What is Bad Jimmy’s?
The smash burger was the Valley’s favorite cheap thrill of the early 2020s, and Bad Jimmy’s became one of its best-known names. In March 2025, chef James Piazza brought it to Scottsdale.
The Scottsdale location is at 7620 E Indian School Rd, near Miller Road on the eastern edge of Old Town, in the space that was Starlite BBQ for more than six years. Piazza started Bad Jimmy’s as a pop-up and in 2023 opened a retro-diner bar on Pierce Street in downtown Phoenix, which became one of the city’s most talked-about burger counters. Scottsdale was the first expansion; uptown Phoenix and Tempe have followed.
The menu is short on purpose. The burgers are smashed thin on a flat-top, so the edges go lacy and crisp, made with K4 Ranch Arizona beef and American cheese. Next to them are criss-cut fries, a riff on a wedge salad, rotating specials that are often smoked-then-fried wings, and soft serve finished with olive oil and salt. The bar does the same high-low trick: Miller High Life on one side, natural wines and classic cocktails on the other, with root beer and Shirley Temples for anyone not drinking.
It’s cheap by Old Town standards, quick, and fun. A couple of doors down is Merci French Cafe, which has been baking croissants in the same building since 2013.
How to do Bad Jimmy’s
Order the double. A smash burger’s flavor is in its crust, and a double gives you two crusts. The double with American cheese is the benchmark; there’s also a veggie burger. Add the criss-cut fries and, for the table, the wedge salad.
Check the special. Bad Jimmy’s runs weekly specials, and wings show up often. They’re smoked and then fried, and they’re worth getting when they appear.
Finish with soft serve. The soft serve with olive oil and flaky salt is the one dessert, and the one thing people tell their friends about.
Timing and parking. It’s open daily from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., an hour later on Friday and Saturday. It’s about half a mile east of Scottsdale Road and the bar district, so it’s more of a lunch spot or an early dinner than a stop on a bar crawl. If you’re staying downtown, it’s an easy rideshare or a long walk past the Civic Center. For more of the area’s cheap eats, see Scottsdale on a budget.
From Starlite BBQ to smash burgers
The building at 7620 E Indian School Rd has been a quiet launch pad for independent restaurants. In the late 2000s Duc and Noelle Liao opened Scratch Pastries there, the bakery that is now Merci French Cafe. In February 2018 the team behind Ocotillo in central Phoenix, chef-owner Walter Sterling with chefs Sacha and Alex Levine, beverage director David Johnson and general manager Brad Twigg, opened Starlite BBQ in a neighboring suite. It was an upscale smokehouse with a sleek industrial room, meats smoked over pecan and mesquite, cornbread pancakes in cast-iron pans and whiskey cocktails.
Starlite ran for more than six years. In the fall of 2024 it closed with little warning, three months after Sterling’s modern Mexican restaurant Chantico had also closed, and regulars called it the end of a favorite neighborhood spot.
Bad Jimmy’s moved in a few months later. James Piazza had built the brand from a pop-up into a downtown Phoenix bar with a retro diner look, a Top 100 restaurant on local lists, and a menu that could be reproduced in a new location without losing what made it good. Scottsdale was its first test outside downtown, and it opened in March 2025. Uptown Phoenix and Tempe have come since.
The honest assessment: Bad Jimmy’s is a burger bar, and a burger here won’t change your life. But it does a small number of things very well, it’s priced for a neighborhood rather than for tourists, and it gave the old Starlite space a second act. In a part of Scottsdale where independent restaurants come and go, that counts.