What is Born & Bred?
Born & Bred is what happened when a career Scottsdale bartender finally opened his own place in Scottsdale. It sits at 6149 N Scottsdale Road, Suite A-101, at the north end of The Shops at Hilton Village, the RED Development center across Scottsdale Road from the Hilton resort on the Paradise Valley line, in the space that was Humble Pie. The owner is Charles Barber, a fifth-generation Arizonan who spent 16 years behind the bar at Zinc Bistro at Kierland, was a partner at Hush Public House, and opened his North Phoenix gastropub Aftermath in 2021. The name is about him: five generations of his family in metro Phoenix.
Barber announced the restaurant in June 2023 and promised an opening by Halloween. It did not go that way. A second Born & Bred in downtown Chandler opened first, in December 2023, and the Scottsdale room followed in spring 2024 (Frontdoors Media put it at March; Phoenix Magazine’s review listed April). The space holds about 90 seats, repainted and refloored, with the wood-burning pizza oven Humble Pie left behind, vintage Valley photographs on the walls, and a planned tribute to Terry Ellisor, the restaurateur behind MercBar, Zinc and The Mission, who died in 2021.
The menu is the Aftermath playbook with pizza added: charred Brussels sprouts, the Aftermac macaroni and cheese, beef tallow frites, burrata, meatballs, eight pizzas from a Margherita to a sausage-heavy Godfather, and the Aftermath burger, Arizona grass-fed beef with Velveeta, house pickles and a Noble Bread bun, which a Fox 10 segment in November 2025 called award-winning. There is steak frites, rigatoni a la vodka, pork Bolognese and shrimp scampi for the people who do not want pizza, and the bar leans toward wine by design; the Chandler room got the local taps.
Who it is for: Hilton Village’s lunch crowd, the Paradise Valley dinner trade that wants a burger and a bottle without driving to Old Town, and the readers who voted it Best Restaurant to Take a Date in Phoenix New Times’ 2025 Best of Phoenix Readers’ Choice poll. Our verdict: a good neighborhood tavern with a very good burger and better-than-it-needs-to-be pizza, run by people who know the Scottsdale customer, and not a place to order the most expensive thing on the menu.
How to eat at Born & Bred
Order the burger and a pizza. The Aftermath burger (about $23.50 on the delivery menu, with a smaller lunch version around $18.50) is the dish the whole company is built on: Arizona grass-fed beef, Velveeta, house-made pickles, a Noble Bread bun and Frites Street fries at Aftermath, beef tallow frites here. Pizzas run about $21. The Margherita, with a thick cap of pulled mozzarella and Bianco DiNapoli tomato sauce, is the one Phoenix Magazine’s September 2024 reviewer called “probably the best part of the meal”; the Godfather, the Nonna, the Ragazzo, a pesto and a Buffalo chicken round out the list. Add the beef tallow frites ($10.50) or the Aftermac.
Skip the oysters and think twice about the steak. The Phoenix Magazine review was blunt: half a dozen oysters in umami mignonette ($24) lacked acid and salt, the mac and cheese ($15) was gritty next to the Aftermath version, and the steak frites ($48) arrived overcooked without anyone asking for a temperature. Reviews since have been kinder, and the current menu lists a $48 bistecca, but we would still spend the money on pizza and wine.
Drink wine, or the strawberry Negroni. Barber told New Times the Scottsdale list would mix Old World and New World bottles chosen for the food, and the opening beverage director was Melissa Orgler, formerly of Pigtails. The B&B Negroni ($16), with strawberry vermouth and a whole berry in the glass, is the house wild card. Happy hour covers B&B frites, Aftermac, shrimp cocktail, the wraps and the burger, plus cocktails, wine, beer and well spirits and a pizza-and-bottle special; the website does not post the hours, a happy hour directory lists $6 drafts and $7 wells, and the Chandler room runs weekdays 4 to 6, so ask. Our happy hour guide covers the rest of the corridor.
Timing and booking. The website lists 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day. Event listings show 10 a.m. openings on weekends and 10 p.m. closes on Friday and Saturday, and reviewers mention a breakfast sandwich and breakfast cocktails, so weekend brunch is likely; confirm at (602) 989-3793. Reservations are on OpenTable, where it holds a 4.7 from about 150 reviews. Walk in at lunch. The pizza-until-midnight plan from 2023 did not survive into the posted hours.
Getting there. Park in the Hilton Village lot off Scottsdale Road; the restaurant is at the north end near Slanted Rice and Handel’s. The resort across the street sends over hotel guests, and the Lincoln Drive crowd from Paradise Valley fills the bar on weekend nights.
The bartender who came home to Scottsdale Road
Barber’s own account of the idea is the best one. In his sixteen years at Zinc Bistro, Matt Carter’s French bistro at Kierland Commons, tourists and snowbirds kept asking him where else to eat, and he kept a list. Born & Bred was meant to be the answer: the place a Scottsdale bartender would send you. Before Zinc there were the low-paying bartending jobs in the Old Town entertainment district that Phoenix Magazine described as “cranking out Red Bull-jacked cocktails,” and after it a partnership in Hush Public House and, in 2021, Aftermath, an industrial, upscale neighborhood gastropub in North Phoenix.
The plan changed twice before it opened. In June 2023 the menu was to be half shareables and half pizza, with pizza only served until midnight for the post-event crowd. By July, Barber told New Times the team would “stick to our guns” and use the wood-fired oven for whole fish and vegetables, with a show-stopper bread service and only a few pies. By the time the doors opened, pizza was back at the center of the table. The people changed too. Aftermath’s chef and partner Dave Bowman left for a corporate job in 2023; Will Bedene, a Zinc sous chef for more than six years and Aftermath’s opening sous, stepped up and was named chef and partner on Born & Bred. By December 2023 the company said Delilah Becerra was overseeing both Born & Bred kitchens and Tyka Chheng was behind the bar. Barber’s sister D’Dee Robertson and his wife Chandler Barber handle guests and administration.
Hilton Village is the right address for it. The center grew up around the Hilton resort on the Central Scottsdale stretch of Scottsdale Road, and its restaurant row has long been where Paradise Valley eats when it does not want to cross into Old Town: Houston’s, Veneto Trattoria, the Vietnamese room next door. The Humble Pie suite had been a pizzeria with an oven worth keeping, and New Times’ location pages put The Good Egg in the same address range before that.
The press split. Phoenix Magazine’s September 2024 review said a restaurant envisioned as a toned-down Aftermath “instead simply lacks tone” and seemed “rushed-to-market.” Readers disagreed: the Best of Phoenix 2025 Readers’ Choice date-night award, a 4.7 on OpenTable and the Fox 10 visit in November 2025 all landed in the following year. The record does not say the exact opening date, whether the Ellisor tribute was built, or what the third brand on the company’s site, Hayden House, is.
Honest assessment: Born & Bred is a competent tavern with one great sandwich and good pizza, in a center that needed exactly that. It is not Aftermath, and the $48 plates are not where it shines. For a Hilton Village lunch, a Paradise Valley burger night or a pre-concert pizza it belongs on the 2020s list of neighborhood rooms that earned their trade honestly.