What is Craft 64?
When Italy’s 50 Top Pizza guide — the closest thing world pizza has to a supreme court — issued its ranking of the best pizzerias in the United States, the list ran through the expected capitals: New York, New Jersey, Phoenix’s own celebrated ovens. And there, among the top 50, sat a brewpub on Scottsdale’s gallery row: Craft 64.
Open since 2013 at Main Street’s heart, Craft 64 runs a two-part thesis. Part one: wood-fired pizza done with genuine craft — a thin-but-hearty crust the Italian judges singled out, mozzarella made in-house, and toppings that lean on local ingredients. Part two: a wall of 30-plus taps devoted to Arizona craft breweries, rotating constantly, curated by people who treat the state’s beer scene as a subject worth following. Plenty of places do one half well. Doing both, in the same modest room, is the whole identity — the state’s proudest pizza-and-pint pairing, formalized.
The setting completes it. Main Street is Old Town’s arts district — galleries shoulder to shoulder, sculpture on the sidewalks — and Craft 64 functions as its kitchen table. On Thursday ArtWalk nights the room fills with collectors, artists, and strollers debriefing over pies; the rest of the week it belongs to regulars who figured out that a top-50-in-America pizza with a local IPA runs about the cost of two Old Town cocktails a few blocks south.
It feels less like a concept than a neighborhood local that happens to be nationally ranked. Which is, roughly, the dream.
Ordering the pie-and-pint the right way
Start with the mozzarella. The in-house cheese program is the kitchen’s foundation, so orient your order around pies where it stars — the classic margherita-style pie is the honest benchmark, and the more composed seasonal pies show what the wood oven does with local ingredients. The crust is the argument the international judges bought: thin enough to blister, hearty enough to carry weight, no floppy-center compromise.
Treat the tap wall as a tour. Thirty-plus Arizona lines means the list functions as a live census of state brewing — the established names alongside whatever a small-town brewery released last Tuesday. The move is to ask what’s new and local, or order a couple of pours across styles and treat dinner as a flight. The staff’s beer literacy is real; use it. This is the room where out-of-state visitors discover Arizona brews, and the natural companion crawl runs through Goldwater Brewing up the street and Fate Brewing for the full local-beer picture.
Time it around the district’s pulse. Thursday is ArtWalk, when Main Street becomes a promenade and Craft 64 becomes its commissary — festive, packed, worth it. Weekends run steady; weeknights are the locals’ quiet window. In high season, everything shifts earlier and busier, and during big event weeks the gallery district absorbs overflow from the entire city.
Budget-wise, it’s firmly mid-range — the rare nationally honored kitchen where a family dinner or a casual date doesn’t require a decision. That accessibility, as much as the crust, is why the room never empties.
How gallery row got a top-50 pizzeria
Craft 64’s 2013 opening timed two waves perfectly. The first was Arizona’s craft beer explosion — the 2010s decade when the state’s brewery count multiplied and local drinkers developed genuine regional pride. Craft 64 built the showcase that scene needed: not a taproom with frozen pretzels, but a real kitchen where the beer got equal billing with legitimately excellent food. The second wave was the national pizza renaissance, as wood-fired craft standards spread beyond the coasts. Scottsdale’s pizza landscape had its old-guard parlors, its imported prestige — Grimaldi’s coal ovens, Pomo’s certified Neapolitan orthodoxy — and its homegrown family institutions like Spinato’s. Craft 64 staked the territory none of them held: hyper-local, brewery-obsessed, arts-district casual.
The 50 Top Pizza recognition, when it came, mattered beyond bragging rights. International honors have a way of landing on the Valley’s fine-dining rooms; pizza-and-beer joints don’t usually get the call. For an unassuming Main Street storefront to make a top-50-in-America list validated a specifically Scottsdale proposition — that the city’s food identity isn’t only resorts and steakhouses, but also craftspeople working small rooms in the old downtown. It’s the same argument the gallery district itself has made for seventy years, which makes Craft 64 an unusually good fit for its street.
There’s also the neighborhood-anchor role, harder to rank but easy to observe. Main Street’s galleries close in the evening; without a great, democratic dinner room, the district would go dark at six. Craft 64 keeps the lights on — the after-ArtWalk table, the artists’ local, the place where the 2010s version of Old Town’s arts community actually gathers.
Honest assessment: purists chasing certified Neapolitan orthodoxy or New York slice-culture will find Craft 64 pleasantly unorthodox rather than definitive. What it is instead is complete — the best pizza-and-beer evening in Scottsdale, in the room that best explains why the old downtown still matters.