What it is
Liberty Market is the all-day café of Gilbert’s Heritage District: breakfast, lunch, dinner, an espresso bar and a cocktail bar in a 1936 brick building at 230 North Gilbert Road that the Ong family ran as a grocery of the same name. The restaurant opened in 2008, a block south of Joe’s Real BBQ and from the same family, the Johnstons, in partnership with David and Kiersten Traina. It opens at 8 every morning and runs through dinner, which in a district where most kitchens open at 11 and close between services makes it the room you end up in more often than you plan to.
The menu is a neighborhood café’s: eggs and coffee in the morning, sandwiches and salads in the middle of the day, a dinner menu with a few larger plates, a kids’ menu, and drinks. It is not a chef’s restaurant and does not try to be. It is where Gilbert has breakfast before the farmers market, where the lunch meeting happens, and where a family eats at 5:30 on a Wednesday.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Not on its own; nobody drives thirty-five minutes for a breakfast sandwich. But if you are coming to the Heritage District for the day, or to Joe’s for lunch, or to Agritopia ten minutes away, this is the meal that fits the hour the others do not cover. Scottsdale’s version of the room is Arcadia Farms in Old Town, and the comparison holds: a long-running café that locals use rather than celebrate.
The practical version
Open daily from 8 AM through dinner, roughly until 9 on weeknights and Saturday, 8 on Sunday. Park in the free Vaughn Avenue garage and walk; the restaurant is across from Water Tower Plaza. Weekend brunch is the only hour with a wait. Allow an hour.
When to go
Breakfast, early. The espresso bar opens with the kitchen at 8, and on Saturdays the Heritage District Farmers Market runs two blocks away from 8 to noon in the cool months, 7 to 11 in summer. Eat first, then shop; the market’s Agritopia produce goes early.
The off hours. Three in the afternoon, when the district’s other kitchens are closed between lunch and dinner, is Liberty Market’s hour. Likewise a 5:30 dinner with children, or a 9 PM dessert and coffee when the restaurant row is on an hour’s wait.
Weekend brunch is the one time to expect a line. The 2022 renovation added a waiting area for exactly that, and the patio is pleasant from October to April. Our brunch note covers the Scottsdale party rooms; this is the opposite kind of brunch.
What to order
Breakfast is the strongest meal: eggs, the coffee, the pastries. At lunch the sandwiches and the salads carry the room; at dinner there are a few larger plates and a full bar. The espresso program is a real one, which puts the place in the same conversation as the rooms in our coffee shops note, with the difference that you can also get a cocktail and a dinner.
With kids
Easy. A kids’ menu, booths after the 2022 rebuild, a patio, and hours that work for a family day: breakfast here, the splash pad at Water Tower Plaza, lunch at Joe’s, Agritopia in the afternoon. It is the Heritage District’s most forgiving room for a stroller.
The neighborhood
Across the road is Water Tower Plaza and the 1927 tower; a block north is Joe’s; south and along the side streets are the rest of the district’s restaurants and bars, and Hale Theatre Arizona on Page Avenue. The free garages are a short walk.
The story
The Ong family opened Liberty Market in 1936 as a grocery on Gilbert Road, in a hay-shipping town of a few thousand people, and the name stayed on the building long after the store closed. By the 1990s downtown Gilbert had emptied toward the freeways, and the man who reversed that was Joe Johnston, who opened Joe’s Real BBQ in a 1929 Safeway a block north in 1998. A decade later, in 2008, with the town building Water Tower Plaza across the road, the Johnstons and the Trainas reopened the old grocery as a restaurant under its original name.
The idea was an all-day room, which the district did not have: coffee and breakfast in the morning, lunch, dinner and a bar, in a building with its brick showing. It worked well enough that it became a Gilbert institution in under a decade, and in January 2022 the owners closed it for about a month to rebuild the dining room with booths and community tables, add a waiting area and a to-go counter, and redo the patio. They kept the full staff on wages through the closure, doing community volunteer work, which is the kind of detail that tells you how the place is run.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale is full of cafés that opened in the last five years, and short on the kind that have been the same for twenty. Liberty Market is what those rooms are hoping to become: the default table in a neighborhood, with regulars who do not look at the menu. It is also the companion piece to Joe’s, and together the two buildings, a 1929 grocery and a 1936 one, are the physical argument that a farm town’s main street could be revived with food rather than with a developer.
Getting there
Loop 101 south from Old Town to US 60 east, the Gilbert Road exit, then two miles south to the railroad tracks; the restaurant is at 230 North Gilbert Road on the right, across from Water Tower Plaza. Thirty-five minutes with no traffic, fifty from North Scottsdale. Park in the Vaughn Avenue garage, which is free. No useful transit from Scottsdale; it is a car or a rideshare.