in fact, Tumerico’s first Yelp reviews came from longtime fans.
“I’ve long loved Wendy’s wonderful vegan offerings at the farmers market so I was really excited to see that she was opening a brick-and-mortar location across the street,” wrote Yelp reviewer Nathaniel S. shortly after Tumerico opened. Vicki W. added: “[I was] so excited to see Wendy in her natural element: creating, working like a fiend, and still taking time to talk to everyone.”
Tumerico’s secret sauce
Since 2016, Wendy has grown her following from the farmers market crowd to a dedicated base of diners in Tucson—even expanding to a second location, Tumerico on 4th, and opening sister restaurant La Chaiteria, which offers meat-based cuisine, along with traditional Mexican breakfast and lunch dishes from Wendy’s childhood.
A combination of creativity and consistency have helped Wendy launch her restaurants to national success. Apart from five staple dishes, the chef changes the menu daily based on what’s fresh at the Rillito Park Farmers Market. “I show up in the kitchen and trust that I’m going to have ideas,” Wendy said. “I am going to get creative, and then we’re going to have something great on the menu.”
Even with an ever-changing menu, consistency is important. Wendy entrusts Tumerico’s salsa recipes—the heart and soul of each dish—to just two prep cooks, whom Wendy affectionately calls her “sisters.” “If you come to the restaurant and you like the food, I really want you to like the food [when you come back], so it needs to taste the same,” Wendy said. “I have two ladies who’ve been with me for years, so I taught them how to make the salsas, and they’re amazing.”
Strategic storytelling has also been part of Wendy’s success: Although Tumerico’s menu is 90% vegan, Wendy said she has intentionally marketed her restaurant as traditional Mexican food, instead of vegan and vegetarian food. “If somebody walks in [and doesn’t know we’re plant-based], I want them to try the food first,” she said. This helped Wendy attract a wider audience back when Tumerico was one of the first vegetarian Mexican restaurants in Tucson. Over time, she’s even changed people’s perceptions of plant-based cuisine.
“I’m not vegan, but after eating here, it changed my whole view of what it means to eat,” wrote Yelp reviewer David K. This is “not vegetarian food that happens to be great—it’s great food that happens to be vegetarian,” said Yelp reviewer Kate S.
Food heard around the country
Landing the #1 spot on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat is a testament to Wendy’s cuisine, as well as her customer service. Out of Tumerico’s 1,000+ Yelp reviews, 56 mention Wendy by name, often commenting on her kindness, hospitality, and eagerness to create connections.
“Wendy is a true gem in the community, and her soul shines in so many ways,” wrote Yelp reviewer Benjamin S. “Truly masterful,” said Yelp reviewer Susan S. “Wendy deserves a James Beard award for what she does here, day in, day out.”
“I want the customers to feel like they’re at home—like they’re family,” Wendy said. “I want them to leave feeling like, ‘They took care of me and they really care about me.’” She and her team do this by explaining the menu to every customer and making personalized recommendations. Since the menu changes daily, Wendy even texts with regulars to let them know about upcoming specials. (Yelp users also add photos of previous chalkboard menus to Tumerico’s business page so customers get an idea of what to expect.)
Yelp has been another way for Wendy to connect with customers, mainly by reading reviews. “I like reading reviews—especially nice reviews—and then I want to say, ‘Thank you’ to the customers because I think that’s really important,” said Wendy. Many customers find Tumerico through Yelp, Wendy said, especially as its spotlight grows. The cafe also topped Yelp’s first-ever Top 100 Restaurants in the Southwest list and placed #8 on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat in 2023.
Already, as news of Tumerico’s win spreads, Wendy has welcomed a rush of new customers curious about the #1 restaurant. “We just want to keep sharing what we do with all these new people that are coming. We want them to be part of the family too, and we want to treat them like we treat our regulars, and we want them to try the food and leave and come back with new friends,” she said.
With Wendy’s Top 100 win, the chef’s food has reached a larger platform than ever, but her message hasn’t changed. “I want to just make my life simple: work less, make more food, better food, tastier food,” Wendy said. “I want [my customers] to leave the restaurant happy and with a full belly and feel good afterwards.”
Just as Wendy discovered with her mom’s enchiladas, a good plate of food says it all.
Chef Wendy Garcia celebrated Tumerico’s Top 100 win on The Kelly Clarkson Show with a cooking demo, showcasing her signature jackfruit carnitas tacos: