What it is
Chelsea’s Kitchen calls itself an Arizona roadhouse, and the building earns the phrase: a low, ranch-style structure at the corner of 40th Street and Camelback Road, built from Arizona materials, with a wide patio on the back that runs to the bank of the Arizona Canal. There is an outdoor bar, a brick fireplace, a canopy of mature trees that is rare in a Valley restaurant, misters for the summer and heaters for the winter. Inside is a handsome dark room; outside is the reason you came.
The kitchen is Southwestern-leaning American with a smokehouse underneath it. Beef, pork and chicken are smoked, roasted or slow-cooked on site, and the beef is raised for the restaurant. The menu runs from deviled eggs and tuna tartare with guacamole through short-rib and wild shrimp tacos to a grilled whole branzino, Mary’s organic chicken, a filet and the Howie burger under gruyère and caramelized onions. The chocolate sea-salt cookies at the table by the door are the house farewell, and people plan around them.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
For the patio. Scottsdale has fine outdoor rooms, and our sunset patios note lists them, but almost none of them face water, and the ones on the Waterfront face a concrete channel. Here the Arizona Canal runs past at arm’s length, with the path on the far bank full of joggers and dogs, old trees overhead and Camelback’s west face a mile north. It is the Arcadia dinner that locals bring visitors to when they want to make a point about where they live.
The practical version
Twelve minutes from Old Town, straight west on Camelback Road. Lunch and dinner daily, brunch on Saturday and Sunday from mid-morning. Reserve for a patio table in the cool months and ask for the canal side. Parking is in the lot off 40th Street. It is the sit-down anchor of a corner that otherwise does breakfast and wine: La Grande Orange and Postino are five blocks south at Campbell.
When to go
November through March is patio season and the point of the place. Dinner at the first seating on a weekday, with the fireplace just lit and the canal path still busy, is the ideal; weekend evenings book several days out. Weekend brunch, from mid-morning, puts the patio in daylight with the water moving beside it, and it is the calmer alternative to the counter line at LGO.
Summer is better than you expect. The trees and the misters keep the patio in use when most of the Valley has gone indoors, and a late dinner in July with the canal beside you is one of the few outdoor meals in Phoenix that works in that month.
What to order
Start with the deviled eggs, which have a following, and the tuna tartare. The tacos are the center of the menu, and the short rib is the one to get; the wild Mexican shrimp version is the other. For a main, the grilled whole branzino or the Mary’s organic chicken; the filet comes sizzling if you want the roadhouse at its most literal. The Howie burger, gruyère and caramelized onions, is the lunch order. The basil gimlet is the drink, the sangria is the brunch drink, and the cookies are not optional.
With kids
Lunch and brunch, yes: the patio is large, the tacos and the burger are easy, and the canal path beyond the rail is the entertainment. Dinner on a weekend is a date room and the children will feel it.
The neighborhood
The canal path out the back runs east past Arizona Falls at 56th Street and on into Scottsdale, and west toward the Biltmore. Five blocks south at Campbell are La Grande Orange and Postino. The Camelback corridor resorts are a mile east on Camelback, which is why the room fills with resort guests on winter weekends. Our what to eat note files this under the dinners worth leaving town for.
The story
Chelsea’s Kitchen came out of the corner store. La Grande Orange, the grocery-café at 40th and Campbell that became Arcadia’s center in the early 2000s, grew into LGO Hospitality, and the group’s first full restaurant was this one, five blocks north, on a canal-side lot at the neighborhood’s busiest corner. The brief was an Arizona roadhouse: a building that looked like it had been there, made from local materials, with a kitchen that cooked meat slowly over fire and a patio that used the one asset every other restaurant in the Valley had turned its back on, the water.
The canal is the oldest thing on the corner. The Arizona Canal was dug in 1885 along the high ground north of the Salt River, and it is what made Arcadia’s citrus groves possible; the neighborhood’s old trees are canal-fed. Phoenix spent most of the twentieth century treating the canals as drainage. By the mid-2000s, when this restaurant and the Scottsdale Waterfront were both turning tables toward the water, the idea had changed, and Chelsea’s patio is one of the first and still one of the best examples of what the canals could be as an address. It has collected best-patio notices from the local press for most of its life and remains the room Arcadia points to first.
The Scottsdale connection
The same canal runs out the back of this restaurant and under Scottsdale Road at the Waterfront, about four miles east; our canal path guide describes the ride and notes that the shade starts, and the restaurants get better, once you cross into Arcadia. Chelsea’s is the natural turnaround for that ride. The Camelback-corridor resorts send their guests here as the “where locals eat” answer, and a good share of the people on the patio on a Friday live in Scottsdale and came for the water they do not have.
Getting there
Camelback Road west from Scottsdale Road, about three and a half miles, to 40th Street; the restaurant is on the southwest corner and the lot is off 40th. From the Camelback corridor, keep going west on Camelback. By bike, the Arizona Canal path from the Waterfront reaches the back of the patio in about four miles with no traffic lights; lock up at the rail. Rideshare from Old Town is a short fare and the right choice for dinner.