What is Fata Morgana?
Fata Morgana is Scottsdale’s glatt kosher Israeli restaurant, and for most of the people who eat there it is the only restaurant of its kind within reach. It sits at 7116 E Mercer Lane, Suite 103, a one-story retail strip on a short street one block south of Shea Boulevard and a few blocks east of Scottsdale Road, in the part of the Shea Corridor where the Valley’s Orthodox community has clustered around its synagogues and schools. It opened in January 2022 in the space that had been Aunt Abby’s Confections.
The owners are Bar Timi, who is from Israel, and David Babaganov, who is from Canada. Their reason for opening, as Timi told Phoenix New Times, was that there were not enough kosher restaurants for the size of the Jewish community here. Timi’s wife, Danielle, works the floor. The restaurant is glatt kosher under Chabad of Scottsdale supervision, which in practice means a meat kitchen with no dairy anywhere, pastries from Brooklyn’s Reisman’s in the counter case, dairy-free desserts, and a door that is locked from Friday afternoon through Saturday for Shabbat.
The food leans Israeli in the way Israel itself eats, which is to say it borrows from everyone. The four-page menu runs through hot and cold appetizers, salads, entrees, sandwiches, vegetarian plates, a kids’ section, dessert and a sushi list. So there is hummus and falafel, chicken and beef shawarma, schnitzel, Moroccan cigars, sabich from Iraq, malawach from Yemen, kebab platters with rice and salad, and a California roll, because, as the staff explained when the paper asked, there is no kosher sushi otherwise. The pitas are par-baked and steamed in-house, which is why they come to the table pillowy and hot.
The room is simple, modern-rustic, with two large photographs on the wall (one of spice-filled spoons, one of road signs to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), and you seat yourself. The name is Italian for mirage, after the shape-shifting sorceress Morgan le Fay; Babaganov called the place essentially a little mirage in Arizona. Our verdict: it is a neighborhood restaurant first and a kosher restaurant second, and the pita and the malawach would hold up on any block in the city.
Ordering at Fata Morgana
Order the malawach and the shawarma. The malawach ($15.95 at New Times’ first taste in March 2022) is a puff-pastry pancake brushed with oil and fried, served on a wooden tray with a spicy tomato sauce and a bowl of hard-boiled egg and pickled vegetables; it is the plate the reviewers could not get enough of. The chicken shawarma plate ($22.95) comes with two sides, typically rice and grilled vegetables, and the kitchen says it uses 30 seasonings. The Moroccan cigars ($11.95) are four fried beef rolls stood up in a martini glass over tahini, with a gamey note because the meat is cooked in lamb fat. The sabich ($13.95) is a pita stuffed with fried eggplant, egg, hummus, Israeli salad and pickles, with fries; the paper found it under-salted. Baba ghanoush was $8.95. The churros ($11.95) are the dessert to share and, like everything sweet here, dairy-free. Current prices are on the website.
Know the kosher calendar. The restaurant is open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday, and closed all day Saturday. When it opened, hours were noon to 9 Sunday through Thursday with Friday closed entirely, so the Friday half-day is a later addition for people picking up food before Shabbat. It also closes for Jewish holidays; check before a holiday-week visit. Do not expect cheese on anything, butter on the table or a cappuccino after dinner; this is a meat kitchen.
Book or walk in. The website takes online reservations and recommends them, but the room is small and casual and walk-ins seat themselves. Sunday evenings and the hour before closing on Thursday are the crowded windows. Groups of four reciting the Birkat Hamazon after the meal are part of the atmosphere, not an interruption. There is a private-party option and a catering menu, and delivery runs through Uber Eats, Grubhub and DoorDash as well as the restaurant’s own online ordering.
Getting there. Mercer Lane is one block south of Shea between Scottsdale Road and 72nd Street; the strip has a small lot and the street takes the overflow. The ZIP, 85254, is a Phoenix ZIP on a Scottsdale address, so search the street address, not the name. Chabad of Scottsdale’s directory also lists a Fata Market paninis-and-coffee counter across the lane at 7121 E Mercer; the press we found does not say whether it shares ownership. The two old-line Jewish delis on this side of town, Chompie’s on Shea and Goldman’s on Hayden, are not kosher, which is the gap Fata Morgana fills.
The kosher restaurant the Shea Corridor was missing
Scottsdale’s Jewish community has lived mostly on the north side of the city since the 1980s, and the blocks south of Shea between Scottsdale Road and 72nd Street are its densest Orthodox pocket, close enough to walk to shul. What the neighborhood never had, beyond a bakery or a market, was a full-service kosher restaurant you could sit down in on a Sunday night. That is the hole Timi and Babaganov set out to fill in January 2022, taking over a candy shop at 7116 E Mercer Lane and opening a restaurant whose business model is the Jewish calendar: six days of service, a Friday half-day, Shabbat off, holidays off.
New Times sent a reviewer in March 2022 and spent most of the piece explaining why an Israeli menu looks the way it does, with Sephardic pies and burekas, Ashkenazi chicken soup and babka, North African couscous and shakshouka, Iraqi sabich and kubbeh, Yemenite malawach and skhug, all arriving in the same small country within a few decades. Fata Morgana’s four pages are that history in miniature. The paper liked the cigars, the shawarma and especially the malawach, wanted more salt in the sabich and more garlic in the baba ghanoush, and reported the table of regulars who had been to Israel many times and said the food reminded them of there. The kosher travel site YeahThatsKosher carried the news to a national readership the same month. Since then the record is thin, which for a neighborhood restaurant is mostly good news: a Yelp page in the low hundreds of reviews averaging a little over four stars, a listing in Chabad of Scottsdale’s directory, a website that has added online reservations, catering, private parties and a hiring page, and Google reviewers who keep singling out the hummus, the pita and, of all things, the habanero barbecue wings.
What the record does not say is how big the room is, who cooks, or how the owners met. We also could not find a published account of the Fata Market counter across the lane. For a wider look at the community the restaurant serves, see our guide to Jewish Scottsdale.
Honest assessment: judged simply as a Mediterranean restaurant, Fata Morgana is a solid, fairly priced neighborhood place with excellent bread, a couple of dishes you cannot get anywhere else in the city, and a few that are merely fine. Judged as what it actually is, the one glatt kosher sit-down restaurant in Scottsdale, it is irreplaceable, and the fact that it has made it four years in a decade when 2020s restaurants have come and gone fast is the strongest review it has.