What it is
Giordano’s Trattoria Romana is the kind of restaurant that used to be on every Scottsdale corner and is now rare enough to drive for: a small, family-owned Italian room that opens for dinner six nights a week, cooks from the owner’s recipes, and has done so in the same spot on Easy Street for more than 25 years. The menu is Roman and northern Italian home cooking. Cannelloni Florentine stuffed with lamb, tortellacci, a chicken Parmesan and a chicken fricassee, mussels, breaded calamari, a shrimp cocktail with horseradish that bites, a Caesar made at the table’s pace rather than the kitchen’s. The red sauce is made fresh every morning, which the owner will tell you and which you can taste. Two specials change nightly. Dessert is tiramisu, cannoli and gelato, and the tiramisu is what people name when they recommend the place.
The room is small, warm and unfussy, with set tables and a buffet sideboard for the private parties it hosts. It is not a scene. It is a trattoria.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Honestly, you leave Scottsdale for Carefree and eat here because you are already there. If you are staying at the Boulders or Civana, Giordano’s is the dinner that is not the resort’s, ten minutes away, at a check roughly half of what the resort dining rooms ask. If you have spent the afternoon at the sundial and the galleries, it is the natural end. From Old Town, 38 minutes each way for a plate of cannelloni is a long drive, and the restaurant would say so too; pair it with a day up north.
The practical version
Dinner only, five to nine, Monday through Saturday; closed Sunday. Reserve in season through OpenTable or by phone. Park on Easy Street or in the lots behind the plaza. Takeout is not a strength at peak hours; eat in.
When to go
Weeknights from November to April are the sweet spot: the room is lively, the specials are running, and the five o’clock seating leaves you the lit plaza afterward. Saturdays in season are the hard nights; the kitchen is at capacity by 6:30 and a walk-in will wait or be turned away, and the owner has asked that takeout callers try after 7:30. Summer is the opposite: a quiet room, a cool one, and a chance to try the specials at leisure. Carefree’s art-festival weekends fill every table in town, including these; book a week out.
What to order
Ask for the two specials before anything else. From the card: mussels or the shrimp cocktail to start, the cannelloni Florentine or tortellacci as the main, chicken Parmesan if someone at the table wants the comfort version. The house wine and a Chianti are the sensible pours; there is a marsala for the end. Share the tiramisu. Do not skip it to save room, because there is nothing to save room for in Carefree after nine.
The neighborhood
Easy Street runs uphill from the sundial past the galleries and the tea room, and Giordano’s is a short walk up from the plaza. Venues Café and the sundial are at the bottom of the street; Keeler’s steakhouse and the Black Mountain Coffee Shop are around the corner in the Spanish Village on Ho Hum Road. The Boulders and El Pedregal are five minutes south. Everything closes early; Carefree is a town that goes to bed.
With kids
Welcome and easy, in the way of a family trattoria: pasta, chicken Parmesan, gelato, early hours. A five o’clock table with children is the norm, not the exception.
The story
Carefree’s downtown has had a lot of restaurants over its seventy years, most of them lasting a season or two of resort traffic. Giordano’s has lasted more than a quarter of a century on Easy Street by doing one thing: cooking a family’s Italian recipes for a town that eats early and comes back. It is a mama-owned restaurant in the old sense, and the regulars, many of whom live in the boulder hills around the town or in the gated golf communities of far north Scottsdale, treat it as the neighborhood kitchen it is. Reviewers over the years mention the same things in the same order: the sauce, the specials, the tiramisu, the welcome, and the difficulty of getting a table in March.
The Scottsdale connection
The restaurant’s clientele is Scottsdale’s northern edge as much as Carefree: Troon, Desert Mountain, Pinnacle Peak, the Boulders’ guests. For a visitor staying anywhere north of the 101 it is the closest honest Italian dinner outside a resort, and for a couple on a quiet weekend it is the kind of place our couples’ weekend note would send you to if it were inside the city line.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north across Carefree Highway, where it becomes Tom Darlington Drive; right on Cave Creek Road, left on Easy Street, and the trattoria is on the right as the street climbs from the sundial. Allow 38 minutes from Old Town, 15 from Pinnacle Peak, and ten from the Boulders. The road home through the boulder hills is unlit, so the designated driver should be the one who skipped the marsala.