What it is
Welcome Diner is a farm-to-table diner on a corner of the Garfield neighborhood, the grid of early twentieth-century bungalows just east of Roosevelt Row in downtown Phoenix. It calls itself an American diner with a Southern tinge, which is accurate: biscuits are the center of the menu, in sandwiches at brunch and lunch and beside fried chicken at dinner, and around them are burgers, plates and vegetables that change with what the restaurant’s purveyors have, plus a cocktail list, local beer and a happy hour. The kitchen cooks everything from scratch, which is not what the word diner usually means and is the whole point here.
The restaurant began more than fifteen years ago in a 200-square-foot prefab metal diner on Roosevelt Street, a counter and a handful of stools that was one of the landmarks of the early Roosevelt Row and one of the few places to eat downtown in the 2000s. It outgrew the building long before it left it. In late spring 2018 Welcome Diner moved a few blocks east to a bright new corner building at 10th Street and Pierce, designed with Kaiserworks, the architecture firm next door, with a real dining room, a bar and an outdoor patio. The old diner on Roosevelt has held other restaurants since.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale brunch is a genre, and our brunch note covers it with affection: big rooms, bottomless mimosas, a bachelorette party, a line. Welcome Diner is the other thing, a neighborhood restaurant in a residential historic district with a kitchen that cooks and a crowd that walked over. It is the brunch downtown Phoenix locals pick, and it is a mile from the murals and galleries of Roosevelt Row, which makes it the right first stop on a day down there.
The practical version
Twenty-two minutes from Old Town, Scottsdale Road to McDowell to 7th Street to Pierce, or the 202 to 7th Street. Street parking in the neighborhood. Brunch, lunch, dinner, happy hour and a kids’ menu; brunch on a weekend has a wait, brunch on a weekday does not. A biscuit sandwich, a side and a coffee is a modest check; dinner with cocktails is moderate. Check the site for current hours, which the restaurant posts by meal.
When to go
Weekday brunch, late morning, is the diner at its most itself: no line, the regulars, the biscuits fresh. Weekend brunch is the busy version and worth the wait once. Happy hour on the patio, late afternoon from October through April, is the quiet hour between the two crowds, and the Garfield blocks around it are at their best in that light. Dinner is the least-known meal and the easiest table, and the fried chicken is a dinner dish.
Summer moves everyone inside; the building is bright and cool and the patio returns in October.
What to order
- A biscuit sandwich, whichever the kitchen is doing; the biscuit is the reason the restaurant exists.
- The fried chicken at dinner, with a biscuit alongside.
- A vegetable side from whatever the purveyors delivered, which is where the farm-to-table claim earns itself.
- A burger, if the Southern plates are not your mood; this is still a diner.
- A cocktail or a local beer, and at happy hour, both.
Dessert is on the drinks menu and is worth a look.
The neighborhood
Garfield is one of downtown Phoenix’s oldest intact neighborhoods, platted in the 1880s and built out in bungalows and small brick houses through the 1920s, and it spent decades neglected before the restaurants and the murals of Roosevelt Row crept east. The blocks around 10th and Pierce are worth a walk before or after: the houses, the gardens, the occasional mural on a side wall. Roosevelt Row proper, with the galleries and bars, begins a mile west; The Churchill’s courtyard is at the far end of it. Both have guides in this section.
With kids
A kids’ menu, biscuits, a patio and a neighborhood to walk off the sugar in: this is an easy family brunch, especially on a weekday.
The story
The first Welcome Diner was a building before it was a restaurant: a tiny early twentieth-century prefabricated metal diner, the kind companies built in a factory and set down on a corner lot, that ended up at 924 E Roosevelt Street in what was then an empty stretch of downtown Phoenix. In the 2000s it reopened as Welcome Diner, a counter and a few stools, serving lunch a few days a week and, as Roosevelt Row’s First Friday grew, late dinners on art-walk nights. It became a landmark of the early Row, photographed more than it was eaten in because it was so small, and when rumors went around in early 2008 that it had closed, the owner had to tell the newspaper it had not.
The restaurant outgrew the building through the 2010s, as the kitchen’s ambitions grew past what a 200-square-foot diner could cook and the crowd grew past what a counter could seat. The move, in late spring 2018, was a few blocks east into Garfield, to a new building on the southwest corner of 10th Street and Pierce designed in collaboration with Kaiserworks, the architecture firm beside it, and with Martha + Mary Studio, a sister company; the owners describe the project as built with the help of regulars and neighbors, and the result has a dining room, a bar, a patio and a kitchen that could finally do the whole menu. The old metal diner on Roosevelt became another restaurant, then another. Sister restaurants followed, but the Garfield corner is the home.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s own diner tradition is the Sugar Bowl, the pink ice-cream parlor on Scottsdale Road open since 1958, and the breakfast houses that line the resort corridor; the what-to-eat note explains the difference between a Scottsdale breakfast and a Phoenix one. Welcome Diner belongs to the generation of downtown Phoenix restaurants that opened before downtown had a dinner crowd and grew with it, and its move from a tiny landmark to a real building is the Roosevelt Row story in one restaurant. Scottsdale visitors who have done the Row’s galleries by day and want to see the neighborhood the artists live in eat here.
Getting there
From Old Town, Scottsdale Road south to McDowell Road, west to 7th Street, south to Pierce Street and east to 10th Street; or Loop 202 west to the 7th Street exit, north to Pierce and east. Twenty-two minutes with no traffic. Street parking on the neighborhood blocks is usually easy; be a good guest on residential streets. The Roosevelt/Central light-rail stop is a mile west, a twenty-minute walk through Garfield and the Row; our getting around note covers the rest.