What is Fellow Osteria?
Fellow Osteria is the Italian restaurant on the ground floor of SkySong, the ASU innovation center at the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and McDowell Road, at 1455 N Scottsdale Road, Suite 100. It opened on Friday, December 14, 2018, the work of Nicholas Campisano and Joshua James, the pair who had opened The Clever Koi on Central Avenue in Phoenix in 2013 and a second one in Gilbert in 2016 under the name Born & Raised Hospitality. Fellow was their first room in South Scottsdale and their first that was not Asian.
They did not pretend to know Italian cooking. The opening menu was built in consultation with Claudio Urciuoli, the Campania-born chef of Pa’La whose Valley résumé ran through Pizzeria Bianco, Taggia, Noca and Noble Eatery, and he shared what New Times called culinary and supply-chain intelligence on everything from buffalo-milk mozzarella to pasta pans. The result, by the paper’s April 2019 review, was a restaurant whose best dishes channeled an Italian ethos of great ingredients and minimal technique: Swiss chard ravioli in sage butter, orecchiette made from grano arso, the burnt-wheat flour of Puglia, and a margherita on dough cold-proofed for about 48 hours under Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes.
The room is 140 seats of blond wood and white under a high ceiling, with floor-to-ceiling glass looking onto the campus, a shaded patio with stand-up shuffleboard and tables on wheels, and a three-sided bar whose centerpiece is a wooden cube carved with three-dimensional landscapes of Arizona plazas, Tucson’s barrios and old Bisbee among them. Outside the windows is SkySong’s 2,000-square-foot community garden, planted with Agriscapes, which supplies the kitchen’s basil, chives, rosemary and mint and once supplied the begonia petals the servers handed out at the end of a meal.
Who it is for: the SkySong offices at lunch, the neighborhood at dinner, and anyone in the south end of the city who wants a pizza and a cocktail without driving to Old Town. The pizzas run $20 to $23 in 2026, the house pastas $20 to $23, and there is a happy hour every day until 6. Our verdict: a good neighborhood Italian room with a better bar than it needs, and the best-value lunch in this part of Scottsdale for seven years running.
How to eat at Fellow Osteria
Lunch is the deal. Since 2019 the weekday draw has been Lunch Love, half a pizza and half a salad; Phoenix Magazine found it at $9.99 that June, The Infatuation called it the best and most reasonably priced lunch in the area at $10 in February 2020, and it is $15 Monday through Friday until 4 p.m. in 2026. The sandwiches, all $18, are the other lunch order: a spicy chicken with blue cheese and Calabrian hot sauce, a chicken Milanese with provolone, a burger with bacon and Dijonnaise, and a grinder of pepperoni, salami picante and speck on a baguette with giardiniera.
Order the pizza and a house pasta. The margherita ($20) is the benchmark, the same 48-hour dough the critics wrote about. The salami picante with Calabrian chiles and honey chili oil ($22), the speck with crimini mushrooms and truffle ($21) and the Miali, a prosciutto, pepperoni and sausage pie ($23), are the step up. Pastas on the May 2026 menu include a cacio e pepe on spaghetti alla chitarra ($20), a carbonara on bucatini with guanciale and snap peas ($22), a pork and beef bolognese on tagliatelle ($23) and a vodka tomato cream maccheroni with guanciale and whipped ricotta ($20). Start with the calamari fritti, grilled or crispy, with romesco ($16) or the saffron arancini ($15). The secondi are a chicken parmesan ($26) and steak frites at $26 or $36; New Times found the steak the weak dish in 2019.
Drink early. Joshua James is a cocktail bartender first, and the bar keeps seven Fernets among a long amaro shelf. The 2019 signature was the Zenzero, peated Scotch with ginger, lemon, passion fruit and Amaro Montenegro under a mound of crushed ice and a sprig of garden rosemary, $11 then. Happy hour runs daily from open until 6 p.m.: $11 classic cocktails, wine by the glass and pitchers, and $16 pizzas. Monday through Wednesday the Flock Together deal is $70 for a pizza, a large salad and four classic cocktails or a bottle of wine. It is on our happy hour guide for the south end.
Sunday brunch. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sundays, with bottles of wine half price all day: a breakfast sandwich on brioche with bacon, egg and maple aioli ($14), mascarpone scrambled eggs with mozzarella ($17), a sausage-and-gravy pizza with a runny egg ($21) and a flat iron steak and eggs. It is a patio brunch when the weather allows, and one of the few on this stretch; see our brunch list.
Timing and parking. Hours are Monday through Thursday 11 to 9, Friday 11 to 10, Saturday 3 to 10 (no Saturday lunch), Sunday 10 to 9. Phoenix Magazine’s 2019 warning stands: the turn into SkySong off Scottsdale Road is easy to overshoot. Park in the campus lots and walk toward the white sail; the Element hotel is on the same campus. Reserve on OpenTable for Friday nights and brunch; weekday lunch walks in.
The Italian room that came with ASU’s innovation center
SkySong is the reason Fellow exists. The 42-acre campus opened in March 2008 on the grave of Los Arcos Mall, the south Scottsdale shopping center that had died in the late 1990s, and for its first decade its ground-floor restaurant spaces were the hardest part of the project to fill: office workers eat lunch and go home, and the surrounding neighborhoods of South Scottsdale were only beginning the turnaround that the campus was meant to start. When Campisano and James signed for Suite 100 in 2018, they were betting that the neighborhood had caught up.
They built for both audiences at once. The December 2018 announcement promised grab-and-go salads and sandwiches and premium coffee for the offices, full-service dinners for the neighborhood, Sweet Republic ice cream for both, and catering for SkySong’s events. The tables on wheels and the shuffleboard were office-party furniture; the carved cube at the bar and the amaro shelf were for the dinner crowd. Clever Ramen, a sister concept, opened next door in February 2019, so for a while the two Clever Koi owners held the whole corner.
The press was warm and clear-eyed. New Times’ Chris Malloy, in April 2019, admired the ravioli, the pizza and the cocktails, found the grano arso orecchiette buried under too much potato and the steak under-seasoned, and concluded that the restaurant was in novice but capable hands. Phoenix Magazine’s happy-hour column that June reported a room that was quiet at 5 and packed by 6. The Infatuation’s February 2020 note about the lunch deal was published weeks before the pandemic emptied the SkySong offices, which must have hurt a restaurant built around them; the record we found does not describe how Fellow got through 2020, only that it did, and that by 2026 it was calling itself Fellow Osteria & Pizzeria on the review sites, with the pizza oven now the headline.
What the record does not say is who runs the kitchen day to day. Urciuoli was a consultant, not the chef, and no later coverage names a successor. The ownership has not changed, and the menu has drifted toward the pizzeria-and-red-sauce center, with spaghetti and meatballs and chicken parmesan where the grano arso used to be, which is the usual path for a neighborhood Italian room that wants to be full on a Tuesday.
Honest assessment: Fellow is not a destination the way the Old Town rooms try to be, and it is better for it. The pizza is still the best on the south end of Scottsdale Road, the pastas are honest at $20 to $23, the bar is a cut above the food, and the lunch deal has survived seven years and a pandemic, which says more than any review. Its real competition is not Italian at all but the vegan burger shop a few blocks east at Hayden and McDowell, UNiQ Burger, and the brunch room on Hayden, and together they make the case that south Scottsdale in the 2020s finally has a dining scene of its own.