What it is
The Gladly is a New American restaurant and whiskey bar on Camelback Road at 22nd Street, opened in 2013 by chef Bernie Kantak and the partners behind Citizen Public House in Old Town. The room is handsome without being fussy, the kind of place the Camelback corridor’s lawyers and money managers eat lunch in on a Tuesday and come back to for a drink on Thursday. The bar is the thing people talk about: more than 350 whiskeys from Kentucky, Scotland, Ireland, Japan and farther, plus a cocktail list that treats the spirits with respect.
The kitchen is Kantak’s, and Kantak is a Scottsdale story. He made his name at Cowboy Ciao on Stetson Drive in the 2000s, where he created the Original Chopped Salad, a dish of smoked salmon, Israeli couscous, dried corn, pepitas, asiago and currants in a buttermilk-pesto dressing that became the most imitated plate in Arizona. He carried it to Citizen Public House when he opened that in 2011 and to The Gladly two years later, where it is still on the menu, tossed at the table. The rest of the menu is seasonal American cooking with a smoker and a sense of humor, and the pork belly pastrami has been there as long as the salad.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because it is the Biltmore’s good restaurant, in a neighborhood that otherwise runs to steakhouse chains and mall patios. If you are spending the day at the Arizona Biltmore or the Wrigley Mansion, this is where the locals who live below them eat. And because the whiskey list is deeper than anything in Scottsdale outside a resort bar.
The practical version
Sixteen minutes from Old Town, west on Camelback. Lunch and dinner Monday to Friday, dinner Saturday, closed Sunday; a weekday happy hour in the bar. Free parking in the plaza lot. A three-level price, with the salad and a drink at the bar a reasonable lunch and a full dinner with whiskey a real bill.
When to go
Weekday lunch is the restaurant’s identity; the Camelback corridor empties into it at noon, and a 12:30 table without a reservation is a wait. Book, or come at 1:15. Happy hour on weekdays in the bar is the best value and the best hour, with the room half full and the bartenders unhurried; our happy hour guide covers the Scottsdale equivalents. Saturday dinner is the one weekend service, and it fills. The Gladly is closed Sunday, which is the detail visitors miss.
What to order
- The Original Chopped Salad. Share it. The table-side toss is part of the point, and the proportions are the recipe; do not substitute.
- The pork belly pastrami. Cured, smoked, sliced thick; the other Kantak signature, when it is on the menu.
- Whatever is smoked or braised. The kitchen has a smoker and a soft spot for long cooking; the daily specials are where to look.
- A whiskey flight. Three pours, chosen with the bartender, from a list that runs past 350 bottles. Tell them what you drink at home and let them stretch it.
- A cocktail. The list leans on the whiskey wall but does not depend on it; the gin and agave drinks are made with the same care.
With kids
It is a grown-up room with a bar at its heart, and lunch is a business crowd. Older kids are fine at an early dinner on Saturday; for a family lunch in the Biltmore, True Food Kitchen up the street is the better fit.
The neighborhood
You are at the west end of the Biltmore district. Biltmore Fashion Park and the Esplanade are three blocks east, the Arizona Biltmore is a mile north, and the office towers that fill The Gladly at noon line both sides of Camelback. Streets are walkable in the cool months; nobody walks them in July.
The story
Bernie Kantak spent most of the 2000s as the chef at Cowboy Ciao, the Old Town restaurant on Stetson Drive that was, for a while, the most interesting kitchen in Scottsdale. The chopped salad he created there, built on smoked salmon and couscous and tossed at the table in a wooden bowl, was the dish everyone ordered and everyone tried to copy; Cowboy Ciao eventually put the recipe on its website in self-defense. In 2011 Kantak and Andrew Fritz opened Citizen Public House a few blocks away on 5th Avenue, a gastropub with a cocktail-first bar, and took the salad with them. It was one of the first places in Scottsdale to treat cocktails as seriously as food, and it earned Kantak James Beard semifinalist nods.
The Gladly was the next step: a bigger, more polished room in Phoenix’s money corridor, where the bar program could grow into a whiskey library and the kitchen could cook for an expense-account lunch crowd. It opened in 2013 at 22nd and Camelback under the In Good Spirits Hospitality umbrella and settled quickly into the role of the Biltmore’s neighborhood restaurant, which in this neighborhood means a very well-dressed one. Kantak still cooks; in March 2026 he hosted the James Beard Foundation’s Taste America dinner for Phoenix in this room, and he turns up at collaboration dinners around the Valley. The restaurant has outlasted most of the Camelback corridor’s openings of its decade by doing the unglamorous things: a consistent menu, a deep bar, good service at lunch.
The Scottsdale connection
The Gladly is a Scottsdale restaurant that happens to be in Phoenix. Its chef, its signature dish and its parent company all come from Old Town, where Citizen Public House is still the original and Cowboy Ciao is where the salad was born. For a visitor who has eaten at Citizen and liked it, this is the same cooking in a quieter, more grown-up room, with a bar twice as deep. The Camelback corridor resorts are ten minutes east.
Getting there
Camelback Road west from Scottsdale Road about five and a half miles to 22nd Street; the restaurant is on the south side of Camelback in a plaza with its own free lot, entrance from Camelback or 22nd. Rideshare is sensible if the whiskey list is the plan; our getting around note has the math for the Camelback run.