In the restaurant business, where long hours on your feet, constant reinvention and high turnover are the norm, it’s not uncommon to see promising chefs flame out well before midlife.
But for some of Arizona’s top culinary figures, the fire still burns. Star chefs Carlotta Flores, Janos Wilder and Chris Bianco are not only still cooking well past 50, each seems to have drawn more purpose and power from their decades in the biz, defiantly bucking retirement by finding new ways to remain in the kitchen — albeit in ways that reflect both the wisdom and physical realities of age.
“Many times I wish that my physical body could keep up with what I used to do,” said Carlotta Flores, 78, matriarch of Tucson’s iconic El Charro Café and its related family-run brands. “But I’ve learned to slow down without stepping away. I still want to teach, to guide, to make sure what we serve has that final touch — what we call in Spanish, ‘el toque.’”
It’s been 54 years since Flores took over the reins of what is now the nation’s oldest family-owned Mexican restaurant in continuous operation from her great-grand-aunt Monica Flin — widely credited as the creator of the chimichanga (the name was a substitute for a Spanish curse word Flin exclaimed after accidentally dropping a burrito into a fryer). While she still has no plans to retire, Flores said she’s had to take a step back from the grind in recent years to care for her husband, who has dementia.
“He’s still involved,” she said softly, but his involvement is mostly therapeutic. “I have people at the restaurant who understand our situation. I’ll call and say, ‘We’re coming in. Can you have one of the men who worked for us for many years meet me at the front?’ And then they’ll walk my husband through the different things that he likes to see at the restaurants. If you really love this business, it’s a part of your being.”
But Flores herself remains a formidable force in the Arizona culinary community, teaching, mentoring and quietly correcting her staff when needed. She’s still the first to spot a limp piece of lettuce on a $17 salad. “If it’s not what we should be serving, it has to be taken off.”
And she’s embraced technology as a means of staying on top of what’s happening in her kitchens, even if she’s not able to get there on a particular day.
“Thank God we have cellphones and cameras now,” she said. “Because my chefs can send me a photo of a dish they just made and I can look at it and say, ‘Try taking this off, or using this other technique.’”
That’s not to say she phones it all in from home. As often as possible, Flores insists on coming in to each of her restaurants (besides the three El Charro Cafes, she also oversees Charro Steak, Charro Vida, Charro Chico and The Monica), sometimes just to maintain a presence.
“Many times you need the personality of the family to make the customer want to come back,” she believes. “Because you also become somewhat of a counselor to a lot of people, you become their friend. And you’re always trying to make each customer feel important.”
For Janos Wilder, 71, another longtime Tucson chef and a James Beard Award winner, a brief stint in retirement only clarified what he truly loved.
“I realized that retirement should be about doing the things I always loved to do,” he said. “And that turned out to be feeding people great food — and I wasn’t doing that anymore!”
That realization led to the launch of Studio Janos, a downtown Tucson dining venue where Wilder prepares intimate, multi-course dinners for private parties of up to 12. Now in its second season, Studio Janos offers two distinct menus: the Heritage Foods Menu, which showcases centuries-old, arid-adapted regional ingredients; and the From the Vault — Janos’ Favorites Menu, a nostalgic revival of signature dishes from his 30-year restaurant career.
“It’s my most fun, my best work, and it’s deeply personal,” he said. “I open only eight months of the year and do just two or three events a week. But I feel like I’m the luckiest guy in the world!”
Wilder’s work has helped Tucson gain global recognition as a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, and he now trains young chefs as culinary ambassadors who represent the region in food cities around the world.
“After 5,000 years of people growing food on the banks of the Santa Cruz River, we owe it to them — and to our future — to keep telling that story through food,” he said.
In Phoenix, another James Beard winner, Chris Bianco, 64, has had to find his own work-life balance for health reasons. The founder of the nationally renowned Pizzeria Bianco began stepping back from the kitchen in 2010 after developing a flour allergy — particularly dangerous for someone known for his hand-crafted dough.
“My allergy to something that I was around all my life got worse and more reactive,” he explained. With the help of internal medicine specialist Dr. Frank Agnone, Bianco has recently been able to manage his asthma well enough to get back in the game — although he no longer keeps his hands in the dough 15 hours a day.
He likens his transition to that of a veteran ballplayer who becomes a coach.
“You throw 100 miles an hour when you’re young. And then one day, when you’re older, you’re a third base coach. You affect the game differently.”
Bianco now serves more as a mentor and tastemaker across his family of restaurants, which includes Tratto, Pane Bianco and a second Pizzeria Bianco in Los Angeles. He still bakes and works on recipes, but focuses most on training staff and preserving the ethos that made his restaurants famous.
He credits that shift to a kind of forced wisdom. His diagnosis of “baker’s lung” put him on a wellness journey that was more holistic than pharmaceutical.
“Asthma was a gift,” he said. “It was a barometer. It made me ask if I was sleeping, eating well, if I was happy. It wasn’t about a magic pill — it was about changing everything.”
For Bianco, Wilder and Flores, age has brought not just experience, but a deeper connection to food, family and community, along with a burning desire to pass that legacy on.
“I think there will always be something of El Charro — feel, taste, wisdom, the magic, or a dish that might’ve been prepared by my part — going forward in our businesses,” said Flores, adding that she’s already got a lot of family members in place to carry her work on.
“It is something that my family understands, and they all work a component of the business. My son runs our downtown location. My daughter runs catering. I have daughters-in-law that work for us as well.”
But she admits sometimes it can be hard to turn over the reins to them.
“Sometimes I weigh whether I need to be at a location and what I’m gonna do, because if they’re there, it’s really their time,” Flores said. “It is something I have to let go of — not be totally involved, but just ask whether they need anything.
“But I also see change happening. I’ve always said I would probably have to move away from Arizona to not be involved in some way or another, because that’s just who I am. I do have a very strong conviction that you must keep part of what was your past as part of your future.”
