What it’s actually like
South Scottsdale is the part of the city that looks like a real place. The houses are single-story ranches from the 1950s and 60s, the streets run in a grid, the trees are old, and nobody is trying to sell you a lifestyle. It is also where a large share of the people who work in Old Town live, which tells you most of what you need to know.
The spine is Scottsdale Road south of Osborn, a strip of unglamorous storefronts hiding some of the best kitchens in the city. McDowell Road crosses it near the southern end; for decades this was the Motor Mile, and at Scottsdale Road it was Los Arcos Mall, which died in the late 1990s and came back as SkySong, ASU’s innovation center under a giant white shade sail. The apartments and offices that followed have changed the corridor more than any other part of Scottsdale in twenty years, but turn one block into the neighborhoods and it is still 1962.
The eastern edge is the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, which begins here at Vista del Camino Park and runs north through Eldorado Park, the city’s first community park and the prototype for the whole system. The southern edge at McKellips Road is Tempe, and Papago Park’s red buttes are a five-minute drive.
Where to eat and drink
This is where I eat when I am paying.
The Salt Cellar has been underground on Hayden Road since 1971; you descend three flights into a room that has not changed, and the crab legs are the point. Los Sombreros does interior Mexican in a 1930s house on Scottsdale Road with a twinkle-lit patio that still feels like a secret after thirty years. DeFalco’s is the Italian grocery-deli the same family has run since 1972. Atlas Bistro is a tasting-menu room in a strip mall with no corkage and a wine shop next door, which is the best deal in Scottsdale fine dining and everyone who knows about it would prefer you not.
Chula Seafood at Hayden and Roosevelt sells swordfish off the family’s own boat. Fate Brewing anchors the south Scottsdale Road beer scene with medal-winning house beers and wood-fired pizza. Carlsbad Tavern, up on Hayden, has been serving New Mexican green chile in a bat cave since 1995 and feeds the industry after midnight.
What is gone matters here too. Papago Brewing taught Arizona craft beer from a Papago Plaza storefront until the plaza was razed in 2019. Avanti was the black-lacquer supper club on Scottsdale Road for thirty-six years. Bobby McGee’s served dinner in costume, and Farrell’s delivered the Zoo on a stretcher with sirens. South Scottsdale has always been where the Valley’s oddest restaurants opened.
Getting there and parking
South Scottsdale is the closest part of the city to the airport: the 202 east to Scottsdale Road or the 101, then north, typically fifteen minutes. From Old Town, it is straight south on Scottsdale, Hayden or Miller. From Tempe, McKellips or McDowell bring you in from the west and south.
Parking is a non-issue. Every restaurant on this list has its own lot or a strip-mall lot in front of it; the parks have lots off Miller, Hayden and Roosevelt. The only place you will think about parking is SkySong, which has a garage.
The better way in is the Greenbelt. From Old Town, drop onto the path near the Thomas Road bike stop and ride south; the underpasses at Thomas, McDowell and the rest mean you never wait at a light. The 11-mile Greenbelt cruise note covers the route.
When to go
South Scottsdale has no tourist season, which is its advantage. Restaurants that require reservations in Old Town in March are walk-ins here. The parks are at their best from October through April: the Eldorado and Vista del Camino lakes are stocked with trout in the cool months and catfish in the warm ones, the splash pads at Paiute and Chesnutt run when it is hot, and the Greenbelt is rideable at any hour from November to March.
Summer here is summer everywhere in the Valley, but this district handles it better than the resort corridor: the pool at Eldorado is heated year-round and the shade trees are sixty years old. August mornings on the Greenbelt before seven are genuinely pleasant. Spring training in March spills over from Scottsdale Stadium, ten minutes north, and the post-game crowd finds its way to Hayden Road.
How it got this way
This was farmland and then, after the war, the first big subdivisions. The 1950s and 1960s built the ranch-house grid almost all at once, for the families working at the Motorola plant on McDowell Road and the Phoenix side of the line. McDowell Road became the Motor Mile because it was the main road to Phoenix and had the frontage; Los Arcos Mall opened at the end of the 1960s as the neighborhood’s own shopping center.
The Indian Bend Wash cut through it all, flooding every monsoon. When the Army Corps proposed a concrete channel in the 1960s, Scottsdale countered with parks, and the first one — Eldorado, 1967 — was built here. The Greenbelt that grew from it is the reason the south side has more lake-and-lawn acreage per resident than anywhere else in the city.
The mall died in the late 1990s, the dealerships thinned out, and for a decade the corridor looked finished. SkySong’s opening in the late 2000s restarted it. The apartments and mid-rise offices of the 2010s and 2020s along McDowell are the visible result; the ranch houses behind them, now with young families and gray-water citrus trees, are the invisible one.
Nearby
Old Town begins at Osborn Road, ten minutes north by bike. Central Scottsdale and the Greenbelt is where the wash path leads once you pass Chaparral Road. East across the 101 is Talking Stick and the Salt River, with the casino and the spring-training complex.