Why it matters
For four decades the biggest food event in Scottsdale was a fundraiser run by volunteers. The Scottsdale League for the Arts started in 1978 as the Scottsdale Men’s League, a group of local businessmen raising money for the city’s three-year-old Center for the Arts. Their fundraiser was a food event. It became the Scottsdale Culinary Festival: by 2000 a week of dinners, tastings, cooking demonstrations and a two-day picnic each April that the League said drew more than 60,000 people. The money went first to the Center, then from 1992 to arts groups and arts-education programs across the Valley.
It is also a cautionary story. The festival shrank through the 2010s, the League’s revenue fell from more than $1 million a year to almost nothing, and in 2020 it handed the festival to Scottsdale Arts. The pandemic postponed that first edition and it never came back. As of this writing (fall 2026), our festival page describes an event that has not been held since April 2019.
Where to find it today
Nowhere, as an active organization. The League’s website has not changed since 2021, when it said it looked forward “to returning to the Arizona culinary scene in 2023.” Its last IRS return covers the year ending July 2021. The festival’s old domain now forwards to Scottsdale Arts. What remains is the lawn: the Scottsdale Civic Center, where the festival’s picnic and tasting days were held, now redesigned and programmed by Scottsdale Arts.
How it started
The Scottsdale Center for the Arts opened on October 23, 1975, in Bennie Gonzales’s building on the Civic Center, cleared from the barrio described in The Barrio Under the Civic Center. The city owned and ran it, with a volunteer support group, the Scottsdale Arts Center Association, raising money alongside. In 1978 a group of Scottsdale businessmen formed a second support group, the Scottsdale Men’s League. In the League’s own words, the festival was started “as a way to raise funds for capital improvements needed at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts facility,” and that “was the organization’s primary goal for 15 years.” Glenn Azzari, its president in 2019, put it more simply: “It was started 41 years ago by a group of gentlemen who were just trying to create a fundraiser.”
Who those gentlemen were is not in any source we found. Neither is the exact year of the first festival. The League says 1978, but its own numbering, which had the 26th festival in 2004 and the 42nd in 2020, counts from 1979.
The IRS recognized the League as a tax-exempt charity in August 1981.
The decisions that locked it in
Food, not a ball. Arts support groups usually raise money with galas. The Men’s League chose a food event. By 2000 the festival ran five days in April, and by the mid-2000s it included a black-tie progressive dinner, reserve wine tastings, a culinary-student awards dinner, cookbook authors’ evenings, cooking demonstrations by national chefs and the two-day Great Arizona Picnic. The League said it had the support of more than 100 restaurants, resorts and caterers. The choice tied the League’s budget to one event and to the goodwill of the restaurant industry.
Women, 1988. Ten years in, the League “opened its membership rolls to women and became the Scottsdale League for the Arts.” It capped active membership at 60, and members had to serve on at least one festival committee. The Valley’s best-known booster clubs, the Charros and the Thunderbirds, had still never admitted a woman as of the latest reporting. By the 2000s women were serving as presidents of the League.
From the Center’s fund to a grant-maker, 1992 and 2002. After about 15 years of capital gifts, the Center had become part of the city’s arts system, and from 1987 the Scottsdale Cultural Council ran it. In 1992 the League began a grant program. At first the money went to the Cultural Council’s education programs, the Scottsdale Arts in Education Council and scholarships for culinary students. In 2002 it opened competitive grants to other nonprofits. Its 2008–09 list ran to 47 recipients, from the Phoenix Symphony and the Heard Museum to Scottsdale Artists’ School, the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Scottsdale and Scottsdale Training & Rehabilitation Services. In 2018 the newest grantee was the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, for summer camp scholarships at Taliesin West.
Paid staff. In the 2000s the festival hired an event director and the League paid general managers. In fiscal 2012 it reported about $78,000 in executive compensation on about $1.05 million in revenue. That made a bigger festival possible, and it put a payroll on a volunteer organization’s books.
Letting go, 2020. For 2020, the League joined Scottsdale Arts and the Scottsdale event company R Entertainment, which produces the Arizona Taco Festival, in what the festival site called “the first year of the event under new leadership.” The new festival was a one-day “lifestyle” event set for April 18, 2020, “under the direction of Scottsdale Arts.” Azzari called it the festival’s “42-year legacy” continuing “in a modernized format.”
The years it nearly ended
The decline shows in the League’s IRS filings and in its own attendance claims. The League reported more than 60,000 visitors in 2000, more than 50,000 in 2006 and nearly 40,000 in 2011. In 2019 Azzari said “nearly 30,000,” with about 35 restaurants. Revenue ran about $1.05 million to $1.2 million a year in fiscal 2012 through 2014, then dropped to about $360,000 in 2015 and 2016, $249,000 in 2017 and $324,000 in 2018. Net assets fell from about $512,000 in 2011 to about $123,000 in 2018. In 2018 the League said it raised “just over $100,000” for its grant program, and it announced $87,000 in grants to 25 organizations.
The 2019 festival went ahead around a construction site, the start of the Civic Center’s rebuilding. The League hung posters from all 41 years on the bridges over the work. It was the last festival the League produced. The 2020 handoff was in effect the end: COVID-19 postponed the April 18 date, the festival site was still showing “EVENT POSTPONED” in 2022, and by September 2023 it said the event “will not be returning in 2023.” The League’s revenue was about $7,300 in fiscal 2020 and $2,420 in fiscal 2021, with about $66,000 in net assets left.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The Men’s League set out to raise capital money for one building. It grew into a Valley-wide arts funder with a festival it billed, at its height, as one of the premier culinary events in the United States. That is expansion by any measure: from one beneficiary to dozens, and from a fundraiser to a week-long production with paid staff. The League did it on its own initiative, and arts and culinary students across the Valley got the benefit.
Today it does nothing that is on the public record. Its last stated purpose is the one on its 2021 website: to support “the arts through culinary fundraisers.” Whether it has formally dissolved, and what became of its remaining assets, is not public.
Who the record leaves out
The founders. A 1978 men’s league that became a 40-year institution left no list of the men who started it in any source we found.
The restaurants and their workers. The festival ran on donated food and on kitchen and service staff working hot April weekends for exposure. The League published sponsor directories and chef lineups, but not what participation cost a restaurant or what its staff were paid.
The volunteers. The League counted on members and outside volunteers to run a week of events. Their numbers and hours were never published.
The grantees. Lists of recipients survive for a handful of years. The amounts given to each, and what the money did, are mostly not public.
What it didn’t have to become
The League didn’t have to become a festival company. In 1987 the city created the Scottsdale Cultural Council to run the Center and raise private money for it. A men’s league founded to fund that building could reasonably have folded into the new council’s donor base, as the Scottsdale Arts Center Association did in 1988. Instead it went its own way, opened its doors to women, and spent thirty years giving money to arts groups all over the Valley.
That independence was the League’s strength. It also meant that when the festival weakened, the League weakened with it: in 2019 its president said the festival brought in 60 to 70 percent of the money the League raised each year. When it gave up the festival in 2020, it went back where it started, to the Center’s operator on the Civic Center. A fundraiser started in 1978 for the Center for the Arts ended with that same organization.