Remembering Norman Fierros, whose creative cuisine made a mark on the Valley

As the year draws to a close, we're sharing memories of Arizonans who passed away in 2025.

The OG Phoenicians out there will likely recognize the name Norman Fierros. Fierros ran several restaurants here over the span of a few decades and his creative cuisine drew fans from all over.

He also worked as a hairdresser in Los Angeles, and was an avid art collector.

KJZZ contributor Robrt Pela was a food writer when he first encountered Fierros. Later the two would become friends.

ROBRT PELA: So the one that he's known for is Fina Cocina, I think because that's where he introduced all of his signatures.

He told me once that a chef only needed one signature dish to make it, and I don't know how serious he was about that, but his signature dish was actually it wasn't a dish, it was his little chocolate chimichangas that he ended every meal with, so you didn't order them, they weren't on the menu, I don't think. They were little tiny bite-sized chimichangas with a big hunk of dark chocolate inside.

And he swore that was it, that that was all he would be remembered for. But you know what I think his signature dish really was, was ceviche.

In fact, he told me many years later when I interviewed him after he had stopped cooking or cooking professionally, he said, I can ceviche anything. And he used to put things in ceviche that let's just say I didn't expect. So he used a lot of shrimp, and he wasn't trying to fool anyone. I mean, it was on the menu.

It's just that his ceviche was never the same. Sometimes it had watermelon in it or pomegranate seeds or cantaloupe, shaved cantaloupe. His idea was ceviche is ceviche, but he took a lot of heat for using shrimp, I know that, and he didn't stop.

He studied French cooking and Asian cuisines, and brought a lot of those influences to the food. And this was, you know, that was not a popular notion or as popular a notion 30 years ago as it is now. And I think he was going for the unexpected.

I think he wanted you to read the ingredients list and say, what? Why is there cantaloupe and shrimp in ceviche? But then if you were in Norman's restaurant, probably the next thing you would say is, “I'm, I think I might try that because it's Norman.”

A lot of the things he did and took some heat for were not popular ideas when he was doing them, including, being in downtown Phoenix. I think he was on Monroe Street in, you know, kind of a shady area for a little while, and there were lines at lunchtime during the week. That's pretty rare because people were like, “it's Norman. I don't care where it is. I'm going.”

Norman always said, I am not a business person, so he would hook himself, he would hitch his wagon to the wrong star, and he did it repeatedly. There was one of his restaurants that closed because it was discovered that he had never paid taxes. Well, he wasn't running, you know, the, the front of the house, and he certainly wasn't doing the books.

He was running the kitchen and, you know, writing the menus. He was, in the last months of his life and saying to me, “I'm gonna come back and cook for Phoenix. I just gotta get over this hump with my health, and I'm gonna come back and cook for Phoenix cause Phoenix wants me to make food for them.”

Norman Fierros was 83.