Fall Arizona Restaurant Week runs September 18 through 27 this year, ten days of three-course, prix-fixe menus at $33, $44 or $55 a head, with more than 200 restaurants statewide signed on. If you have lived in Old Town for more than a year, you already know the drill. Pick a spot you have been meaning to try, book early because the good tables go fast, and enjoy a meal that would normally cost more.
What is different this fall is which restaurants showed up on the list and which ones did not. Walk two blocks in either direction from Stetson Drive and Sixth Avenue right now and you will pass through the densest run of restaurant openings Old Town has seen in years, most of them from the last twelve months. Not one of them is on the published Restaurant Week roster.
That makes for an interesting contrast if you are deciding where to spend an evening this month: some established Old Town restaurants are on the list, while the recent openings are not.
What Restaurant Week actually rewards
Restaurant Week gives participating restaurants a chance to offer three-course menus for ten days, while giving diners a set-price way to try them.
The House Brasserie on Main Street fits that description well. It operates out of Scottsdale's second-oldest home, a Victorian-era house with a shaded patio and a menu that changes every two weeks under head chef Dustin Wheeler. It has been an Old Town regular for years, and it is listed among the restaurants participating in Arizona Restaurant Week this fall. A few blocks away at the Scottsdale Waterfront, Marcellino Ristorante, a longtime fixture of the Arts District dining scene, is also running the discount menu.
Together, they give diners a chance to try familiar Old Town dining rooms through the Restaurant Week program.
The restaurants not on this fall's list
Now look at what has opened in the same few blocks over the past nine months, along with what is expected to open later this year. None of it appears on this fall's participant list.
40 LOVE opened on Stetson and Sixth Avenue this past December, backed by Niall Horan and DeAndre Hopkins, with a country-club-inspired dining room designed by John Sofio and a menu from chef Ryan Pitt that runs from Snake River Farms Wagyu steaks to a two-ounce pour of Louis XIII for $480. It drew Devin Booker and Gunna to its opening weekend and still books out on Fridays and Saturdays.
Above All Else took over the former STK space on Stetson Drive early this year, built around rooftop views and what its CEO has described as the kind of photo-ready plates diners are chasing right now. Cielito opened in February atop the new AC Hotel Scottsdale Old Town, a rooftop restaurant and bar built by a research and design consultancy specifically around how people in this neighborhood actually eat and drink at night. BOA Steakhouse, led by chef Brendan Collins and anchored by a Four Sixes Ranch dry-aged ribeye, the first Arizona partnership of its kind, was slated for a spring opening at the Scottsdale Waterfront. Ponderosa House opened in May near Marshall Way and Indian School Road, in a renovated 1922 house, from restaurateur Jacob Finley, pitched deliberately as the neighborhood spot Old Town had been missing between the tourist-facing rooms. Drake's Hollywood took over the former Buca di Beppo on Scottsdale Road in late July with a valet-only entrance and an Old Hollywood theme. Ari & Lloyd, a dual restaurant-and-lounge concept from local owners Katie Schnurr and Stephen Roach, aimed to open in a converted cabinetry showroom a few doors from 40 LOVE by the end of July. DEPWAH, a French-Vietnamese concept with a rooftop lounge built around Vietnamese coffee and matcha, is expected to join the same stretch later this year.
Eight restaurants, one calendar year, opened or opening within a walk of each other, and not one of them discounting a meal this month.
The contrast is straightforward: the newer restaurants listed here are not on this fall's participant list, while several established Old Town restaurants are. That leaves diners with different choices depending on whether they are looking for a Restaurant Week menu or a newer room.
What that means for your next ten days
If you want a deal, Restaurant Week offers prix-fixe menus at participating restaurants. If you want the newest rooms in the neighborhood, many are not on the participant list, and you are probably making a reservation more than a day or two out.
| Where | This week | What you'll spend |
|---|---|---|
| The House Brasserie, Main St. | Running Arizona Restaurant Week | $55 prix fixe, three courses |
| Marcellino Ristorante, Scottsdale Waterfront | Running Arizona Restaurant Week | Set Restaurant Week pricing |
| 40 LOVE, Sixth Ave. | Full menu, no discount | Wagyu entrees run $75 to $95 |
| Above All Else, Stetson Dr. | Full menu, no discount | Standard rooftop pricing |
| Ponderosa House, near Marshall Way | Full menu, running its own event | Doc Holliday Cocktail Showdown, Sept. 21 |
That last line is worth planning around on its own. Ponderosa House is hosting the Doc Holliday Cocktail Showdown on September 21, right in the middle of Restaurant Week, with eight Valley bartenders competing head to head. It is a good example of how the new wave of restaurants is building its own draw instead of leaning on the citywide discount system.
The same ten days overlap with two other things worth knowing about if you live here. Bonner David Galleries opened a solo exhibition called Flourish on September 10, featuring painter Hunt Slonem's work through October 31, with a reception on October 1 from 6 to 9 p.m. And every Thursday evening, rain or shine, the Scottsdale Gallery Association runs its weekly ArtWalk from 7 to 9 p.m. along Main Street and Marshall Way, the oldest continuously running event of its kind in the country, with galleries staying open late and no admission charge.
One thing that will not be there if you go looking for it: the Saturday farmers market. The market has relocated after sixteen years at its Brown Avenue lot, where the city approved a parking garage expansion this spring. It will not reopen until October, at a new spot in the City Hall parking lot near 75th Street and Bennie Gonzales Way.
Reading the corridor correctly
None of this means the new restaurants are better or worse than the ones that discounted. It means they are at different points in their own life cycle. Some are newly opened, while others have served the neighborhood for years; this fall's roster includes several longtime fixtures.
If you have lived in Old Town long enough to remember when Main Street carried most of the neighborhood's dinner reservations, the last year has quietly shifted that center of gravity a few blocks north and east, toward Stetson Drive and Sixth Avenue. Restaurant Week offers a snapshot of which restaurants are participating this year.
Phoenix Living tracks these small shifts because they tend to say something true about how a neighborhood is actually living day to day, not just how it looks on a map. If you are curious about what a stretch of new restaurant openings usually means for the streets around it, or you are simply looking for a local team that pays attention to the same details you do, Phoenix Living would be glad to talk it through with you.
