True Food Kitchen Biltmore: The 2008 Original, Where Dr. Weil and Sam Fox Made Healthy Eating a Chain

What it is

True Food Kitchen is the health-minded restaurant chain that started here, on the Camelback Road edge of Biltmore Fashion Park, on October 27, 2008. The idea belonged to two people: Dr. Andrew Weil, the Tucson physician whose books on integrative medicine and the anti-inflammatory diet had made him a household name, and Sam Fox, the Scottsdale restaurateur whose Fox Restaurant Concepts was then a dozen Valley restaurants and is now a national company. They met at one of Fox’s Tucson places in the late 1990s and talked for years about a restaurant that would serve Weil’s diet to people who did not want to be lectured. When the Biltmore space came open, they built it.

The room is bright, the kitchen is open and the menu is the Weil pyramid rendered as lunch: a kale salad that became famous, grain bowls, wood-fired pizzas, a long run of vegetable sides, fish and chicken as options rather than the main event, fresh juices and a proper bar. It changes with the seasons four times a year. The patio along Camelback is one of the better ones in the neighborhood.

Why leave Scottsdale for it

Honestly, you do not need to; there is a True Food Kitchen at Scottsdale Quarter that opened in 2010 and serves the same menu. You come to this one because you are already in the Biltmore for the hotel, the mansion or the mall, and because this is the original: the room where a Scottsdale restaurateur and a Tucson doctor proved that a restaurant could sell vegetables at scale.

The practical version

Seventeen minutes from Old Town along Camelback Road. Free parking at the mall. Lunch, dinner and weekend brunch, every day. A two-level price, with entrees in the range of a nice casual lunch. Reservations help at dinner and brunch; walk in at a weekday lunch after 1:30.

When to go

Weekday lunch between October and April, on the patio, is the restaurant at its best; the Camelback corridor offices fill it from noon to one, and by 1:30 the tables turn. Weekend brunch is the other peak, and it is popular enough that our brunch note sends people to the Scottsdale branch to avoid it. Summer moves everything inside, where the room is cool and big; dinner after seven on a July weeknight is quiet and easy.

What to order

1. The kale salad. Tuscan kale, lemon, Parmesan, breadcrumbs; the dish that people copied for a decade.
2. The Ancient Grains bowl. The permanent grain bowl, with whatever vegetables are in season and an optional protein; the most ordered thing on the menu.
3. The seasonal menu. The quarter of the menu that changes is where the kitchen is paying attention: squash and Brussels sprouts in fall, strawberries and asparagus in spring, the fish of the moment year-round.
4. A pizza. Thin, wood-fired, with a margherita that is better than it needs to be.
5. The juices and the bar. Fresh-pressed juices and refreshers on one side, a short wine list and cocktails on the other; the restaurant is not dry and never pretended to be.
6. Dessert. The flourless chocolate cake and the seasonal fruit crisp, both meant for sharing.

With kids

Very good: a kids’ menu that is real food, a loud enough room that nobody notices a toddler, a patio with the mall lawns beside it, and gelato at Frost a hundred feet away. The grain bowls are the trick for a picky eater; let them pick the toppings.

The neighborhood

You are at 24th and Camelback, the center of the Biltmore district. The mall’s gardens are outside the door, the Arizona Biltmore is a half mile north, the Wrigley Mansion is on the hill above it, and the Camelback Esplanade across the street has more restaurants. It is a full afternoon if you want it to be.

The story

Andrew Weil had been arguing since the 1990s that most of what ailed Americans could be improved by what they ate, and his anti-inflammatory food pyramid, heavy on vegetables, whole grains, fish, olive oil and spices, sold millions of books. What it lacked was a restaurant. Sam Fox had the opposite problem: a growing company of successful concepts (North, Olive & Ivy, Sauce) that were good but not different. The two had met in Tucson in the late 1990s and, by Fox’s own account, had been circling the idea of a restaurant together for years when a Biltmore Fashion Park space became available in 2008. They opened True Food Kitchen that October, in the middle of a financial crisis, with the proposition that healthy food could be sold on taste rather than guilt.

It worked quickly. Scottsdale Quarter got the second location in 2010; California, Colorado and Texas followed. By 2017 there were twenty restaurants and P.F. Chang’s, itself a Scottsdale-born chain, bought a majority stake. Fox left the business then to concentrate on Fox Restaurant Concepts, which now includes Flower Child, his own fast-casual answer to the same question. Weil kept a minority interest and his name on the concept, and an investor group owns the company today, with dozens of locations across the country. Every one of them is a copy of this room.

The Scottsdale connection

Fox is Scottsdale’s most consequential restaurateur, and this was his breakout concept; our Sam Fox profile tells that story. The Kierland True Food Kitchen is the Scottsdale page of the same chain, and the one most visitors will actually eat at. The Biltmore original is the footnote worth a detour when you are already here.

Getting there

Camelback Road west from Scottsdale Road to 24th Street, about six miles; the restaurant faces Camelback on the mall’s south edge, with the closest parking in the Camelback-side lots. Rideshare drops at the Camelback entrance. Walk the mall’s center garden to the Macy’s end afterward and you have seen the whole center.