How Scottsdale Eats: Sonoran Roots, Arizona Produce and a New Market Home

On Saturday mornings this season, Scottsdale shops for food in a new spot. The Old Town Scottsdale Farmers Market has moved to the City Hall parking lot, where more than 100 growers and specialty food producers set up each week. It is a fitting place to start, because Scottsdale's way of eating rests on a few old habits: farm produce from a desert that was once citrus and cotton country, Sonoran cooking handed down in Old Town families, and chefs who build their menus around what Arizona grows.

The traditions on the plate

Scottsdale began as a farm town. Settlers who came after the Arizona Canal was finished in the 1880s planted citrus along it, and by the First World War cotton had become the local cash crop; a cotton gin opened on Second Street in 1920, and cattle ranches spread across the land to the north. Long before any of that, the Hohokam farmed this valley with canals of their own. Citrus groves and cotton fields have given way to neighborhoods, but the habit of eating close to the land has stayed.

Mexican food from the Sonoran tradition has been part of Old Town for generations. Los Olivos Mexican Patio on Second Street has been run by the Corral family since 1947, four generations now, and still makes its tortillas and salsas by hand for a menu of more than 130 dishes, from enchiladas to sizzling fajitas. On Brown Avenue in Historic Old Town, The Mission takes a modern turn with chef Matt Carter's Latin cooking, drawing on Spain, Mexico and Central and South America.

The city even has an official food: chili, by a 1994 mayoral proclamation. And each winter, Western Week brings frybread making to the Waterfront and the Arizona Indian Festival to the Civic Center, where this year's program, with representatives of all 22 Arizona tribes, included an Indigenous Food Symposium.

Cooking with what Arizona grows

The clearest expression of local ingredients is at FnB, tucked into historic Craftsman Court off Fifth Avenue. Chef Charleen Badman, named Best Chef: Southwest by the James Beard Awards in 2019, is known for building seasonal menus around locally grown vegetables that change with what farmers bring in, sometimes week to week. Her co-owner, Pavle Milic, built the restaurant's reputation in part on an Arizona-only wine list and still champions the state's winemakers. Craftsman Court itself, built from 1955 to 1958, is on the Scottsdale Historic Register.

Chula Seafood shows that a desert city can still eat fresh fish. The family-owned company calls its south Scottsdale market and restaurant on Roosevelt Street its original Arizona location, where it sells fresh, never-frozen, sustainably caught fish by the pound alongside poke, house-smoked fish and daily specials. The family traces the business to its own fishing boat, the FV Chula.

In the Arts District on Main Street, Craft 64 pairs wood-fired pizza with a tap list of 30 craft beers, ten from its own brewery and twenty from Arizona brewers, a small map of the state's beer scene in one room. The pizzas have earned the brand a place on the 50 Top Pizza list of pizzerias in the United States.

Markets and makers

The farmers market runs Saturdays from October through June, with shorter mornings in May and June and a break from July through September. It now sets up in the City Hall lot at 75th Street and Bennie Gonzales Way, after more than a decade in the Brown Avenue parking structure, which the city is expanding. With growers and specialty food makers side by side, it is worth a stroll even if you only came for coffee.

For the sweet side of a Scottsdale table, Sweet Dee's Bakeshop, at the bottom of the Camden apartments in Old Town, bakes for the seasons and takes holiday pre-orders, such as its handcrafted Thanksgiving pies. Up north on Pima Road, De Babel serves Middle Eastern and Mediterranean dishes such as shawarma and baba ghanoush; it has a second Scottsdale restaurant at The Edge on 90th Street, which added a halal market.

Eating by the calendar

The market's season, October through June, is a good guide to Scottsdale's eating year, and the city's own calendar adds to it: ArtWalk brings people to the Arts District galleries every Thursday evening, and Western Week returns each winter. The best way to learn how Scottsdale eats is to follow that calendar. Start with a Saturday at the City Hall market, end the week with a Thursday ArtWalk supper in Old Town, and fill the days between at the family kitchens and chef's counters that have been feeding the city, some of them for close to 80 years.