What is Cornish Pasty Co.?
The most useful restaurant within a block of Old Town’s bar strip is a dark room serving 200-year-old tin-miner food from the far end of England. This is not a joke; it is simply how the neighborhood worked out.
Cornish Pasty Co. opened at 3800 N Goldwater Blvd on November 7, 2013, the third location of a company that Dean Thomas, a native of Cornwall, had founded in Tempe in 2005. The product is the pasty — a hand-crimped pastry crescent, traditionally stuffed with steak, potato, onion and rutabaga, built so a miner could carry a whole meal underground and eat it without utensils. The company’s version of that original is called the Oggie, and it is the correct first order. Everything after that is Thomas’s imagination: curries, breakfast pasties, carne adovada, a turkey-and-stuffing number that is Thanksgiving in a crust, and a vegetarian and vegan list long enough to make a meat-eater jealous.
The Scottsdale room is dim, wood-heavy and pub-like, with a full bar that pours British ales and runs a proper happy hour. It sits at Goldwater and Main, one block west of the Old Town entertainment blocks — close enough to catch the after-bar crowd, far enough to keep the DJ out.
The honest verdict: this is cheap, filling, well-made food in a neighborhood that charges a premium for all three, and the hours — until midnight on weekends — make it one of the district’s few real late-night kitchens. It is not fancy. It does not need to be.
How to eat a pasty like you mean it
Start with the Oggie. It is the traditional pasty and the only honest way to judge the kitchen: beef, potato, onion and rutabaga, seasoned simply, sealed in a crimped crust that is meant to be sturdy rather than flaky. Gravy comes alongside; regulars ask for it on the side and dip. If the Oggie is right — and it usually is — the rest of the menu can be trusted.
Then go wide. The kitchen’s real personality is in the variations. The chicken tikka masala pasty is the crossover hit, the carne adovada nods to the Southwest, and the Thanksgiving-style turkey and stuffing version is a seasonal fixture people drive across the Valley for. The vegetarian and vegan pasties are not an afterthought — they are some of the best things on the list, and the crust does not care what is inside it.
Portion strategy. One pasty is a full meal for most adults; it arrives roughly the size of a football and lands like one. Two people should order two different fillings and swap halves — it is the only way to sample the range without a second visit.
The bar is half the point. British ales and ciders on tap, a happy hour that the local press has graded well, and a room dark enough at midday that lunch feels like evening. On weekend nights it runs until midnight, which makes it the sober-ish pit stop of choice between the Scottsdale Road bars and the hotels along Camelback. Goldwater Brewing and Sip Coffee & Beer House are on the same stretch, so the block makes a natural low-key crawl.
When to go: weekday lunches and late weeknights are calm; Friday and Saturday after 10 p.m. bring a line of people who have just discovered that Old Town’s other kitchens are closed.
From Tempe’s tin-miner food to Old Town’s late shift
Dean Thomas’s first shop, in Tempe in 2005, was an unlikely bet: that a college town raised on burritos would embrace a Cornish working-class staple most Americans had never heard of. It worked because the pasty is, functionally, a burrito with a British accent — portable, filling, cheap, endlessly variable — and because Thomas treated the tradition seriously while playing freely with the fillings. The Tempe room became a cult, and by the early 2010s the company was ready to test whether the formula travelled north of the Salt River.
Scottsdale in 2013 was mid-boom. The entertainment district was consolidating around Indian Plaza and Saddlebag Trail, the Fashion Square luxury wing was drawing a different crowd, and Old Town’s food economy had split cleanly into expensive dinners and cheap drunk food, with almost nothing in between. Goldwater Boulevard, a block west of the strip, was the seam — quieter, cheaper to lease, still walkable to everything. Cornish Pasty Co. took a corner there and filled the gap: honest food at honest prices, served late, without the bottle-service tax.
It found the neighborhood’s working population immediately. Bar staff, hotel employees and students learned that the pub on Goldwater was open when their shifts ended, and the room developed the regulars a chain outpost rarely gets.
Honest assessment: the Scottsdale location is a branch, not the original, and purists will note the Tempe room’s scruffier charm. The food is heavy by design; a summer lunch here requires commitment. But Old Town’s dining map has few rooms this useful — cheap, distinctive, family-owned and open late — and the Brat Haus and Sugar Bowl tier of unpretentious Old Town institutions has room for a Cornish hand pie. Thomas’s miners’ meal has outlasted a dozen flashier neighbors. That is the whole review.