Dinner at Coronet

While planning the road trip, I happened upon an ad for Coronet in the Tucson Tourism Guidebook, and it looked intriguing enough to mark down as a potential dinner spot. Score one for the Madison Avenue copy writers! After some further checking after I got to Tucson, I decided it was the place to have dinner tonight, in lieu of a second night of Sonoran hot dogs and a Mexican Coke from my favorite Tucson hot dog vendor.

Coronet is a really cool place - it's actually three places - a cafe, a cocktail bar, and a restaurant. The buildings which house the three dining spots were built in the late 1860s by Joseph Ferrin, a German immigrant and merchant tailor. His wife Therese, an herbalist and naturopath known as "The Angel of Tucson," was one of the most illustrious figures of Tucson's early pioneer days. She was a driving force behind many fledgling Tucson institutions, most notably Temple Emanu-El, the first Jewish congregation in Arizona.

The menu was a bit eclectic, with smaller plates and larger plates, and I selected a few of the smaller plates to sate my appetite - the Pate de Campgane to start, the Charred Asparagus Panna Cotta to carry me through, and the Green Goddess Salad to finish. I skipped dessert though I was tempted.

As I was dining alone, the host sat me at the bar (and comped my beer), where I met a lovely couple from Tucson who engaged me in conversation to find out whatever had brought me to the scorched desert landscape of Tucson and Arizona. I bent their ears a bit, got some tips for more places to visit and see on my way to Big Bend, and learned their story as well. She is a native Venezuelan whose grandfather, she claimed, was a founder of Gulf Oil in Venezuela. He runs the manufacturing operations for for HF Coors, a dinnerware firm based in Tucson. HF Coors sells direct to the public, so I wasn't able to get the line for Greg, Mark, or Paul (but I tried!).