What is Beginner’s Luck?
Old Town has always been good at dinner and drinks and oddly bad at lunch. Beginner’s Luck is a chef’s answer to that: an all-day room, tucked into a courtyard just off Main Street, where the day starts with a latte and ends, on weekends, with a cocktail and a plate of slow-roasted pork.
It belongs to chef Bernie Kantak and co-owner Andrew Fritz, whose In Good Spirits group runs Citizen Public House on Fifth Avenue and The Gladly in Phoenix. Kantak is a James Beard Award semifinalist and the creator of the Original Chopped Salad, the plated rows of smoked salmon, couscous, arugula and dried corn that he first made at Cowboy Ciao and that became one of the most famous dishes in Scottsdale. He had wanted to do brunch and lunch for years, but Citizen’s kitchen was too small. “I’ve been wanting to do lunch down here for a while, why don’t you let me at it?” he recalled telling his friend Gio Osso, whose Piccolo Virtù had just closed in the space.
Beginner’s Luck opened in February 2024. The model was Stationæry, a coffee shop in Carmel-by-the-Sea that grew into a neighborhood restaurant. Fritz, hooked on third-wave coffee, built a specialty coffee program; Kantak built what he calls “well-traveled comfort food.” The name was Fritz’s, a hope for a little luck on the team’s first try at breakfast.
The room sits at 7240 E Main St, a courtyard storefront at the east end of the Main Street arts district that had already housed two chef-owned Italian restaurants, Nonna Urban Eatery and Piccolo Virtù. The third tenant is the most casual, and it has already lasted more than twice as long as Piccolo.
Brunch, lucky hour and dinner
Mornings are walk-in. Brunch and lunch run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and there are no reservations, so a weekday at opening is the easy table. The brunch menu has a Southwestern-meets-global streak: Short Rib for Breakfast, hash and short rib with mole, two eggs and queso fresco, is the chef’s favorite; the eggplant shakshouka comes with baked eggs, chermoula and farmer’s cheese; My Rich Uncle’s French Toast is challah with five spice and salted butterscotch; and the Lucky 7 Cereal Bowl is chia pudding with blue corn grits and granola.
Lunch leans on slow-roasted pork. The kitchen roasts pork for hours and puts it everywhere: a 12 Hour Pork Bowl on blue corn grits, the High Roller Burrito, and the Not Quite a Cubano with chicharron and pimento cheese. The Lucky Burger with Grandma Francis’ chili sauce and the crab and shrimp roll on a butter-toasted New England bun are the safe bets, and the Original Chopped Salad is the one dish to order no matter what.
Afternoons are lucky hour. From 1 to 3 p.m., and until 5 on Friday and Saturday, a dine-in menu of snacks and drinks takes over, with Dole Whip chicken wings and a three-cheese beer fondue among the plates. The bar runs bright daytime cocktails and coffee drinks.
Dinner is Friday and Saturday. From 3 p.m. on weekends, the room turns into a dinner restaurant with small plates, salads and “big plates,” and reservations are recommended. The restaurant is closed on Tuesdays.
Make it an Old Town morning. Beginner’s Luck sits across Main Street from the Rusty Spur Saloon and a block from the Old Adobe Mission and The Mission. The Old Town Farmers Market sets up a few blocks away on Saturday mornings, and the brunch guide covers the rest of downtown’s weekend options.
The courtyard with three lives
The storefront at 7240 E Main St is a small lesson in Old Town restaurant economics. It sits in a courtyard set back from the street, east of Scottsdale Road, where the gallery district shades into the Western-wear shops and saloons of the historic core. In 2017 it became Nonna Urban Eatery, a matchbox Italian room run by a Monte-Carlo-trained sushi chef and his wife, which lasted until 2022. In December 2022, Gio Osso of Virtù Honest Craft opened Piccolo Virtù there; it drew strong reviews and closed after about a year, with Osso announcing that the space had been sold.
Kantak’s arrival in early 2024 changed the formula. Both earlier tenants were dinner restaurants that needed a full room every night in a block that empties after the galleries close. Beginner’s Luck built its business on daytime, when Main Street is full of gallery browsers and visitors, and kept dinner to the two nights that can carry it. Kantak said at the opening that he hoped Piccolo Virtù would return someday, and teased Osso with a porchetta on the menu: “Gio swears that his porchetta is better than mine.”
It also fits the arc of Kantak’s career, which runs through Old Town’s history. He built his reputation at Cowboy Ciao on Stetson Drive in the 2000s, opened Citizen Public House on Fifth Avenue with Fritz in 2011, and spent the 2010s as one of the chefs who defined modern Scottsdale dining. Beginner’s Luck brought him to Main Street, and in 2025 the group opened Minnow, a sushi and matcha bar in Phoenix’s Arcadia neighborhood, as its fourth restaurant.
The honest assessment: Beginner’s Luck is not trying to be the most ambitious kitchen in Old Town, and walk-in brunch on a winter Saturday can mean a wait. But it is a James Beard semifinalist cooking breakfast in a courtyard, with good coffee and the chopped salad on the side, and in a neighborhood that saves its best cooking for after dark, that is a real addition.