What was Forno 301 Scottsdale?
Forno 301 Scottsdale was a sit-down Italian restaurant with a drive-thru window, and it is the only one we know of in Scottsdale. It stood at 7111 E Thomas Road, on the southwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Thomas in South Scottsdale, in a building that had been a Filiberto’s, which explains the window.
The owner was Luca Gagliano, who grew up in San Remo on the Ligurian coast and opened the original Forno 301 on Central Avenue in Phoenix in 2015. In November 2020, with dining rooms barely open, he took the old Filiberto’s and opened Slice Eat, a pandemic answer to a pandemic problem: wood-fired pizza by the slice or the pie, eggplant parmigiana, pasta and, as New Times put it, gelato to rival Dairy Queen, all ordered from the car.
It did not hold his interest. “I didn’t enjoy the concept too much; it was too fast-food-ey,” he told Phoenix New Times, and in August 2022 he turned the building into a second Forno 301, with the full menu, a dining room behind big windows onto the kitchen, a long bar and a covered patio. The drive-thru stayed, so you could still order cavatelli bolognese, prosciutto-and-fig bruschetta and a bottle of Cabernet without leaving the driver’s seat.
The Scottsdale restaurant closed in December 2025, after five years and two concepts, and the press we found does not name a successor in the building. The Phoenix original, at 1616 N Central Avenue, remains open and still serves the same handmade pasta and wood-fired pizza. Our verdict: it was a good neighborhood Italian place, run by the same owner who cooked at the original, in a fast-food building, and the window was never a gimmick; it was the building telling the owner how to survive 2020.
What the menu and the window were
Order ahead. Gagliano’s own advice, given to New Times when Forno 301 opened here, was to call in advance or order online, because almost everything was made to order. At the window, he said, it took 8 to 15 minutes, and the staff handed out a scoop of gelato or a water while you waited.
The pizzas and pastas. The kitchen made more than a dozen wood-fired pizzas at about $15 to $16 each. The pasta was made by hand in-house, chef and bartender Andre Casasola said: cavatelli bolognese, fettuccine carbonara, gnocchi with pesto (San Remo is in Liguria, where pesto was born, Gagliano pointed out), and ravioli stuffed with ricotta and spinach in butter and sage, to which Casasola suggested adding spicy olive oil and crushed pepper.
The dish he was proudest of. Gagliano singled out the eggplant parmigiana: sliced eggplant layered with tomato sauce, spices, mozzarella and parmesan, baked in the wood-fired oven and served on a wooden board. In Italy it is a main course or a starter, he said, and it is not served with pasta. The Mista salad of mixed greens, heirloom tomatoes, goat cheese and walnuts in champagne dressing was the light option.
The room and the patio. Inside, wine-cask remnants hung on the walls as art, barrels made tabletops, and a floor-to-ceiling graphic of a pizza in the oven met you at the door. The long bar had windows that let bartenders pass drinks to the covered patio, which had misters and dog bowls, which made it a dog owner’s stop (see our guide to Scottsdale with dogs). The cocktail to order was the San Remo: gin, lemon and Aperol.
Hours and the crowd. When Forno 301 opened here in 2022 it ran 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. The customers were neighbors from the south Scottsdale grid and commuters on Thomas, not tourists; Old Town’s Italian rooms, from Grimaldi’s to Pizzeria Virtù, were a short drive north and drew a different crowd.
The Filiberto’s that learned Italian
The corner of Scottsdale and Thomas sits on the busiest north-south road in the city, about a mile south of Old Town. A drive-thru building there is worth more as a drive-thru than as anything else, and Gagliano’s first move in November 2020 treated it that way. Slice Eat was a slice, a pie or a plate of pasta, handed through the old Filiberto’s window to people who did not want to sit indoors. It opened in the same month New Times was cataloging a wave of second locations and pandemic pivots across the Valley.
The second move, in August 2022, was the more interesting one. Instead of selling the drive-thru as a novelty, Gagliano brought the whole Forno 301 operation east from Central Avenue: the handmade pasta, the wood-fired oven, the wine, and Casasola, who had cooked at the Phoenix restaurant since 2015. New Times’ write-up treated the window as the hook, and it was, but the restaurant behind it was a real one. That makes it a small landmark of the 2020s in Scottsdale: a pandemic shortcut that its owner kept after the pandemic because customers liked it.
It closed in December 2025. New Times listed it among that month’s closings, noting that the restaurant had gone through multiple evolutions, that the drive-thru had survived the elevation of the concept, and that the central Phoenix original remained open. The report gave no reason, and we did not find one from the owner. The record we found also does not say what, if anything, has replaced it; directory listings for 7111 E Thomas Road simply read closed.
Honest assessment: Forno 301 Scottsdale was better than its building and never quite escaped it. The food was the same handmade pasta and wood-fired pizza that made the Phoenix room a downtown fixture, but a dining room behind a fast-food window on Thomas Road is a hard sell to anyone who has not already eaten there. It is worth remembering as the place that proved you could get eggplant parmigiana and a bottle of Cabernet through a car window in Scottsdale, and that a chef from San Remo was willing to try.