The Best Restaurants in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona
People say deserts are muses for creativity. The Phoenix metro area spreads through a sunny basin of the vibrant, creosote-scented Sonoran Desert, a hotbed of culinary creativity that has flown mostly under the national radar. The top cut of Phoenix and Scottsdale restaurants can hang with just about any American city. Better still, many have the capacity to surprise. With world-class pizza, sure. But also with char-blistered Sonoran meats, Indigenous Thai curries, tasting menus under purple sunset vistas, and cocktails that use ancient desert ingredients in modern ways. Visit these spots to experience what kind of gastronomic heat the Valley’s best culinary talents can bring.
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Every restaurant on this list has been selected independently by Condé Nast Traveler editors and reviewed by a local contributor who has visited that restaurant. Our editors consider both high-end and affordable eateries, and weigh stand-out dishes, location, and service—as well as inclusivity and sustainability credentials. We update this list as new restaurants open and existing ones evolve.
SHELBY MOORE/Courtesy ValentinerestaurantValentine
$$Valentine is a warm restaurant-cafe-bar-bakery hybrid that presents a bold vision of Arizona food. Co-owner Blaise Faber has dubbed its style New Southwestern. Chef Donald Hawk delivers in spades on the promise of innovative dishes tapping into regional traditions. He takes specific desert ingredients—tepary bean, i’itoi onions, cactus fruits—and creatively deploys them to give his food intrigue and soul. That prickly pear? It goes into gochujang for beef heart ssam. The mighty tepary bean? The fragrant, faintly smoky sidekick to ribeye with huitlacoche butter. Valentine’s coffee program is similarly inspired, and cocktail maestro Faber has devised unique tipples inspired by Arizona’s biomes. Oh, and Crystal Kass’s unique program has won national accolades. Valentine feels about as unique as a seven-armed saguaro.
Courtesy Pizzeria BiancorestaurantPizzeria Bianco
$$Chris Bianco is a giant in the pizza world and his handiwork hasn’t slipped an inch over the decades. Famously, he says he doesn’t do much, delegating praise to the farmers, ranchers, and other producers. But he truly excels at giving premier local ingredients—flour, pistachios, cheeses, herbs, citrus—the exact touches they need to express themselves as ideally as pizza, salad, and pasta dishes can. Bianco’s pizza defies category, embracing hard-way methods like blending select local flours. The Rosa, a white pie crowned with pistachios, red onion, rosemary, and Parmigiano Reggiano, is his Mona Lisa. His simple marinara is a dark horse that showcases his technique. Too many people often overlook the pasta specials at the Town & Country location, so be sure to consider them when you make your inevitable pilgrimage.
restaurantShinBay
$$$Veteran sushi chef Shinji Kurita, who learned the craft at his parents’ eatery in Japan, is a true shokunin—an artist who has dutifully practiced over many years and become a master. His omakase counter in Old Town, Scottsdale serves just two small seatings per night, and these meals are a marine adventure. Given the distance from the market in Japan from which Kurita overnights his fish, he liberally employs curing and other methods of extending freshness. Omakase flights tend to start with a non-fish opener, perhaps eggplant or yam variations, and then plunge into creative seafood-centric preparations before flowing into a final parade of nigiri. All the while, the Kurita slices and molds fish to downtempo music with the grace of a dancer—at Shinbay, omakase can feel like a movie. Meals cost $225+, so people tend to dress up some and devote their full attention to them.
Courtesy Christopher’s at Wrigley MansionrestaurantChristopher’s at Wrigley Mansion
$$$Perhaps the last act in the storied career of a renowned old-school Phoenix chef, Christopher’s manages to offer top-tier food and scene. The eatery perches on a high hill above the city lights of downtown Phoenix and the far purple sweep of mountains. Two nights a week, chef Christopher Gross rolls out French-leaning classics from his career, dishes like foie gras terrine, sauteed duck, smoked salmon. Gross, though, has a mind that motors to new places. Thursday through Saturday, he serves his winding, abstract tasting menu, which allows him to shift into a more creative gear. The tasting menu sees foie gras turned to soup, that duck aged seven days and plated with sherry gastrique, chocolate towers, and even enigmatic menu listings like “something cool” and “mignardise, mignardise, mignardise.” Christopher’s is an experience in many ways.
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FnB
$$This pioneering vegetable-centric restaurant in downtown Scottsdale whisks hyperlocal Arizona produce in new directions, resulting in dishes new to the world. But this isn’t simply a case of a chef taking a hands-off approach and letting the carrots and kohlrabi shine. Charleen Badman is a creative and technically refined force. She shaves the kohlrabi into a salad with apple, aged cheddar, and horseradish, gives those carrots a Mexican street treatment and pairs them with lime-avocado mayo, chile, and cotija. The menu changes closely to track the evolving produce microseasons. Arizona beverage champion Pavle Milic matches Badman’s food with a thoughtful, thrilling drink program; libations often include local gose, esoteric ciders made from foraged apples, and a range of interesting potables from afar. Cocktails keep things relatively classic. All drinks are best enjoyed at the “FnBar,” a cozy, whimsically tiled room on the restaurant’s easternmost end.
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Little Miss BBQ
$In a tiny lot by the airport, several giant smokers welded from old propane tanks emit the smells of woodsmoke. Even in the summer heat, a line of an hour-plus stretches, unless you’ve arrived at least 20 minutes before the 11:00 a.m. opening time. Laidback music plays, some people wait at picnic tables, watching pit masters (who have been on the clock since not long after midnight) check on papered brisket—all signs scream that you’ve entered an intense temple of barbecue. Scott Holmes serves barbecue in the Central Texas style: beef-centric, meat seasoned minimally and plated without sauce. If you opt for brisket, be sure to request fatty slices, which dissolve in your mouth. The real secret, though, is that there are two menu items superior to even Holmes’ 10/10 brisket. First, pastrami, a Thursday special with a cult local following. Second, a Flinstonian beef short rib offered most Fridays and Saturdays. To round out your tray with other meats and taste what else Holmes can do, consider a juicy smoked turkey breast, flavor-brimming sausage made from meat trimmings, and jalapeno cheddar grits.
Courtesy of ResyrestaurantBacanora
$his Grand Avenue nook has heart and vibe unlike any other downtown Phoenix restaurant. That’s thanks to Rene Andrade, whose Sonoran roots shape an electric menu of Sonoran Mexican specialties, many of them charred on a smoky, giant Santa Maria-style grill in the music-packed room’s corner. Bacanora is a cool spot. People drink agave spirits out of bone luges, tuck into Flinstonian steaks ringed with flour tortillas and salsas, and enjoy bracing raw seafood plates like limey shrimp aguachiles. Flavors are huge and uncompromising. The fruity heat of chiltepin pepper scorches nearly everything, even cocktails and desserts. Andrade plays by no rules but his own, and that’s what makes this young-but-now-classic Phoenix restaurant so great.
Aaron SotorestaurantLom Wong
Yotaka and Alex Martin’s nearly two-year-old Thai restaurant plates specialties from up and down the country, favorites inspired by their travels, friends and family, and Yotaka’s Chiang Rai roots. As a result, Lom Wong is a bit of a unicorn, unlike any other eatery in Phoenix. The eclectic array of stir-fried crab, fried chicken, hand-pounded curry, diverse noodle dishes, mango salads, and fried bamboo takes the phrase “from scratch” to another level, as many keystone ingredients are squeezed, minced, or shaped in-house. Another excellent wrinkle here is the specific intensity of the drink menu, anchored by natural wines and cocktails concocted with ingredients like turmeric-infused scotch and galangal honey, dark rum and palm sugar. Drinks are tailored for spicy eating, and Lom Wong helps raise the bar for Thai eating in Phoenix.
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