What it is
La Grande Orange is a corner store that outgrew the description. The building at 40th Street and Campbell Avenue holds a counter for breakfast and lunch, a coffee bar with a proper espresso program, a bakery and a cake shop, a wall of wine, shelves of the kind of grocery you buy when you are not really grocery shopping, and, at the back with its own door and its own hours, a pizzeria with a full bar. The neighborhood calls it LGO and treats it as a public utility.
The thing it is famous for is the English muffin, baked in the LGO Bake Shop and sold both as the base of the breakfast sandwiches and by the bag to take home. The rest of the list is long: pastry, salads and sandwiches at midday, gelato, a rotisserie, sushi in the case, and the pizzas after four. None of it is cheap by grocery standards and none of it is expensive by Scottsdale standards, which is the whole Arcadia proposition.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale does not have one. Old Town has good coffee shops and good breakfast rooms, but it does not have the place where a neighborhood actually gathers on a Saturday morning, with the kids on the patio and the dogs tied to the bike rack and a line that everyone is cheerful about. LGO is that place for Arcadia, and Arcadia is twelve minutes away. It is also the right breakfast before Camelback, whose Echo Canyon trailhead is a few minutes north on 44th Street, and the right provisioner for a walk on the Arizona Canal, which runs a half mile north of the store, at Camelback.
The practical version
Twelve minutes from Old Town: Indian School Road west to 40th Street, then north to Campbell. The grocery opens at 6:30 every day. The pizzeria opens at 4 PM Monday through Thursday and at 11 AM Friday through Sunday. Parking is a small lot and the street, and on weekend mornings both are full by eight. Order at the counter, find a table, and expect to see someone you know.
When to go
Weekday mornings are LGO at its best: the regulars, the commuters, a seat on the patio in the shade of the building, and a wait of a few minutes. Weekend mornings are LGO at its most LGO, which is to say a line to the door and a parking lot full of people pretending they are not waiting for a space. Both have their point. If you are coming from Scottsdale for the experience, go on a Saturday and arrive before 8:30; if you are coming for breakfast, go on a Wednesday.
In winter the patio is the reason to be here, and from November to March the morning light on this corner, with Camelback’s west face a mile north, is the Arcadia postcard. In summer the store opens at 6:30 for a reason: the neighborhood is here and gone by nine.
What to order
The breakfast sandwich on the house English muffin, in whichever version is on the board that month. A coffee from the bar, which takes itself seriously. At lunch, one of the salads or a sandwich, eaten on the patio. In the evening, the pizzeria: thin crusts, a short list, a bar that pours well, and a room that is quieter than the counter out front ever is. Take home a bag of the muffins and something from the wine wall, which is chosen with more care and priced lower than anything in a resort shop.
With kids
Easy. The patio tolerates anything, the bakery case solves every negotiation, and the canal is a ten-minute walk north for burning off a cinnamon roll. The cake shop does custom cakes with notice, which is useful if a birthday lands during a trip. Our brunch note has LGO as the out-of-town pick for a family morning.
The neighborhood
This corner is the center of Arcadia’s restaurant row. Postino is across the street in the old post office, Ingo’s is a block north, Chelsea’s Kitchen is five blocks up at Camelback, and The Vig is five blocks south at Indian School. Our Camelback corridor guide covers the resorts a mile east; this is where the people who work at them eat.
The story
Arcadia was citrus. The neighborhood under Camelback’s west face was planted in orange and grapefruit groves from the 1920s, watered by the Arizona Canal, and subdivided for ranch houses after the war with the trees left standing in the yards. By the 1990s it was a quiet, prosperous, slightly dull part of east Phoenix with nowhere much to eat, which is how a neighborhood ends up with a corner store that becomes its living room.
La Grande Orange opened in the early 2000s at 40th and Campbell, a corner that already had Postino across the street: Craig DeMarco had opened that wine café in a former post office in 2001 and was a founding partner in the store as well. The idea was a grocery that sold the things a neighborhood like this actually wanted, with a counter and a coffee bar so people would stay. They stayed. The muffins became a product, the bakery became the LGO Bake Shop, the pizzeria arrived at the back, and the group that grew out of the building, LGO Hospitality, went on to open Chelsea’s Kitchen on the canal at 40th and Camelback. Within a decade the corner had taught every developer in the Valley the phrase “neighborhood concept,” and Arcadia had become the best restaurant row in the metro.
The Scottsdale connection
The lesson travelled east. The Postino that Scottsdale knows, Postino Highland, is the child of the one across this street, and the whole wave of patio-and-wine neighborhood rooms that followed in Old Town and the Waterfront took its cues from this corner. Arcadia is also, practically, part of Scottsdale’s weekend: the Camelback resorts are a mile east, the Echo Canyon trailhead is ten minutes away, and the canal path connects the two cities without a traffic light. Our what to eat note sends people here for the breakfast that Old Town does not quite have.
Getting there
Indian School Road west from Scottsdale Road, about three and a half miles to 40th Street, then north three blocks. From the Camelback corridor, 44th Street south to Campbell and west. By bike, the Arizona Canal path from the Scottsdale Waterfront runs southwest into Arcadia in about two miles; leave the path near 40th Street and ride south a few blocks. There is no useful transit; it is a car, a rideshare or a bicycle. The coffee list in our coffee shops note covers the Scottsdale side if you want to compare.