Introducing MXSW Top 100: Our 100 favorite restaurants

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a new addition to Mouth by Southwest: A link on the navigation bar above for the first-ever MXSW Top 100, a list of our favorite restaurants in the East Valley.

Since launching MXSW a couple years ago, we’ve gotten questions from readers nearly every day. Are there any good restaurants in Mesa? Where can I find good Chicago deep-dish pizza? What decent places are open on Sunday nights?

We hope the Top 100 will help to answer many of those questions for you.

The Top 100 shouldn’t be considered the 100 highest critically rated restaurants in the East Valley – which we define as Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Queen Creek, and Ahwatukee.

Rather, it’s the places we like, the places where we eat all the time, the places we feel deserve your support.

The list wasn’t compiled for so-called serious “foodies” so much as people who just like to go out to eat. There are a lot of burger joints, sandwich shops, and pizza places. And, of course, we prefer locally owned independent restaurants.

It was a difficult list to put together, especially when we got down to the last two or three spots and still had two dozen restaurants in mind. But it’s a start.

Over time, the list will change, probably quite frequently. Restaurants open and close, improve and worsen, chefs come and go. And, believe it or not, sometimes even we stumble upon an existing place we didn’t know enough about.

As always, let us know if there’s someplace new (or even old) we need to check out.