What is Echo Coffee?
Echo Coffee is a coffee shop that roasts its own organic beans at 2902 N 68th Street, Suite 135, in a small center just north of Thomas Road in South Scottsdale. Steve Belt, an Arizona State graduate who taught himself to roast, opened it in mid-2010, and it has been the serious coffee stop for this corner of the city, a mile north of SkySong and a block from the Phoenix line, ever since.
Belt’s approach was the one that defined the Valley’s second-wave shops: he researched nearly every significant coffee house in the Phoenix area, tasted a great deal of coffee, and settled on a roasting style of his own, done in small batches on a Diedrich IR-3 every other day, according to a 2011 CoffeeTalk profile. The shop used organic beans only and organic milk only. Phoenix New Times named it Best Coffee House in Scottsdale in 2011, and in November 2013 put it first on its list of the five best places for coffee in the city, with baristas “as dedicated to talking about beans as they are to roasting them.”
The room is modern, with high ceilings and a loft-like layout, a patio, free wifi and, unusually for this part of town, a parking lot of its own. The case holds pastries baked in the back, and the menu runs to breakfast burritos and light lunch.
The owner now is Rob Rigolfi Jr., who was 30 in 2024 and who had founded a nonprofit in Haiti before coming to Phoenix. Under him the shop has become the Valley’s most dog-forward cafe: since June 2021 it has given one percent of all sales to the Arizona Humane Society, its beans come in “doggie bags” drawn with his four dogs, and on March 6, 2024 it opened a second counter inside the society’s new Papago Park campus. Our verdict: the best coffee south of Old Town, and the one shop in Scottsdale where bringing the dog improves the visit.
How to use Echo Coffee
Timing. The 68th Street shop opens at 6 a.m. seven days a week and closes at 6 p.m. (one Tripadvisor listing says 10 p.m., which we do not believe). That early opening is the practical advantage over the Old Town roasters: on a weekday you can be in and out before the SkySong and Thomas Road office traffic, and the patio is quiet until about 8. Weekends fill with the Papago trail crowd and neighborhood dog walkers. The Humane Society counter at 5501 E Van Buren Street opened with hours of 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, so it is a lunch stop, not a morning one.
Order the roast. Echo is a roastery first. Espresso drinks show the house beans best; drip and cold brew are there too. Early coffees came from a local importer who claimed carbon-neutral beans from Papua New Guinea, Cameroon and Kenya, and the shop’s later house offerings included a Titus blend and an El Salvador Bourbon single origin. Twelve-ounce bags of whole beans were $20 in 2024, and when the Papago shop opened, two bags bought in store earned a free cold brew. An AHS-branded blend was planned.
Eat something. The pastry case is baked in-house and reviewers consistently rate it above the usual coffee-shop pastry, though a 2022 review complained that a pastry chef had left. Breakfast burritos and a short lunch list fill out the menu; the Humane Society counter adds hot cocoa, tea, lemonade and baked dog treats.
Bring the dog. The shop keeps treats behind the counter and sells them, the patio is set up for leashes, and the owner’s dogs, Diesel, Chunky, Peggy and Luna, are on the bean bags. Our guide to Scottsdale with dogs rates it the easiest coffee stop in the city for that reason.
Parking and the crowd. The center’s lot is the rare free, easy parking at a south Scottsdale coffee shop, which Cartel and the Old Town rooms cannot say. The crowd is laptops on weekday mornings, strollers and dogs on weekends, and the 4.3 rating across roughly 1,500 Google reviews reflects a place that has been consistent for a long time rather than one that is chasing novelty.
The roaster that outlasted the coffee boom
Echo belongs to the first wave of Valley shops that roasted their own beans, the generation that came up around 2010 alongside Cartel in Tempe and before Press built its roastery. New Times’ June 2014 guide to locally roasted beans listed Echo with the city’s roasters, and its 2011 and 2013 awards put a south Scottsdale strip center on the same lists as the downtown Phoenix shops. That mattered: the coffee bars of the 2010s clustered in Old Town, Kierland and the Airpark, and the stretch of Scottsdale south of Osborn had little between the drive-thru chains.
Belt’s story is the self-taught roaster’s. He opened the shop in mid-2010, and the early coverage, CoffeeTalk’s roaster profile in August 2011 and the blogs that visited that year, describes a man more interested in the beans than the business. The record then goes quiet on him, and we could not find when he sold. What the record does cover is the man who bought it. Rob Rigolfi Jr. went to Haiti at 21, inspired by his mother’s humanitarian work, founded the Bob Rabbit Project to help underserved communities there, opened a cafe called Haitian Breeze that closed when the country’s instability made it impossible, and moved to Phoenix, where, by his telling in a September 2024 In Business Magazine column, work at Echo and a chance meeting with a mentor led to his owning it. A friend’s dog, Diesel, who survived a near-fatal attack and kept him company through the pandemic, became the reason for the Humane Society program.
That program is the shop’s second act. One percent of every sale since June 2021, event sponsorships, dog treats, bean bags illustrated with the owner’s dogs, and in March 2024 a full-service second location inside the Arizona Humane Society’s Rob and Melani Walton Papago Park Campus at Van Buren and 55th Street, where the society’s president, Steven Hansen, welcomed Echo as part of the campus. It is unusual for a one-shop roaster to expand into a shelter rather than a second strip center, and it says something about what the business is for now.
Honest assessment: Echo is not chasing the specialty-coffee cutting edge in 2026 and has not had a serious press review since 2014, so you are relying on a long customer record rather than critics. That record is good. The coffee is roasted properly and in-house, the hours are generous, the parking is easy and the cause is real. It earns its place on our list of the best coffee shops in Scottsdale as the south-side pick, and it has outlasted most of the shops that won awards beside it.