What is Akamaru Japanese Restaurant?
Akamaru is the small, chef-owned Japanese restaurant that Chef Hiro and his wife opened in October 2025 at 15689 N Hayden Road, Suite 126, in the Sonora Village shopping center at Hayden Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, on the north edge of the Airpark. The unit had been a Duck Donuts. It is not a big room: an L-shaped counter faces an open kitchen, and the owners chose it, by their own account, because it already had a hood, gas lines and a grease trap and sat a little back from the road in a center where the rent and the noise were lower than at the Quarter.
The chef’s full name has not appeared in print. What his wife wrote on the restaurant’s blog before it opened is this: he started at an izakaya in Japan washing dishes and cleaning, earned his way into the kitchen and learned by watching rather than from recipes; after emigrating more than a decade ago he took a small cooking class in New York from a retired Japanese master chef, then worked as a sushi chef at high-end omakase restaurants in Manhattan. A friend offered him a ramen shop to co-launch in Arizona. The visions clashed, the partnership fell apart, the restaurant never opened, and the couple found they liked Arizona and could not find Japanese food they wanted to eat at a price they wanted to pay. So they opened their own, “just one couple, one kitchen,” with no investors and no franchise.
The format is two restaurants in one unit. From 11 to 3, Akamaru is a lunch counter for onigirazu, the Japanese convenience-store rice sandwich wrapped in nori, and donburi rice bowls, with matcha and hojicha lattes. From 5 to 9 it turns into an izakaya: rotating sashimi, bluefin, uni, takoyaki, karaage, three-hour braised pork belly, miso black cod, Japanese craft beer, sake and shochu. What Now Phoenix called the concept “Tokyo-meets-New York” when it reported the liquor license in August 2025, and that is accurate enough.
It is for the Airpark’s office lunch crowd and for the neighborhoods north of the 101 that have had sushi bars but no izakaya. Our verdict: the best cheap Japanese lunch in North Scottsdale, and a sincere small-plates dinner cooked by the owner, in a donut shop by a Best Buy.
Ordering at Akamaru
Lunch is the rice sandwich. The onigirazu are built to order and priced $12.50 to $13.50: karaage (Japanese fried chicken, spicy mayo, lettuce, $13), chashu (soy-garlic braised pork belly with a seasoned soft-boiled egg, $13.50), yakiniku beef in soy and sesame ($13.50), cooked salmon and avocado ($12.50) and unagi with cucumber ($13.50). The donburi are the other half of the board: unagi don ($19.50), gyu don of soy-marinated beef and onion ($18.95), chashu don with ajitsuke tamago ($18.50), oyako don ($18.50), a rotating eight-piece sashimi don with ikura ($35) and the uni and ikura don ($42). Hand rolls run $12 to $18.
Dinner is the izakaya. The cold side is a rotating sashimi selection prepared daily, bluefin akami (three pieces, $15) and toro (two pieces, $18), uni ($18), a yellowtail carpaccio with serrano and yuzu ($15), oysters two ways ($12), ika mentaiko and stuffed baby squid ($8 each). The hot side is chicken karaage ($12), ebi mayo ($16), takoyaki from the Tsukiji Gindaco recipe ($8.50), buta kakuni, pork belly braised three hours with mustard ($16), a soft-shell crab bun ($10.50), a chashu bun ($9.50), chashu fried rice ($16.50) and the gindara miso yaki, miso-marinated black cod ($33), which is the dish to build the table around. A daily special is cooked on the line by Chef Hiro in limited quantities; ask what it is before you order anything else.
Drink Japanese. The beer list is the surprise: Echigo’s Koshihikari rice lager ($8.50), a Kyoto white yuzu ale ($12.50), a Kyoto matcha IPA ($14.50) and a Wakayama sansho ale ($13.50). Sake is sold by the bottle, from a $30 Otokoyama junmai through Kubota Manjyu ($62) to a $142 Nabeshima junmai daiginjo; there is Iichiko shochu ($6) and Kumano whisky ($19). Wednesday is sake night, 30 percent off sake and Japanese beer. The teas are good and cheap: gyokuro, sobacha and a yuzu matcha kukicha at $4, a hojicha latte at $5.75.
Timing and the room. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 11 to 3 and 5 to 9, closed Monday, with a two-hour break in between; the restaurant’s Instagram has advertised later weekend closings, so call. The “Reserve a table” button on the website goes to DoorDash, and reviewers recommend booking dinner because the room is small. Sit at the counter. Parking is the Sonora Village lot; the unit is in the row with Paradise Valley Burger Company, Saigon District and bb.q Chicken, not on the Hayden frontage. Do not confuse it with Hiro Sushi on 90th Street, a different restaurant with a different Hiro.
The donut shop that became an izakaya
Sonora Village is the kind of center that explains the Airpark. Anchored by Best Buy and Staples at Hayden and Frank Lloyd Wright and owned by YAM Properties, it serves the office parks of the Airpark by day and the subdivisions east of Hayden by night, and its restaurant row has been getting more interesting: Wildflower, Oregano’s and O.H.S.O. for years, then Paradise Valley Burger Company in October 2024, then in late 2025 Saigon District, Veda Indian Cuisine and bb.q Chicken. When AZ Big Media rounded up the newest tenants in February 2026, YAM said the center was 93 percent leased.
Akamaru is the smallest of those tenants and the only one owned by the people cooking in it. The record on it is unusual for a strip-center restaurant because the owners wrote most of it themselves. What Now Phoenix picked up the liquor-license application on August 19, 2025, and reported an October target. On August 31 the restaurant’s blog published “Why We Started Akamaru,” the story of the izakaya dishwasher who became a Manhattan omakase chef, and on September 2 “Why We Chose This Location,” which explains the former Duck Donuts in terms of ventilation and gas lines and ends: “We believed if the food was good enough, people would come.” A reply the owners posted on Yelp gives a soft opening of Saturday, October 18; Mouth by Southwest reported the restaurant open on November 16, 2025.
What the record does not say is the chef’s surname, the seat count, or anything from a professional critic; by October 2026 the coverage was two announcement items, a Sonora Village roundup and about sixty Yelp reviews averaging 4.6 stars that praise the service and the fresh-grated wasabi.
The thing to notice is the model. North Scottsdale’s Japanese restaurants of the 2020s have mostly been big: Kuza’s robata room on Scottsdale Road, Tomu-San at DC Ranch, the Quarter’s sushi bars. Akamaru is the opposite, a Tokyo neighborhood format (lunch counter by day, izakaya by night) in 1,000-odd square feet with a two-hour break in the afternoon, priced so that the uni don at $42 is the most expensive thing on the board. The nearest thing in spirit is Shinbay, which is a very different price, and the old counter sushi bars of Scottsdale Road, most of which are gone.
Honest assessment: Akamaru is a small, honest, owner-run restaurant doing two things well, and the lunch is the one you will come back for. The dinner menu is short and the room is cramped and there is no sushi bar in the omakase sense, so do not come expecting Chef Hiro’s Manhattan résumé on a plate; come for the karaage, the kakuni and the beer list. If it survives its first two summers, Sonora Village will have the neighborhood izakaya that the Airpark never had.