What is Call Her Martina?
Most of the restaurants along the Scottsdale Waterfront belong to someone big: a Chicago steakhouse group, a Valley restaurant empire, a national chain’s flagship. Call Her Martina belongs to a family from Hermosillo.
The Moreno family opened it in Unit 165 at 7135 E Camelback Rd as a “barra + cocina,” and they divided the work the way families do. The parents developed the recipes. A brother runs the bar. The sisters took on branding, marketing and design. Elisa Moreno leads the operation, and the family describes the place as “a tribute to the women who have shaped our lives.” Their grandmother, Abuela Malucha, was a cook, and her recipes sit underneath the modern menu.
The food is Sonoran at heart and modern in technique. That means tableside guacamole, aguachiles, tostadas and tacos, but also a serious beef program, which is very Sonoran: a prime ribeye taco, Martina’s Ribeye grilled and finished with a beef reduction, and bone marrow elote. The room is styled after La Época de Oro, the golden age of Mexican cinema, with black-and-white portraits of that era’s actresses looking down on a dining room laid out across several rooms.
It is upscale without being stiff. The family’s stated aim was to bring the hospitality of Mexico’s best restaurants to Scottsdale, and on a good night that is what it feels like.
How to order, and when to go
Open with the table rituals. The tableside guacamole is the standard opener, and the street-style mini elotes and bone marrow elote are the sides that get photographed. Early reviews singled out Beets in the Cloud, beet wedges on a goat cheese foam with caramelized pecans, as the dish that tells you this is not a combo-plate kitchen.
Make the beef the centerpiece. Hermosillo is cattle country, and the menu leans into it. Share the ribeye taco as a starter, then put Martina’s Ribeye in the middle of the table. If the table wants something lighter, the verde aguachile, shrimp in a citrus-chile broth, is the counterweight. Save room for the cheesecake chimichanga.
Drink agave. The bar is a family project, built around agave cocktails. Ask what the bartenders are proud of this month rather than ordering a house margarita on autopilot.
Book, park, walk. Reservations run online for tables of one to twelve; bigger parties go through a large-party inquiry or a phone call. The Waterfront’s public garage is the easy parking play, and the canal path out front makes this a natural first stop before Canal Convergence in November or a stroll over the Soleri Bridge. The patio is dog-friendly. During Arizona Restaurant Week, Martina has run a three-course prix fixe with a drink, which is the cheapest way to try the room.
A family room on a corporate canal
The Waterfront was conceived in 2003 as condo towers, offices and canal-side patios on the southwest corner of Camelback and Scottsdale roads. In practice its restaurant row filled with big operators: the original P.F. Chang’s in the same complex, Sam Fox’s Culinary Dropout and Olive & Ivy, and later Chicago’s Maple & Ash. It is a stretch of real estate that usually goes to companies with lawyers on retainer.
When the Morenos signed for Unit 165, local press framed it as a family bet: eight months of planning, a chef from Sonora, Fernando Gienesta, in the opening kitchen, and a target of opening on New Year’s Eve 2021. Their pitch was specific. They did not want a Tex-Mex cantina or a generic “modern Mexican” room. They wanted the dishes trending in the best restaurants south of the border, cooked by people raised on Hermosillo home cooking.
That puts Martina in a long Old Town line. Scottsdale’s Mexican restaurants have run from family taco counters to Garcia’s on this very intersection in the 1970s, to Los Sombreros and chef-driven rooms like The Mission. Martina’s contribution is a Sonoran accent and a family name on the lease at the most corporate address in Old Town.
The honest assessment: the room is a production, prices sit at the Waterfront’s level, and the golden-age glamour is laid on thick. But the cooking has a point of view, the beef is taken seriously, and in a district of brand extensions, a restaurant that exists because one family wanted to honor its women is worth seeking out.