What was Buddha’s Ritual?
Buddha’s Ritual was the restaurant that was supposed to give SOHO Scottsdale a reason to exist after dark. SOHO is the Bing Hu-designed live-work loft and townhome complex at 16580 N 92nd Street, on the southwest corner of 92nd and Bahia Drive, just east of the 101 and a mile from WestWorld in the Princess & WestWorld district. Its developer, Irene Catsibris Clary, had ground-floor retail to fill, and in October 2021 she announced a tenant with a radio host attached.
The operators were Scott and Melissa McIntire of Mac Entertainment Group, whose The Ainsworth in downtown Phoenix and The Lola at Westgate are big-bar, lawn-game, brunch-cocktail rooms, in partnership with “Joey Boy” Rodriguez, host of the Morning Mess radio show, and Freddy Nguyen, a local entrepreneur credited with the concept. The idea was Asian-American fusion for breakfast, lunch and dinner in a 2,700-square-foot space with a hot pink front door, garage doors onto a wraparound patio with a fire pit and lawn games, a long bar, and a dining room done in baby blue, pink and black under bright illustrations. It also sold branded hats and shirts.
It opened in early 2022; AZ Family found it recently opened on February 4. Executive chef Rasco Conneway wrote a menu that read like the pitch: croffles (croissant-dough waffles) with a Laffy Taffy-based “razztaff” sauce at weekend brunch, Buddha’s Benny with crispy pork belly, a tarviche tower, a chicken katsu sandwich, a banh mi plate, grilled kimcheese, kimchi mac and cheese, pho, ramen and wood-fired pizzas with Asian toppings. By July 26, 2022, it was marked closed on the delivery apps, and the Scottsdale Progress later dated its departure from SOHO to August 2022.
Our verdict: a bar company’s idea of a restaurant, opened in the wrong building for a brunch crowd, and gone before anyone had to review it.
What the menu and the room were
Brunch was the headline. Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., the kitchen sent out croffles and cinnamon roffles, stuffed banana nut croissants, loaded berry croissants, a breakfast pizza, something called the FBFT, and Buddha’s Benny with pork belly. This was the Mac Entertainment formula from The Ainsworth, the brunch-as-event, moved to a loft complex with a lawn.
Dinner was fusion in the broad sense. The starter was the tarviche, tuna tartare and ceviche stacked with avocado, mango salsa and house rice crackers. Mains ran the chicken katsu flyer (panko chicken sandwich), a deconstructed banh mi plate, the Buddha burger, pho and ramen, and shareables like the Saint Bourdain and kimchi mac and cheese. The wood-fired oven, which had been in the suite before Buddha’s Ritual and stayed after it, produced pizzas with Asian toppings such as the Trang Pie. The press we found did not publish prices; the format and the neighborhood put it in the $15 to $30 range at dinner, less at brunch.
The bar was the business. A long bar served inside and out, there was a signature cocktail program and a happy hour, and the patio’s fire pit and lawn games were the furniture of a company that runs nightlife rooms. Mac Entertainment said the opening was its official expansion into Scottsdale.
The room worked against it. SOHO Scottsdale is lofts and townhomes on a side street south of Bell Road, with no through traffic and no neighbor restaurants; the nearest reasons to be on 92nd Street are WestWorld during Barrett-Jackson and the Arabian Horse Show, both in the first quarter of the year, which is when Buddha’s Ritual was open. The restaurant listed itself at Suite 2004 and later at Suite 100; it was the same corner space.
What regulars did. For the few months it existed, the pattern was weekend brunch on the patio, a croffle photographed for Instagram, and the Ainsworth crowd driving up from downtown to see what the McIntires had built. The record does not show a weekday following, from the Airpark offices to the south or anywhere else.
The corner space at SOHO before and after
SOHO Scottsdale was an unusual thing to build in north Scottsdale: urban-style lofts and work-live units from a prominent Valley architect, on a parcel between the industrial Airpark and the equestrian sprawl around WestWorld, with retail bays on the ground floor that needed tenants who could survive without foot traffic. The Scottsdale Progress later wrote that the corner had housed two concepts before Sugo Bistro and that a wood-fired oven came with it. Buddha’s Ritual was one of those, and its backers were as well capitalized as any: Mac Entertainment Group had two of the Valley’s busiest brunch bars, Rodriguez brought a morning-radio audience, and the opening was covered by What Now Phoenix, AZ Big Media, AZ Family and Fabulous Arizona in the span of four months.
It lasted a season. The restaurant was reported open on February 4, 2022, marked closed on Uber Eats by July 26, described in one listing as temporarily closed due to a move, and, according to the Scottsdale Progress, announced as leaving SOHO in August. No reason was published. The partners did not relocate it; no second Buddha’s Ritual ever opened; the OpenTable and Yelp listings went to permanently closed and stayed there. The press we found does not say whether the problem was the location, the summer, the partnership or the economics of running three meals a day in a complex with a few dozen residents.
What came next is the interesting part. Executive chef Robert “Rasco” Conneway, whose career had included The Lola, saw the empty corner with its oven still in place and, with chef Anthony Keoni, reopened it as Sugo Bistro, a scratch Italian restaurant with Neapolitan-style pizza, handmade pasta and a 120-seat room, with a grand opening on April 29, 2023. The Progress and AZ Big Media covered it in May; Conneway talked about throwing out any imperfect pizza and wanting regulars to fist-bump the kitchen. That is the sound of a chef betting his own name on a room his employers had abandoned. By 2026 the listings for Sugo had gone to closed as well, and the record does not say what, if anything, is in the suite now.
The arc puts Buddha’s Ritual in the 2020s file of pandemic-era openings by bar groups that mistook a good patio for a neighborhood. The same years produced durable rooms a few miles away at Kierland and Grayhawk; the difference was that those had a center around them. SOHO’s corner has now outlasted at least three restaurants, and the oven is the only tenant with tenure.
Honest assessment: Buddha’s Ritual was a concept deck with a kitchen attached. The croffle was clever, the kimchi grilled cheese was the kind of thing a bar menu should have, and the room looked like money. But six months is not a restaurant, it is a soft launch, and the fact that the chef stayed to try again in the same space says more about the location’s potential than the partners’ commitment to it. It belongs in the lost column for the north end, as a warning about building a brunch bar where nobody walks.