What it is
Pizzeria Bianco is a brick room with a wood oven and about forty seats on Heritage Square, the one block of Victorian Phoenix that survived, and it is where Chris Bianco has made the pizza that food writers have been calling the best in America since around the turn of the century. The menu is six pizzas, an antipasto, a couple of salads and a short Italian wine list, and it has barely changed since the room opened in 1997. Bianco won the James Beard award for Best Chef: Southwest in 2003, the only pizza maker ever to win a regional chef award, and the Foundation’s Outstanding Restaurateur award in 2022. Bar Bianco, in the Victorian house next door, is where you wait.
The pizzas are Neapolitan in spirit and Arizona in detail. The Rosa, with red onion, Parmigiano, rosemary and local pistachios, is the one that gets copied; the Wiseguy, with wood-roasted onion, smoked mozzarella and fennel sausage, is the one locals argue is better. The Margherita tells you about the crust, which is blistered and a little chewy and tastes of something. Bianco has spent more than thirty years on the dough, and that is the whole explanation.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has excellent pizza. Pizzeria Virtù and Pomo are both Neapolitan and both good, and the what-to-eat note lists more. What Scottsdale does not have is the restaurant that made American pizza a serious subject, in the room where it happened. People fly in for this. If you are already twenty-five minutes away, drive.
The practical version
Twenty-five minutes from Old Town to Heritage Square, 7th Street and Adams, downtown. Open Monday through Saturday, 11 to 9, closed Sunday. No reservations, no takeout. The wait is nothing at weekday lunch and over an hour on a weekend night. Park in the Heritage garage at 5th Street and Monroe or use the square’s valet. Two pizzas and an antipasto for two people, with a glass of wine each, is a moderate bill; the price is in the time, not the check.
When to go
Weekday lunch at opening is the answer, and it is not a secret, so be there before 11. Weekday dinner at 4:30, when the doors reopen for the evening, is the second answer. Friday and Saturday nights in high season, from January through April, are the long waits, and the square is also busiest then with Chase Field and the arena a few blocks west.
Summer is quieter downtown and the pizzeria is air-conditioned, which makes a July lunch here one of the pleasanter things to do in the Valley at noon.
How the wait works
Put your name in at the door, then walk next door to Bar Bianco, a Victorian house with a porch and a small bar pouring Italian wine, and they will come find you. On a mild night the porch is better than the dining room. If the list is long, the Rosson House, the 1895 Queen Anne mansion that anchors the square, gives tours, and the rest of Heritage Square is a ten-minute walk of restored bungalows.
What to order
For two people: one Rosa, one Wiseguy, the antipasto, a glass each. For four: add the Margherita and the Sonny Boy. The Biancoverde, with ricotta and arugula, is the lighter one and the one vegetarians get without compromise. There is no dessert to speak of; there is gelato elsewhere downtown.
The other location
The second Pizzeria Bianco, at Town & Country on 20th Street at Camelback, opened in 2013 and is fifteen minutes from Old Town along Camelback Road. It is open every day, takes a limited number of reservations, and bakes the same six pizzas in a bigger, plainer room. If you want the pizza and not the pilgrimage, it is the practical choice, and it is on the way back from the Biltmore. Pane Bianco, the sandwich shop on Central in midtown, does the lunch version.
With kids
Pizza, a walkable square and a wait that can be spent on the Rosson House lawn: this is one of the easier downtown restaurants for a family, as long as you go at lunch.
The story
Chris Bianco grew up in the Bronx, came to Phoenix at nineteen with asthma and no plan, and in 1988 started baking pizza in the back corner of a neighborhood grocery store in central Phoenix. He went to Italy in 1993 to learn what he was doing wrong, came back, and in 1994 reopened in a strip-mall space at Town & Country, the shopping center at 20th Street and Camelback. In 1997 he moved downtown to the old Baird Machine Shop on Heritage Square, a 1920s brick building the city had restored as part of the square, and that is the room you eat in now.
The reputation came in stages. Phoenix knew first. Then, around 2000, the national food press found him: Zagat gave the pizza a near-perfect score, Bon Appétit and Vogue and Rachael Ray and Andrew Zimmern each called it the best in America, and the James Beard award in 2003 made it official. The line, which had been a local inconvenience, became the subject of national articles. Bianco kept the menu at six pizzas, kept the room small, and spent the next two decades opening other things so he could keep this one the same: Bar Bianco next door, Pane Bianco in midtown, the second pizzeria at Town & Country in 2013, Tratto, and in 2022, the year he won Outstanding Restaurateur, a Los Angeles pizzeria. A Netflix series made him a household name among people who had never been to Phoenix. He still bakes here.
The Scottsdale connection
Bianco is the reason Phoenix has a pizza culture and Scottsdale is where most of it is sold. The Neapolitan rooms that opened across Scottsdale in the 2000s and 2010s learned from his dough and his restraint, and several of their owners cooked for or near him. The James Beard and Michelin entry in our lexicon explains why his 2003 award mattered so much to a Valley that had never had one. Cibo, a mile north in a 1913 bungalow, is the other downtown pizza room worth a Scottsdale visitor’s drive, and the two make a fair argument.
Getting there
From Old Town, the 202 west to the 7th Street exit and south to Adams, or Scottsdale Road south to McDowell, west to 7th Street and south; 25 minutes with no traffic, more during a Diamondbacks or Suns home game, when the whole downtown fills. The Heritage garage at 5th Street and Monroe is the easy park. The light rail stops at 3rd Street/Washington, four blocks away, which makes a car-free day with the museums up Central possible; our getting around note has the rideshare math for a night when you would rather drink the wine.