What is Belmont Kitchen & Cocktails?
Belmont Kitchen & Cocktails is the restaurant that finally gave North Scottsdale a chef with a résumé to match its real estate. It opened in February 2025 at 8876 E Pinnacle Peak Road, Suite 100, at Pima and Pinnacle Peak Road, in the small center that has been anchored since 1999 by the original Mastro’s. That corner is the gateway to Pinnacle Peak and Troon, a part of the city with, as Phoenix Magazine put it, no shortage of beautiful homes and no restaurants “more urbane than steaks, pub grub, Mexican food and pizza.”
The owners are Rosewood Concepts, a company formed by Phillip Lewkowicz and Neal Thompson; Belmont is its first restaurant. Lewkowicz is part of the family that owns Cafe Monarch in Old Town and is acting CFO of Cafe Monarch and RESERVE, the two most formal rooms in the city. He is a North Scottsdale resident, and his stated reason for the project was that he had “always felt there was a gap in quality dining options in our area.” His wife Megan Lewkowicz led the interior design: natural wood, black, green and gold, a long bar, low light. Phoenix Magazine called it an intimate, sexy restaurant with a “gorgeously glitzy bar that exudes a Gatsby vibe.”
Five months in, the kitchen changed hands. Alex Stratta joined as executive chef in July 2025. Stratta won the 1998 James Beard Best Chef: Southwest award at Mary Elaine’s at The Phoenician, then ran Alex at the Wynn Las Vegas to two Michelin stars; before that he cooked under Alain Ducasse at Louis XV in Monaco and Daniel Boulud at Le Cirque. He had told friends he was done with restaurants. Lewkowicz called him in June, and by August Stratta was phasing his dishes onto the menu and describing Belmont as “a really fancy, luxury neighborhood place” where you can have a Tuesday taco night or Friday caviar and champagne.
The menu is Modern American with French and Italian technique underneath: Wagyu and Argentine beef, miso black cod, lobster ravioli, porcini cigars, a 3 to 6 p.m. happy hour with a $24 Wagyu burger. Our verdict: it is the best cooking north of the 101 by a distance, served in a room built for date night, and the only thing it cannot fix is the drive.
How to eat at Belmont
Start with the cigars. The porcini mushroom cigars ($23), crisp rolls of wild mushroom with black truffle pecorino, wilted spinach and roasted chicken jus, were the first Stratta special to land on the menu and the dish everyone remembers. The roasted beet and pineapple salad ($19) with goat cheese, pistachio and aged balsamico is the lighter opener. The menu also carries filet empanadas, artichoke flowers, tuna tartare and caviar service.
Then order what Stratta is known for. His red wine-braised short rib has followed him from Las Vegas; at Belmont it comes with mascarpone polenta and ginger-tomato jam, and Phoenix Magazine called it legendary. The grilled Spanish octopus with romesco and crispy potatoes is the other dish the magazine singled out. The miso-glazed black cod ($56) with orange butter, savoy cabbage and peanut sambal is the fish to get. Steaks run to an 8-ounce American Wagyu New York strip ($55) and an 8-ounce Argentine filet ($68); there is also a rack of lamb and a sea bass with stewed peppers. Expect $120 to $160 a head with wine, which is Mastro’s territory next door.
Drink the show. Bar manager Richard Allison builds cocktails with, in Phoenix Magazine’s words, fire, smoke, bubbles and treasure chests. The Velvet Revolver is tequila, amaro, strawberry and spiced honey; the zero-proof Disco Poet is mango, honey and Tajín. Sommelier Daniel Reza runs a list that holds a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence and a wine-dinner series.
Use the happy hour. It runs 3 to 6 p.m. daily and is the neighborhood’s main event; AZ Big Media counted about 60 people in the bar at 4 on an August afternoon. The Mishima Wagyu burger ($24), quesabirria tacos ($22) and the Spritz Decision ($15) are the standing orders. See our happy hour guide for the rest of the north end.
Book and dress. Reservations are on OpenTable; the restaurant opens at 3 p.m. daily and serves until about 10, with the website showing a 9:30 close some nights. The dress code bans athletic wear, hoodies, tank tops and flip-flops. Parking is the shared lot with Mastro’s off Pinnacle Peak Road. For the Chef’s Table, $1,000 a guest with a four-person minimum and wine included, the first date is November 7, 2026, at 6 p.m.; the Michelin Series began with a $125 Lunch & Learn on September 13.
The chef who thought he was done, and the corner that needed him
Alex Stratta’s career is the kind Scottsdale likes to claim. Born in Wisconsin to a hotelier father, he grew up in hotels in Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Monaco and Mexico, apprenticed in a three-star French kitchen at 19, and came to the Valley to run Mary Elaine’s, where the 1998 James Beard award made him, at 30, the most decorated chef in Arizona. Steve Wynn then gave him a restaurant with his own name on it so that he could never leave the building; Alex at the Wynn held two Michelin stars, and Stratta’s sous chefs went on to win Beard awards of their own. By the mid-2020s he had, by his own account, stopped looking for a kitchen.
Lewkowicz found him anyway. The AZ Big Media profile has the owner realizing on their first phone call “how aligned we were,” and Stratta explaining that decades of fine dining had not made him stubborn, only “much more flexible.” That flexibility is the whole idea of Belmont. It is not a tasting-menu room like the family’s Cafe Monarch or RESERVE; it is a bar with a serious kitchen behind it, where the same chef who writes a $1,000 Chef’s Table also signs off on a happy-hour burger. Stratta told Cronkite News in July 2026 that he wanted Belmont to be a place “where you can have exquisite cuisine or just a burger.”
The location explains the rest. The suite beside Mastro’s had sat in a center that was, in late 2024, mid-renovation with roads under construction around it. North of the 101 the serious restaurants have been steakhouses and hotel dining rooms, and the few chef-driven places, Hush Public House chief among them, were small. Phoenix Magazine’s Best New Restaurants list for 2025 put Belmont in the top ten with the plain observation that above the 101 “good luck” finding anything more urbane than steak and pizza, and credited Stratta’s arrival in July with making the menu “really take flight.” The press we found does not say what the build-out cost, whether Stratta holds equity, or how the lunch and brunch service promised at the announcement fared; the current hours start at 3 p.m., which suggests they did not last.
Honest assessment: Belmont is a very good restaurant whose reputation now rests on one man in his late fifties, and the owners know it, which is why the Michelin Series and the Chef’s Table exist. The room is handsome, the bar is loud at 5, and the dress code and prices will put off some of the golf-shirt crowd that lives around it. For the rest, it is the first place in Pinnacle Peak and Troon where the food is the reason to go, and its arrival in the 2020s is the clearest sign yet that the north end’s dining has caught up with its houses.