Editors’ Choice: the places we’d send you to without a second thought.
Most of this site is reporting: what a place is, what it costs, what to order, what it used to be. The seal is the one place we stop reporting and just tell you. It marks the establishments the editors personally recommend, on the strength of years of our own visits — the counters we eat at on weeknights, the hotel bar we take visiting family to, the store we would miss if it left.
There is no scoring rubric behind it and we are not going to invent one. A place earns the seal because the whole experience lands, every time, in a way a checklist would miss. It is mostly vibes. The vibes are good.
A recommendation, not a rating
Every guide on this site already tells you whether to go. The seal is for the shorter list: places where we have stopped evaluating because we have simply been going for years. The welcome is the same whether you are a regular or a stranger. The thing you order every time is still good. It holds up on a Tuesday in August when the city empties out and standards tend to go with it.
None of that fits in a rubric, and a rubric would force a dive bar and a resort spa onto the same scoresheet, where both would lose. So there is no scale, no stars and no number. A place has the seal or it does not, and the guide underneath tells you why we keep going back.
Only an open establishment can carry it. When a place closes, its page stays as local history and the seal comes off the same day.
What the seal is not
- Not for sale. No business has paid for it, applied for it or been asked for anything. The affiliate links on gear, hotel and tour pages are disclosed where they appear and have no bearing on who gets it.
- Not a score. There are no criteria, no points and no ranking within the list. Alphabetical order is the only order.
- Not a snapshot. It is earned over years of visits, not on one good night, and it is not awarded to anywhere we have been fewer than a handful of times.
- Not permanent. When the thing that earned it goes, so does the seal, and the page says so.
- Not complete. Plenty of excellent places are not on this list yet because we have not been enough times to be sure. Absence is not a verdict.
Who carries it right now
9 places, in alphabetical order. No ranking.
Restaurants
All tables →Mexican Old Town
Barrio Queen
The original Barrio Queen by the Old Town canal bridge pairs regional Mexican cooking — cochinita pibil, birria, house-pressed tortillas — with more than 400 tequilas and a riot of Dia de los Muertos color, and launched a statewide restaurant family in 2011.
$$ Checked Sep 2026
Bars & Gastropubs Old Town
Goodwood Tavern
A dim, wood-covered pub at 7330 E Stetson Dr that chef Aaron May built out of the old Shotgun Betty's in the mid-2010s and that still runs as the Entertainment District's comfortable middle ground: pub food, brats and bison, pool and darts, big-game screens and a 3-to-7 happy hour every day.
$$ Checked Oct 2026
Mexican Old Town
Los Olivos Mexican Patio
The Corral family's adobe landmark has fed Old Town Scottsdale since the late 1940s — Sonoran enchiladas, margaritas, and a sculpted folk-art facade that's been a rite of passage for first-time visitors for nearly 80 years.
$$ Checked Sep 2026
Pizza Downtown & 5th Ave
Old Town Pizza
A small New York-style pizza shop on Fifth Avenue — classic thin pies, thick Sicilian squares, grandma-style pans, calzones and strombolis — that fills the one gap Old Town's chef-driven 5th Avenue block never bothered with: a cheap, fast, honest slice.
$ Checked Oct 2026
Farm & Healthy Downtown & 5th Ave
Original ChopShop
Ryan and Caitlin Jocque opened this Old Town juice-and-bowl shop on 5th Avenue in 2013, betting early on the fast-casual healthy wave — the chain it spawned now spans Arizona and Texas, but the original still feeds Old Town daily.
$ Checked Sep 2026
Dessert Old Town
The Sugar Bowl
A shocking-pink ice cream parlor that has anchored Scottsdale Road since 1958, immortalized in hundreds of Family Circus cartoons and still serving hot fudge sundaes to the grandchildren of its first customers.
$ Checked Sep 2026
Shopping
All stores and centers →Jewelry Downtown & 5th Ave
Giving Bracelets
Giving Bracelets is the small Fifth Avenue shop next door to Cartel Coffee where wrap bracelets of leather, natural stone and metal are made in-house and ten percent of every purchase goes to CASA programs for children in foster care. Arizona native Lesa Sawyer started it after the 2008 recession closed the door on her handbag business, turning the leftover leather into bracelets. It grew from farmers markets into wholesale and then into this storefront, and it is the easiest gift on the street to feel good about.
$$ Checked Oct 2026
Event Venue Downtown & 5th Ave
Mini Social
Mini Social is the event room the Zoolikins family runs next door to their children's boutique on the Fifth Avenue curve: 2,700 square feet of white brick, polished concrete and big windows that seats up to fifty, rents by the hour from three-hour weekday blocks to whole weekends, and comes with a kitchen, a 70-inch television, speakers, a wall of furniture and two owners who will do the balloons, the florals and the bar if you ask. It opened in 2017 as a play café for parents with toddlers, closed in the pandemic, and came back in 2021 as the venue Old Town did not have for the baby shower, the first birthday, the bridal brunch, the thirty-guest wedding and the office off-site that are too big for a living room and too small for a resort.
$$ Checked Oct 2026
Children's Boutique Downtown & 5th Ave
Zoolikins
Zoolikins is the mother-owned children's boutique on the curve of Fifth Avenue that opened in 2010 as a cloth-diaper and earth-friendly baby shop and grew into the kids' store of downtown Scottsdale: Jellycat and Palm Pals plush, wooden toys, picture books, Arizona-themed onesies and a 'Desert Finds' shelf built for visitors with a grandchild to buy for. It shares a wall with Mini Social, the event venue the same family runs next door, and it is the one door on the avenue where a stroller is the expected vehicle.
$$ Checked Oct 2026
The ones we get asked
The short version of all four answers: we go a lot, we pay our own way, we keep no scoresheet, and we take the seal back when a place stops being the place.
How the rest of the site is written, and what it will never do, is on the about page; where the money comes from is on the disclosure page.
How does a place get the seal?
By being somewhere we have gone back to, on our own time and our own dime, for years, and would send a friend to without a second thought. There is no application, no nomination form and no inspection. We notice we keep recommending a place in conversation, and eventually the site catches up.
What are the criteria?
There are none, deliberately. A scoring rubric would make a dive bar compete with a resort spa on the same sheet, and both would lose. The seal marks the places where the whole experience lands: the welcome, the room, the thing you order every time, how it holds up on a Tuesday in August. Call it vibes. We would only add that the vibes are good.
Can a business buy, apply for or sponsor one?
No. Nothing on this site is for sale except the affiliate links, which are disclosed where they appear and have no bearing on the seal. A resort with a booking link and a resort without one are judged the same way, which is to say not judged at all, just visited a lot.
Is it permanent?
No. Places change hands, chefs leave, a patio gets a television. When the thing that earned the seal goes, the seal goes with it, and the page stays with an honest update. A place that closes keeps its guide as local history and loses the seal the same day.