What is Arrivederci Ristorante?
Drive a mile south from Kierland Commons on Scottsdale Road, turn east on Thunderbird, and the restaurant economy changes: the valets vanish, the parking is free, and the Italian place on the corner has been there since before the mall existed.
Arrivederci Ristorante opened in 1996 at 7101 E Thunderbird Road and has done the same thing ever since — from-scratch southern Italian cooking, served by a family, in a room that is white-tablecloth-casual in the specific way of 1990s Scottsdale. The founder learned to cook at home in a small Italian village, and the restaurant now describes its menu as the flavors of the Amalfi Coast: the veal ossobuco over risotto alla milanese that is the kitchen’s signature, pollo al limone, homemade ravioli caprese and a fettuccine Alfredo that regulars measure other Alfredos against.
It is not a scene and never tried to be one. It is the restaurant where a North Scottsdale family has its anniversary dinner, where the office on Thunderbird books its holiday lunch, where the couple who bought their house in 1998 still sit at the same table on Sundays. A second Arrivederci on Pinnacle Peak Road served the far north for a while and has since closed; the Thunderbird room is the original and the one that counts.
The honest verdict: Arrivederci is not the best Italian restaurant in Scottsdale — that argument runs through Marcellino and Veneto Trattoria — but it may be the best value in the north half of the city for a proper sit-down Italian dinner, and it has outlived nearly every neighbor that opened with it.
Ordering like a Thunderbird regular
Ossobuco first, menu second. The braised veal shank over saffron risotto is the dish the kitchen is proudest of and the one it can run out of on a busy Saturday. If it’s on your mind, say so when you sit down. It’s the most expensive plate in the room, and it is still priced well under what a Kierland steakhouse charges for a starter and a side.
Share the homemade pasta. The ravioli caprese — ricotta, parmesan and mozzarella in fresh pasta — is the right table starter, and the fettuccine Alfredo is the right dish for whoever at the table doesn’t want to think. The pollo al limone is the regulars’ default main: chicken breast, lemon, butter, done properly, no reinvention.
Lunch is the neighborhood’s secret. Arrivederci runs a real lunch service with its own menu, and the Thunderbird and Airpark office crowd knows it. The room is calmer, the prices drop, and the pasta is the same. It is one of the few sit-down Italian lunches in North Scottsdale that isn’t a chain.
Book the weekend, walk the weeknight. The room is mid-sized and the neighborhood treats it as its occasion restaurant, so Friday and Saturday nights from January to April fill. Tuesday through Thursday, walk in. The bar is a fine solo-diner seat.
Logistics. Free strip-center parking at the door — the whole point of being a mile south of Scottsdale Quarter. Dress is whatever you wore to the Quarter. Expect level-two pricing: a couple with a bottle of wine, two pastas and a shared dessert will land at roughly what one Kierland entrée and a cocktail costs. That arithmetic is the restaurant’s business model and its loyalty program.
The corner that predates the mall
When Arrivederci opened in 1996, the Thunderbird-and-Scottsdale-Road corridor was the quiet edge of a growing city. Kierland Commons had not been built; Scottsdale Quarter was a decade away; the Airpark was still mostly hangars and light industry. The family Italian restaurant was the natural genre for the era — the same years that produced Veneto Trattoria in Hilton Village and Marcellino in its first Old Town incarnation — and Arrivederci took the form most Scottsdale diners of the 1990s wanted: familiar dishes, generous portions, a family at the door.
What changed was everything around it. Kierland Commons arrived in the early 2000s and brought North Italia, the polished-casual Italian that would define the next twenty years of Scottsdale pasta. Scottsdale Quarter followed with its own roster. The corridor became a destination, rents climbed, and the independent rooms of the 1990s mostly closed or fled. Arrivederci did neither. It stayed a mile south, kept its lot and its prices, and became the place the neighborhood went when it didn’t want the mall.
The expansion to Pinnacle Peak Road was the family’s one bet on growth, serving the far-north subdivisions that filled in through the 2000s. It has since closed, which says more about the far north’s restaurant economics than about the cooking. The Thunderbird original absorbed the regulars and carried on.
Honest assessment: Arrivederci is old-school in ways that cut both directions. The Alfredo is rich, the ossobuco is big, the room is not chasing a design award, and a diner who wants the tasting-menu ambition of the modern Italian rooms will find it comfortable rather than exciting. But thirty years on one corner, family-run, a mile from the most expensive dining real estate in North Scottsdale, is its own kind of achievement — the kind that Avanti and the other Italian institutions of an earlier Scottsdale ultimately couldn’t sustain.