Why he matters
Plenty of celebrity chefs have licensed their names to Scottsdale hotel restaurants. Scott Conant did something rarer: he moved here. The New York chef, a James Beard winner for L’Impero and for years one of the judges on Food Network’s Chopped, has owned a home in Arizona since 2016, and for most of the time since he cooked in the Valley rather than lending it a logo.
His Scottsdale chapter is The Americano, the Italian steakhouse on north Scottsdale Road whose kitchen he led from 2020 until 2024. He left it, and Phoenix’s Mora Italian, in May 2024, and the people who search for “Scott Conant Scottsdale” today are looking for a restaurant that is no longer his. As of October 2026 his food is in Tempe.
Where to find his mark today
The Americano. Still open at 17797 N Scottsdale Road, now under Beau MacMillan, with Conant’s steakhouse-plus-pasta template largely intact.
Tell Your Friends. The underground jazz lounge beneath The Americano, which he helped plan before he left.
Roman God of Fire. His Roman-style restaurant at 52 E Rio Salado Parkway in Tempe, opened August 2026.
The Americano years
The Americano opened in February 2020 with restaurateur Stefano Fabbri running it. Conant had been part of the concept’s development and stepped back when his filming schedule collided with the opening; when the pandemic grounded him in Scottsdale that spring, he came back, and later that year his SC Culinary team and Creation Hospitality, led by Bob Agahi and David Sellers, took over the restaurant’s ownership and operation with Conant running the kitchen. His menu was the one the room is still known for: prime and American Wagyu steaks, house-made pasta, Italian crudi, and about 200 wines including his own SC label.
It made north Scottsdale a destination in a way few restaurants on that stretch of the Princess and WestWorld corridor had managed. In late 2023 Creation and Beau MacMillan’s Clive Collective announced Tell Your Friends, a 52-seat lounge in the space below, with both chefs involved.
The handoff
On May 2, 2024, Creation Hospitality announced that Conant was stepping away and that MacMillan would take over The Americano, Mora and the soon-to-open Tell Your Friends. Conant said he was confident handing over the reins, kept The Americano by Scott Conant in Atlanta, and said his family would stay in Scottsdale. Mora closed less than three months later, after seven years. For about two years he had no Valley restaurant, working instead on projects like a Martone Street tomato sauce sold through Scottsdale-based Sprouts.
The full story
Conant built his name in New York. L’Impero won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in 2003, he left it in 2007, and his Food Network work, above all as a judge on Chopped, made him one of the most recognizable Italian chefs on American television.
He bought a home in Arizona in 2016. Mora Italian, on Seventh Street in Phoenix, followed in 2017 with Conant as chef; it closed for renovation in the summer of 2020 and reopened in April 2021. The Americano opened in north Scottsdale in February 2020, and by the end of that year he was running its kitchen. A second Americano opened later in the InterContinental Buckhead in Atlanta, which he still runs.
After the 2024 handoff the Valley lost track of him as a restaurateur until 2026. Pretty Decent Concepts, the group behind Wren & Wolf and Carry On, approached him about a Roman-inspired menu, and Roman God of Fire opened in August 2026 at 52 E Rio Salado Parkway in Tempe: 8,000 square feet of statues and arches, pizza and breads from a wood oven, supplì, linguine alle vongole, tonnarelli carbonara and squid-ink spaghetti with lobster. That puts his current cooking on the Tempe side of the Salt River rather than in Scottsdale.
His Scottsdale legacy is the template he left at The Americano and the idea, picked up by Luna by Giada at Fashion Square in 2024, that a Food Network name can anchor a serious Scottsdale dining room. This page does not give his birth year: the sources it could check disagree or omit it.