What was Clever Ramen?
Clever Ramen was the quick-lunch version of one of Phoenix’s best-loved ramen shops, set inside a university office park. It opened in early 2022 at 1455 N Scottsdale Road, in SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center on the southeast corner of Scottsdale and McDowell roads in South Scottsdale.
It came from Born & Raised Hospitality, the company of award-winning mixologist Joshua James and hospitality veteran Nick Campisano, whose Clever Koi in central Phoenix and Gilbert had made its name on ramen, bao and cocktails. The pair announced the SkySong shop in September 2020 as Broth & Bao, promising customized ramen bowls, steamed bao, togarashi fries and soft serve that fall. The pandemic pushed it back more than a year, and it opened under the Clever name in January 2022. The owners said they wanted to simplify the traditional ramen restaurant and make it accessible to the casual diner.
The format was build-your-own: pick your noodles, a meat-based or vegan broth, then vegetables, meats and sauces, the way you would at a burrito counter. For people who did not want to design lunch, there were set ramen and rice bowls, bao and loaded fries. The room, about 2,500 square feet, was the other attraction: Aline Architecture Concepts wrapped it in a curved plywood ceiling and wall shaped like a tangle of noodles, cut by CNC machine from a parametric model.
It closed abruptly on July 1, 2024, after about two and a half years, and Shio Ramen & Crudo opened in the space in 2025. It was a sibling of Clever Koi in spirit, serving some of the same customer favorites in a more casual setting, and it shared the building with the group’s Italian restaurant. Our verdict: it was a smart, well-designed lunch counter for an office campus, and it showed how hard it is to make a destination out of a place built for the people already there.
How the counter worked
Build or choose. At the counter you chose noodles and a broth, then layered on vegetables, proteins and sauces. The Scottsdale Progress, previewing the opening, said the kitchen specialized in its meat-based and vegan broths with a wide range of toppings. The fastest route was a pre-built bowl: the pork, with crispy pork belly and pork butt, tonkotsu tare, scallions and garlic oil, was the most popular, and the lemon chicken and spicy kimchi bowls covered the lighter and the hotter ends of the menu. Rice bowls were there for anyone who did not want soup at noon in July, and the kitchen kept the vegan broth on equal footing with the pork.
Order the bao and the fries. The steamed bao came with pork belly, hot chicken or kimchi cauliflower, the last a real vegetarian option rather than an afterthought. The fries were the shareable part: kimchi cheese fries, and the Krazy Fries with black pepper garlic aioli and pork belly. The published record we found does not give prices, so we do not quote any.
Who ate there. New Times described SkySong as a campus of offices and apartments that provided the key customer base for a quick lunch spot, and the room, with its wood-paneled installation, matched its young professional crowd. It served lunch and dinner, and the group’s own Fellow Osteria shared the building for anyone who wanted a full-service dinner.
Getting there. Guests at the Element Scottsdale at SkySong could walk over. It sat on Scottsdale Road at McDowell, at the south edge of the city’s restaurant map, about two miles below Old Town.
What it was not. It was not Clever Koi, and was not meant to be. The owners pitched it as the casual, counter-service sibling serving some of the same customer favorites, as New Times put it, for people who wanted ramen in a lunch hour rather than a night out.
A ramen shop for the innovation center
SkySong was built on the site of the old Los Arcos Mall at Scottsdale and McDowell, a research and office campus that by the early 2020s also had apartments and a hotel. Born & Raised Hospitality bet that its residents and office workers wanted ramen. The announcement in September 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, called the concept Broth & Bao and set a fall opening; it took until January 2022 to open, and by then the group had settled on putting its best-known name on the door. The Scottsdale Progress and Fast Casual covered it that spring mostly as a design story, which says something about how striking the room was.
The design came from Brian Laubenthal of Aline Architecture Concepts, working with millwork partner Lion Craft. They modeled the ceiling and the wall in parametric software, sent the shapes straight to a CNC cutter, and kept the feature on budget with little waste. “We really wanted to design a restaurant using modern technology and not lose the authenticity and character that makes our projects unique,” Laubenthal told the Progress.
The end came without warning on July 1, 2024. The owners’ post thanked customers for “three years of delicious ramen, pillowy buns, and loaded fries,” a count that seems to start before the doors opened, and steered fans to Clever Koi, Across the Pond and Fellow Osteria. New Times listed it among 15 closings that July and noted the summer spike in closures that the Valley’s heat brings every year. No reason was given. In March 2025, Shio Ramen & Crudo, from the owners of Sushiholic, soft-opened in the space, so the corner kept its ramen.
Honest assessment: Clever Ramen was a good idea a little too tied to its address. The bowls were Clever Koi’s flavors at a faster pace, and the room was one of the better-looking lunch counters of the 2020s in Scottsdale. But a build-your-own counter in an office park lives on weekday lunches, and when those were not enough, the owners closed it rather than turn it into something else.