What was Cuoco Pazzo?
Cuoco Pazzo was the first restaurant Peter DeRuvo could call his own, and it lasted about as long as he did.
It opened in October 2011 at 4175 N Goldwater Blvd, near the corner of Goldwater Boulevard and Indian School Road on the western edge of Old Town, with a grand opening in early November. The owners were father and son Mario Rana Sr. and Mario Rana Jr., who also ran the Mad Chef Gastropub; the name, Italian for crazy cook or mad chef, was a nod to it. The chef and partner was Peter DeRuvo, a cook New Times later described as associated with most of the top Italian restaurants in town, who came straight from less than nine months at Prado in the Montelucia and had made his name at Sassi. He called it his first venture as a chef on his own.
He opened it like one. DeRuvo brought nine staffers from Prado, had the space blessed by Tibetan monks because it had already been through so many incarnations, and wrote what he called a Romanesque menu: housemade pastas, wood-oven pizzettas, offal, an elaborate antipasti plate and whole animals roasted to order for groups who called ahead. There were cooking classes that began with an espresso and a walk to the Old Town Farmers Market. The bar poured 21 drafts, house-made cellos and cocktails developed with mixologist Jason Asher.
Phoenix Magazine’s critic loved it, ending a March 2012 review by telling readers they would be nuts not to try the crazy cook. By the time the review ran, the crazy cook was gone. DeRuvo left in early February 2012, telling New Times he did not see eye to eye with the Ranas on how they carried out business. The room became T. Roosevelt’s Tavern, and in mid-March 2013 the Ranas sold it to Nick Neuman, whose Evo has been there ever since.
Our verdict: a genuinely exciting Italian kitchen that collapsed over a partnership, not over the food.
What the menu and the room were
Start with the antipasti. Phoenix Magazine’s critic said that if you tried only one thing, it should be the grande antipasti misti ($25), the best antipasti plate the critic had ever had: top-quality cheeses and charcuterie, house-made pickled beef tongue, pickled vegetables including raw pickled potatoes, spiced olives, jams and crostini, enough for two as a light meal. The marinated grilled squid ($13) came cold over lentil ragu, the Venus clams with spicy Italian sausage ($15) in a broth with broccoli rabe and local red chiles, and the mascarpone polenta ($13) with truffled wild mushrooms. Beef heart ($11) was there for the adventurous.
Then pasta, and skip the mains. House-made pasta was the best thing going. The black tagliolini ($20), colored with cuttlefish ink and packed with seafood, was a bargain; Nonna’s ravioli ($17) were filled with ground chicken in butter broth; cavatelli ($17) came with veal, pork and beef meatballs. Thin-crust pizzettas from the wood-fired stone oven were excellent, except a funghi pie drowned in truffle oil. The secondi were the weak spot: a $41 whole fish, a dry $21 Tender Belly pork chop and a gamey $27 half duck. Desserts, including pecan crêpes with huckleberries and Chris’s caramelized applesauce cake ($9 each), were among the best in town.
Order a whole animal. New Times’ November 2011 visit found DeRuvo dismantling a roast pig stuffed with local greens and fennel sausage. He offered in-house beasting: call ahead with a duck, goat, lamb or rabbit in mind, and the kitchen would roast it whole and cook three more courses from the rest of the animal, with dessert. The paper also tried saffron arancini and crispy ribs with sapa and crushed peanuts.
The room. A long library of cookbooks sat on the half wall between the dining room and the kitchen. The walls were red brick and gilded Moroccan-style red wallpaper, with a big chalkboard of specials. Hours were 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.
The bar. Mario Rana Jr., who managed most nights and tended bar on Thursdays, worked Italian liqueurs into classic cocktails and beer into the pizza dough, which used SanTan’s Devil’s Ale. The beer list ran to 21 drafts, 14 cans and 14 bottles, mostly microbrews, with several from Arizona.
The room everyone said was cursed
The space at 4175 N Goldwater Blvd has a reputation. Evo’s owner, Nick Neuman, later recalled that it had been Cafe Blue for many years and then a series of quickly failed places, which he listed as Bacon, Cuoco Pazzo, Sunshine Moon Peking Pub and T. Roosevelt’s Tavern, and that everyone told him the place was cursed and the location terrible. DeRuvo knew the history when he moved in, which is why he brought in the monks.
What failed this time was the partnership. DeRuvo told New Times in January 2012 that he had always believed food should be simple, handmade and not outrageously priced, and that he was wary of chefs who stood behind seventeen restaurants at once. A month later he was out, saying only that he did not see eye to eye with the way the Ranas carried out business and wished them well. He went on to run the kitchen at Davanti Enoteca, a Chicago group’s wine bar on Scottsdale Road, which opened that August and closed in May 2013.
The Ranas kept the room going. At some point the press we found does not date, Cuoco Pazzo became T. Roosevelt’s Tavern, an American and Italian comfort-food spot; Mario Rana Jr. had told New Times in 2011 that the person he would most like to have a drink with was Teddy Roosevelt. In mid-March 2013, according to the Arizona Republic as cited by New Times, the family sold its interests to Nick Neuman. He got the keys in early March and opened Evo in late April, and New Times greeted it as another Italian concept in the room, adding that perhaps the third time would be a charm.
The ending loops back. In 2015 DeRuvo joined Evo’s kitchen and told New Times he had no hesitation about returning, and that he thought Cuoco Pazzo and some other places he had worked had not gotten their due because of situations out of his control. Evo is still open, a late-night pasta kitchen on the same Goldwater block, which settles the question of the curse.
Honest assessment: Cuoco Pazzo was one of the most ambitious Italian restaurants Scottsdale opened in the 2010s, and the food deserved a longer run. It belongs with the chef-driven rooms of that decade that were undone by money and partnerships rather than by diners. The record is good on the cooking and thin on the ending: nobody, in the press we found, wrote the day Cuoco Pazzo stopped being Cuoco Pazzo.