Why he matters
In the mid-1990s, eating out in Old Town mostly meant steaks, red sauce and margaritas. Peter Kasperski changed that from a back street. Stetson Drive was the service lane behind Fifth Avenue, backing onto a fenced canal, and in 1997 he opened Cowboy Ciao there. Instead of moving somewhere better once it worked, he kept building on the same block, and for about a decade Stetson Drive was the most inventive dining address in Arizona.
His other contribution was wine. Kasperski’s lists ran to thousands of labels, won Wine Spectator awards, and were written to be fun rather than intimidating. The grape shot, a small pour served like a shot so a table could try six wines, is the idea people still mention.
Where to find his mark today
The block. Southbridge grew up around his restaurant row. Cowboy Ciao and Kazimierz World Wine Bar are closed, but their addresses are still restaurants.
The salad. Citizen Public House in Old Town still serves the Stetson chopped salad as the Original Chop.
The closed rooms. Sea Saw and Digestif tell the rest of the Stetson story.
A block, not a restaurant
Cowboy Ciao was the anchor. Chef Bernie Kantak’s Stetson chopped salad, arranged in rows and tossed at the table, became the dish every Valley menu copied. Sea Saw, which opened in 2002, put Nobuo Fukuda’s Japanese tasting menus in a room of about 28 seats and paired them with wine instead of sake. Kazimierz, the “Kaz Bar,” hid behind Cowboy Ciao with an unmarked door and a list of roughly 3,000 wines. In 2008 Digestif brought chef Payton Curry’s house-cured salumi and one of the Valley’s first serious cocktail programs to the new SouthBridge development.
The cluster also trained people. Kantak went on to Citizen Public House, pastry chef Country Velador made her name in the Stetson rooms, and Fukuda won a James Beard Award at Sea Saw. The 2000s chapter covers the Old Town that surrounded them.
The full story
Peter Kasperski started washing dishes at 12 and came to the Valley in 1979, at 21. His first job here was behind a bar in Scottsdale. In 1997, after years in other people’s restaurants, he opened Cowboy Ciao at 7133 E Stetson Drive, pairing cowboy kitsch with what the menu called “modern American with global influences.” He also ran Harry & Steve’s Chicago Grill, a Cubs fans’ sports bar in Mesa, and wrote wine columns for Phoenix magazine.
Through the late 1990s and the 2000s he turned the street into a cluster: Sea Saw beside Cowboy Ciao, Kazimierz behind it, and Digestif across the way in SouthBridge. The recession cut the ambitious ones first. Sea Saw and Digestif both closed in 2009, and SouthBridge spent its first decade losing tenants.
The flagship lasted longer. Kasperski’s group filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2012 and again in 2017, carrying roughly $1.6 million in tax debt. On October 16, 2018, the case converted to Chapter 7 liquidation, and Cowboy Ciao and Kazimierz closed that same day after 21 and 15 years. New owners reopened the Kazimierz space in 2019 under its old name.
Kasperski came back in December 2020 with Character, a small restaurant on Roosevelt Row in downtown Phoenix, opened with mixologist Richie Moe III; it closed in 2021. In a Phoenix magazine profile that year he talked plainly about the bankruptcies and about giving up drinking. The block he built belongs to the resort-metropolis era, and it showed that Old Town could support independent, chef-driven restaurants, which most of Old Town’s newer dining depends on.