What it is
Cibo is a wood-fired pizzeria in a 1913 brick bungalow on 5th Avenue, a mile west of Roosevelt Row in the Roosevelt historic neighborhood of downtown Phoenix. Guido and Michelle Saccone restored the house and opened it in 2005, and they kept what made it a house: several small rooms with exposed brick and hardwood floors, a front porch, and a yard under old trees that they turned into the patio Phoenix New Times has named the best in the city in 2024 and again in 2025. The menu is Neapolitan in style and generous in range: thin, blistered pizzas from the wood oven, salads, antipasti, dessert crepes that have their own following, and a short Italian wine list. Since February 2026 there has been a 20-inch pizza for tables that want to share.
It is the second-best pizza downtown and the best downtown pizza dinner, which are different things, and the difference is the house and the reservation book.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has very good Neapolitan pizza; Pomo and Grazie are in the what-to-eat note for a reason. What Scottsdale does not have is a restaurant in a 1913 house, because Scottsdale has almost no 1913 houses, and it does not have a patio under old trees in a city’s oldest surviving neighborhood. Cibo is a downtown Phoenix evening in a way no Scottsdale pizzeria can be, and it is the pizza you can book on a Saturday night, which Pizzeria Bianco across downtown is not.
The practical version
Twenty-four minutes from Old Town, 202 to 7th Avenue or Scottsdale Road to McDowell to 5th Avenue. Street parking in the neighborhood. Reserve, and ask for the patio from October through April. A Margherita, a house pizza, a salad and the crepes feeds two with a bottle of wine for a moderate check. Dinner is the main event; check the site for lunch hours, which have varied.
When to go
October through April, on the patio, is the Cibo that wins awards: the yard under the trees, lights in the branches, a cool evening and the house glowing behind you. Summer moves everyone inside, where the small brick rooms are pleasant and the air conditioning works; the patio returns on monsoon evenings when the storm has passed and the temperature has dropped twenty degrees.
Weekend evenings in high season book out several days ahead. A Tuesday or Wednesday at 6 is easy.
What to order
- A Margherita, to judge the oven. The crust is thin and blistered with a little chew, closer to Naples than to New York.
- One of the house pizzas, which range from the classics to combinations with a Phoenix accent; the server will steer you.
- A salad or an antipasto to share; the kitchen does the vegetable side of an Italian menu well.
- The dessert crepes. Regulars order them as a matter of course, and a table that skips them has not finished.
- Italian wine, from a short list priced fairly.
For a group of six or more on the patio, the 20-inch pizza added in 2026 is the right call.
The neighborhood
Cibo sits in the Roosevelt historic district proper, the blocks of early twentieth-century bungalows west of Central that survived the freeway and the parking lots and are now the most intact old neighborhood in downtown Phoenix. A walk around the blocks before dinner, north on 5th Avenue and back down 3rd, is worth fifteen minutes. Roosevelt Row and its bars are a mile east; the Phoenix Art Museum is a mile north at Central and McDowell.
With kids
Pizza, crepes, a yard and small rooms where a child’s noise disappears: it is one of the more comfortable downtown dinners with children, especially early on the patio.
The story
The house came first. Fifth Avenue north of the original Phoenix townsite was laid out as a streetcar suburb in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the brick bungalows that line it, this one from 1913, were the homes of the city’s clerks, teachers and small merchants when Phoenix had fewer than 20,000 people. The neighborhood declined with the rest of downtown after the war, lost blocks to the freeway and to parking, and was saved in the 1980s by preservationists who got the Roosevelt district listed and the remaining houses protected.
Guido and Michelle Saccone bought one of them and spent the early 2000s restoring it, then opened Cibo in 2005 as a wood-fired pizzeria at a time when downtown Phoenix had almost no dinner restaurants and Pizzeria Bianco was the lonely exception a mile and a half east. The idea was a neighborhood Italian place in a house, and that is what it has stayed: the same owners for twenty years, the same small rooms, the same oven, a menu that has grown without changing character, and a patio that Phoenix has slowly decided is the best in the city. The awards in 2024 and 2025 and the 20-inch pizza in 2026 are the recent chapters of a story that has mostly been about not changing.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s pizza boom of the 2000s and 2010s, the Neapolitan rooms that opened across Old Town and the Airpark, came after Bianco and Cibo had shown the Valley that pizza could be a serious restaurant rather than a delivery; several Scottsdale pizzaioli cooked in downtown Phoenix first. The bungalow restaurant is the other thing Cibo has that Scottsdale cannot copy: Scottsdale was a farm town in 1913, and the few old houses that became restaurants, like the Sugar Bowl’s neighbors on Scottsdale Road, are from the 1940s and 1950s. For a dinner in a house older than the city you are staying in, you drive west.
Getting there
From Old Town, Loop 202 west to the 7th Avenue exit, north to Fillmore and east two blocks to 5th Avenue; or Scottsdale Road south to McDowell Road, west about eight miles to 5th Avenue and south to Fillmore. Twenty-four minutes with no traffic. Street parking is on the neighborhood blocks and is usually easy. The light rail’s Van Buren/Central and Roosevelt/Central stops are both about a ten-minute walk; our getting around note has the rideshare math for a dinner with wine.