The desert is a throughline in Aaron Lopez’s life. His family comes from the arid hills surrounding Matapé in northern Mexico. In the 1920s, family members immigrated to the United States to work in mines. Lopez was born in California’s Imperial Valley, an intensely hot, arid region that receives only a few inches of rain each year. Yet the harsh landscape is full of life. His grandfather, Hector, taught him about the plants growing around them, regularly quizzing Lopez to make sure the knowledge took root. Food also brought the family together, with everyone contributing to the cooking. “It was a love language for all of us,” says Lopez.
After high school, Lopez moved to Los Angeles and opened an art gallery. When the venture failed, he took a job in a restaurant kitchen. “I loved it so much,” he says. “It was so intense and I was intense, and I needed that.”
Lopez attended Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena before pursuing fine dining, first as a pastry chef and later on the savory side of the kitchen. His résumé includes positions at Orsa & Winston and Redbird in Los Angeles, as well as Pai in Honolulu. While working in Hawaii, he met fellow desert transplant June Chee, now his wife and business partner. Eventually, they felt called back to the desert. “It’s in our DNA,” says Lopez.
The couple lived in Austin before developing Ursa from a desire to celebrate the often-overlooked beauty of the desert. In the fall of 2025, they opened the 3,300-square-foot restaurant in downtown Tucson, serving a tasting menu built around distinctive Sonoran Desert ingredients: clean-scented creosote, surprisingly sweet mesquite pods, bitter almond-like jojoba seeds, nopal, and palo verde seeds reminiscent of edamame. The menu centers crops used in the region before colonization, leaving out ingredients such as tomatoes, apples, radishes, peas, and lemons. “Our goal is to really show what the desert can do,” says Lopez.
