What is Franco’s Italian Caffe?
On a stretch of Scottsdale Road better known for brunch parties and late-night tacos, Franco’s Italian Caffe is the old-school room: dinner only, five nights a week, a Florentine menu and a chef-owner who has been cooking for Scottsdale since 1987. It sits at 4327 N Scottsdale Rd, a few doors from The Montauk and across the road from Diego Pops, and it feels nothing like either.
Franco Fazzuoli was born in Florence in 1942, ran three well-reviewed restaurants in Manhattan, and opened Franco’s Trattoria in Scottsdale in 1987. After a stretch back in New York he returned and opened this restaurant in October 2012, in the space that Bravo Bistro had held for 18 years. His longtime chef Steve Martin, who started with him at the first Trattoria, came too.
The cooking is Tuscan in the plain sense: good ingredients, short ingredient lists, nothing piled on. The headliner is the bistecca Fiorentina, the Florentine T-bone, in 24- and 32-ounce cuts. Around it are pastas like fettuccine tartufo, linguine and clams and house ravioli, secondi like a 16-ounce veal chop with mushrooms and demi-glace, rack of lamb and chicken paillard, and desserts like tiramisu and the Governor’s chocolate cake. The other draw is the wine list, which earned a 2-star accreditation from the World’s Best Wine Lists awards in 2025.
How to eat at Franco’s
Order the steak for two. The bistecca is priced like a centerpiece (the 32-ounce cut is the one to split), and it’s the dish the kitchen is proudest of. Start with a shared pasta. The fettuccine tartufo is the richest, the capellini with tomato and basil the lightest, and whole-wheat and gluten-free pasta are available.
Ask about the specials. When the restaurant opened, the nightly specials included burrata with prosciutto, pappardelle with wild boar ragù and risotto with lobster. The specials board is where the kitchen’s Florentine instincts show most.
Let the wine list do some work. It’s the restaurant’s best-known asset outside the steak. Tell the staff what you’re eating and what you’d like to spend; that works better than paging through the list alone.
Plan around the hours. Franco’s serves dinner only: 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 5 to 9:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday. Takeout orders are taken only from 5 to 5:30 p.m. Book ahead for the weekend. Reviewers often mention the valet; otherwise the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and the Fifth Avenue public lots are a short walk.
Make an evening of the block. A glass at Wine Girl, a block and a half south on the same side of the road, before dinner, or a nightcap at The Ends on Stetson Drive after, turns dinner into a night out without leaving the few blocks around Scottsdale Road. The Old Town on foot note covers the walk.
Fifty years of Franco
Fazzuoli’s own telling starts in Florence. He came from a family of Tuscan landowners, washed dishes as a teenager, served as a paratrooper in the Italian Army, and in 1966 co-founded a trattoria in Florence that was destroyed in the Arno flood that November. He stayed on to help the “mud angels” rescue the city’s art, then left for America at 25. In New York he worked as a dishwasher, busboy and night cook, and in 1975 opened Il Ponte Vecchio, followed by Zinno in Greenwich Village and Cent’Anni, the restaurant that made his name.
In 1987 he moved to Arizona and opened Franco’s Trattoria at Hayden Road and Mountain View with Steve Martin, a young chef he had met at a barbecue. It outgrew that space and moved to a larger site at Hayden and Via de Ventura, and Martin spent summers in Florence learning from Fazzuoli’s mother. In 2003 a Franco’s Italian Caffe opened at the Camelback Esplanade; it was sold in 2007, when the family moved to New York so their daughters could train in ballet, one of them at the School of American Ballet. There Fazzuoli and Martin ran Trattoria Toscana in the West Village.
The family came home first, and Fazzuoli followed after a year and a half of commuting. Backed by local investors, he took over the former Bravo Bistro at 4327 N Scottsdale Rd, refurbished it, and soft-opened on October 19, 2012. Phoenix Magazine’s review described the cooking as “top-notch ingredients prepared simply.”
That puts Franco’s in an odd spot on today’s Scottsdale Road. Most of its neighbors arrived in the 2010s as high-energy concepts built for groups and weekends. Franco’s is a chef-owner restaurant whose Scottsdale story starts in the 1980s, when Fazzuoli’s Trattoria was one of the few places in town cooking Tuscan food the Tuscan way. It’s one of the last links on this block to that era, and it’s still serving the same food.