What is Anhelo?
Anhelo means “longing” or “desire” in Spanish, and the restaurant at the corner of Goldwater Boulevard and First Avenue is built to make you feel it before you reach the door. A brick path winds through shade trees and flowering beds, past a fountain and lanterns, and hidden speakers in the branches play birdsong. The building behind it is small: a dining room, a private dining room, a bar and a wine room, about 38 seats inside and a garden patio.
It’s the second home of a restaurant that made its name in downtown Phoenix. Chef and owner Ivan Jacobo, born in Mexico and raised in Goodyear, opened Anhelo in 2021 on the ground floor of the Orpheum Lofts, where it became known for exacting plating, polished service and a Wine Spectator-recognized wine list. In late 2024 he announced the move to Scottsdale, closed downtown on November 23 and handed that space to his more relaxed restaurant, Flour & Thyme. The new Anhelo, in a building put up for it, opened on July 25, 2025. Jacobo called it his “dream restaurant.”
Dinner is built around tasting menus. At the opening there were three: a five-course Petit menu, a nine-course Chef’s Tasting and the 11-course Grand Tasting, which ends with a tableside cheese cart. Jacobo says the Petit menu comes from his own upbringing: growing up, he would never have considered a tasting-menu restaurant, and he wanted a price that let people try one.
That puts Anhelo in unusual company. Within a few blocks are Cafe Monarch, Old Town’s most famous prix fixe, and Gio Osso’s Virtù Honest Craft. Few neighborhoods in the Valley have this many serious special-occasion dining rooms this close together.
Booking, ordering and the bar-seat trick
Plan a month out. The dining room is small, and when Anhelo opened in Scottsdale the reservation book opened on the last Sunday of each month for the whole of the following month. The Grand Tasting has to be booked and paid for when you reserve. Dinner runs Tuesday through Saturday; Sunday and Monday are dark. Confirm current policies with the restaurant, because the opening-season rules may have shifted.
Pick your menu by appetite and budget. At the July 2025 opening the Petit Tasting ran about $100 to $160 a person, depending on the main course, the Chef’s Tasting $250 and the Grand Tasting $350, with optional wine pairings on all three. Opening-season dishes included a foie gras pie with a pistachio crust and pomegranate caviar, kombu dry-aged kanpachi with pickled apple, trout roe and hibiscus oil, a wild mushroom and black truffle risotto using Arizona-grown mushrooms, lobster agnolotti and a dry-aged duck breast a l’orange. The menu follows the seasons, so expect changes.
Or sit at the bar. The bar is the walk-in option and the best value in the house: at opening it served dishes from the tasting menus a la carte, in tasting-size portions, so you can order three or four plates and a glass of wine instead of committing to the full evening.
Parking is easy, for Old Town. Anhelo has valet out front, and one reason Jacobo gave for the move was a parking lot, which he never had downtown. The Main Street galleries are a short walk east if you want to make an evening of it, and on Thursdays ArtWalk keeps them open late.
A downtown restaurant moves to Old Town
Ambitious chefs in metro Phoenix who want to cook a tasting menu have usually ended up either in a resort dining room or in a small independent room of their own. Jacobo took the independent route. Anhelo opened in 2021 on the ground floor of the Orpheum Lofts on Adams Street in downtown Phoenix and built its reputation there over three years, without a patio or a parking lot.
What Old Town offered was space and control. In 2024 Jacobo told Phoenix New Times that the Scottsdale site gave him “an opportunity to create a dream restaurant that any chef would die for”: a new building, a patio of real size, a garden approach and parking. He wanted the experience to start on the path to the door rather than at the table. The opening slipped from Valentine’s Day 2025 to July 25, but the building he described is the one that opened.
The location says something about Old Town’s west side. The blocks of First Avenue and Main Street between Goldwater and the Valley Ho were once mostly galleries and small offices. Over the 2010s and 2020s they gathered a cluster of chef-owned restaurants: Cafe Monarch on First Avenue, Pizzeria Virtù and Craft 64 on Main, Virtù Honest Craft at the Bespoke Inn and ZuZu at the Hotel Valley Ho. Anhelo added a tasting-menu restaurant in a building of its own.
The Phoenix side of the story continues. Flour & Thyme, the sibling that took over the Orpheum Lofts space, closed temporarily in early 2026 for plumbing repairs and a remodel, and Phoenix New Times now describes Anhelo as the “Scottsdale fine-dining establishment” at the top of Jacobo’s group. A chef who grew up in Goodyear and once wouldn’t have set foot in a tasting-menu restaurant now runs one of Old Town’s most expensive.