Why he matters
For more than forty years Tomaso Maggiore was the Valley’s reference point for formal Italian cooking. His Tomaso’s on the Camelback Corridor, open since 1977, was the room where many diners first saw what serious Italian service looked like, and the model for dozens of restaurants he opened after it. It sat on the Phoenix side of the line, but his influence crossed it.
His bigger Scottsdale legacy is a family business. The Maggiore Group he founded with his son Joey in 2005 turned out Hash Kitchen, the Gainey Village brunch room that changed how Scottsdale does weekend mornings, and late in his career he opened a trattoria of his own on north Scottsdale Road. His daughter runs a restaurant in that room today.
Where to find his mark today
Hash Kitchen. The original, at the Shops at Gainey Village, opened in 2015 and grew into the group’s best-known brand.
The Italian Daughter. At 23655 N Scottsdale Road in north Scottsdale, in the space he opened as Tomaso’s When in Rome in 2017.
Two generations, two kinds of restaurant
The contrast is the story. Tomaso’s ran on tableside Caesar salad and the white-tablecloth manners of the 1970s. Hash Kitchen, opened by Joey and Cristina Maggiore with partner Flora Tersigni in July 2015, runs on a 50-topping Bloody Mary bar, weekend DJs and cereal-crusted French toast. The two look nothing alike, but Joey grew up in his father’s kitchens, and the cooking under the spectacle is serious.
When Maggiore opened Tomaso’s When in Rome in 2017, he went back to his own style: a 5,000-square-foot room seating 180, Roman columns and murals, cacio e pepe and saltimbocca. After a renovation it reopened as Tomaso’s Italian Kitchen in 2019. The 2010s chapter covers the north Scottsdale it opened into.
The full story
Tomaso Maggiore was born and raised in Sicily and came to the United States as a young man, working in New York City restaurants before heading west. In September 1977 he and his wife, Patricia, opened Tomaso’s Italian Restaurant on the Camelback Corridor. It won awards, lasted for decades, and made his name. Over the next forty years he launched more than 50 restaurants in Arizona and California and even bottled his own Sicilian red.
In 2005 he and his son Joey founded The Maggiore Group. Its restaurants included Tommy V’s Osteria, Notorious Burgers, The Sicilian Butcher and The Sicilian Baker, and in 2015 Hash Kitchen at Gainey Village, which grew into a multi-state brand. The group’s newer concepts all descend from that Gainey original.
On June 14, 2017, he opened Tomaso’s When in Rome at the Pinnacle of Scottsdale shopping center, near Scottsdale and Pinnacle Peak roads, a trattoria built around Roman cooking. On September 18, 2019, it reopened as Tomaso’s Italian Kitchen, a more casual version of the original.
Maggiore died of lung cancer in February 2021, at 73. His obituaries give no exact birth date, and this page leaves the field empty rather than guess. In April his daughter, Melissa Maggiore Meyer, opened The Italian Daughter in the north Scottsdale space as a tribute to him, while Joey carried on The Maggiore Group. His career began in Phoenix, but by the new-west era his children were running restaurants of their own along Scottsdale Road.