What it is
Postino Arcadia is a wine bar in a post office, and both halves of that sentence matter. The building is a low brick 1940s branch office at 40th Street and Campbell Avenue, built to serve the ranch-house subdivisions going in among the citrus groves under Camelback. In 2001 Craig DeMarco and Lauren Bailey turned it into a café that sold wine by the glass for very little, beer by the pitcher for the same, and a board of bruschetta on which you picked four toppings from a dozen. The garage doors roll up, the patio wraps the building, and the neighborhood has been sitting there every afternoon since.
Everything Scottsdale knows about Postino, including the Highland branch on Scottsdale Road, was worked out in this room: the $6 glass until 5 PM, the $25 bottle-and-board on Monday and Tuesday nights, the brie-and-apple and the ricotta-and-date, the no-reservations policy and the pleasant wait. The company it grew into, Upward Projects, now runs Postinos across Arizona and in several other states. This one turned twenty-five in 2026.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because the copies are good and the original is better. The post office has a scale and a shade the newer rooms do not, the crowd walks or bikes in from the streets around it, and the corner it sits on, with La Grande Orange across the street, is the center of the best neighborhood restaurant row in the metro. If you have done Postino at Highland and liked it, this is the version worth a twelve-minute drive.
The practical version
Twelve minutes from Old Town along Indian School Road, then north on 40th Street to Campbell. Open daily from late morning into the late evening. Walk-in only; the wait starts at five in winter and lasts all night on weekends. Happy hour prices run until 5 PM every day. Dogs on the patio. Parking is a small lot and the surrounding streets, and Arcadia’s streets are patient about it. Our happy hour guide has the Scottsdale branch for comparison.
When to go
Mid-afternoon on a weekday, from about 2:30 to 4:30, is the hour the regulars keep: the happy-hour price is on, the patio is half empty and the light comes through the roll-up doors. Monday and Tuesday after 8 are the bottle-deal nights, and the Arcadia room clears earlier than the Scottsdale one, so a table comes quickly. Friday and Saturday evenings are a wait of real length; if that is when you can come, put your name in and walk across to LGO for a coffee or down 40th to look at the houses.
The patio is the point from October through April. In summer the doors come down, the air conditioning does its work, and the room is a fine refuge for an afternoon that is too hot for anything else.
What to order
The board. Pick four: the brie and apple, the ricotta and date, something with tomato, and one that sounds wrong and turns out right. A glass from the by-the-glass list, which is chosen for drinkability and price rather than ambition, and is better for it. The salads and panini are fine and secondary. The dessert is a cookie or two, and that is correct.
With kids
Weekday afternoons, yes; the patio is tolerant, the bruschetta is finger food, and a lemonade is on the list. Weekend evenings, no; the room is a bar by then and the wait is unkind to a six-year-old.
The neighborhood
La Grande Orange, across Campbell, is the breakfast half of this corner and was co-founded by the same man. Ingo’s burger counter is a block north on 40th, Chelsea’s Kitchen is at Camelback, five blocks up, and the Arizona Canal path runs a half mile north, at Camelback. Our wine tasting rooms note covers the Scottsdale side of the glass; this is where the casual version of it started.
The story
The Arcadia post office closed as a post office and sat on its corner, surrounded on four sides by houses, until Craig DeMarco, a Phoenix native and ASU graduate, decided it should be a wine bar. The neighbors disagreed. The use-permit fight that followed was, by the city’s own account, the largest opposition to a restaurant permit in Phoenix history; the people who lived on 40th Street and Campbell did not want cars, noise or wine on their corner. DeMarco and his wife Kris, with Lauren Bailey as partner, won, barely, and opened in 2001 with so little money left for furniture that they brought a couch from home.
What they had was a simple idea at the right moment: wine by the glass for about the price of a beer, a board of toppings on grilled bread that a table could share, and a patio you could sit on for three hours without anyone asking you to leave. The neighbors who had fought it became the regulars within a year. By the mid-2000s the room was the Valley’s default first date and its default Tuesday, and the corner had a second anchor when La Grande Orange opened across the street with DeMarco as a founding partner. Upward Projects, the company that grew out of the post office, took the formula to central Phoenix, Gilbert, Kierland and Old Town Scottsdale, then out of state. The original stayed exactly what it was, and in 2026 it marked twenty-five years.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale got its Postino at Highland and Scottsdale Road, a block from Fashion Square, and it is the room our happy hour guide sends people to first. But the whole category of Scottsdale restaurant that followed, the roll-up-door wine-and-patio room in a repurposed building, from the Waterfront to Kierland, is this building’s grandchild. Arcadia itself is where a good part of Scottsdale’s restaurant and resort staff live, and where the Camelback-corridor resorts send guests who ask where locals go. Our Camelback corridor guide covers the resorts a mile east of here.
Getting there
Indian School Road west from Scottsdale Road to 40th Street, north three blocks to Campbell; Postino is on the southwest corner. From the Camelback corridor, 44th Street south to Campbell, then west. The Arizona Canal path from the Waterfront reaches Arcadia in about two miles if you would rather ride, which many of the people on the patio did. Rideshare is the right answer for the bottle deal; our getting around note has the math.