Are we the new hot spot for dining excellence?
How many successful restaurants does it take to for a place be worthy of a “dining mecca” label? There’s no good answer to that but, by unscientific measures — or just by the looks of it — Arcadia and the surrounding areas seem to be on a fast path to mecca-worthiness. The culinary choices continue to grow and get more inventive, and lucky neighborhood diners are more and more tempted to eschew home-cooked meals for the newest dining experience.
With fresh concepts popping up on Camelback and to the north and south of that bustling corridor — combined with Arizona’s restaurant industry being projected to post the largest growth in sales and jobs (as it did in 2014) in the country — the stars (celestial and those used for restaurant ratings) are aligning in Arcadia and adjacent Biltmore, Paradise Valley and Old Town Scottsdale.
Steak 44, the creation of the Mastro brothers who are best-known for building the Mastro’s franchise, dramatically revamped the old Cork ’N Cleaver location at 44th Street and Camelback. This concept, while not out of the norm for a high-end seafood and chop house, is crawling with business executives, sports stars and celebrities and has quickly become a concept to mimic, with private tables, multi-room dining areas and an exclusive bar scene.
One of the trailblazers for the Arcadia restaurant boom was Postino, a wine café that opened in the historic Arcadia Post Office building in 2001. Craig DeMarco, who co-owns Postino and its umbrella company Upward Projects, has witnessed the full evolution of the dining scene. What once was largely strip malls and chain restaurants has transformed into dynamic concepts forged by creative restaurateurs for a dining public that has become more sophisticated via the explosion of reality cooking shows and websites obsessing over food.
His company, which is also behind the Central Avenue restaurants Federal Pizza, Joyride Taco House and Windsor, set the stage for community-focused restaurants in the Arcadia area. DeMarco says the Arcadia dining scene has changed “dramatically” since the opening of Postino, which was a trailblazer of the new Arcadia wave, with its adaptive reuse of space before “adaptive reuse” was a household term. “When I was looking at that site [Postino], I must’ve taken over 100 people to see it and I could not get anyone to think it was a good idea,” DeMarco relates.