What was Fratelli la Bufala?
Fratelli la Bufala was an Italian chain’s attempt to put Naples in a McCormick Ranch shopping center. It opened in spring 2023 at 7300 N Via Paseo del Sur, Suite B, in The Grove, the retail and dining center near Hayden Road and McCormick Parkway in McCormick Ranch, and it was the brand’s second restaurant in the United States, after Miami.
The brand began in Campania in 2003. Its founders, by the company’s account, learned to make DOP buffalo mozzarella from their father, and by the time it reached Arizona the chain had more than 70 restaurants, in Naples, Milan, London, Dubai and Jeddah among other cities. The Scottsdale franchisee was Fabio Sodano, who had been with the brand since the mid-2000s and opened several of its stores in Sicily. He told the Phoenix Business Journal he closed those because of Mafia intimidation and harassment, moved to Scottsdale in the late 2010s to be near family, and started on the Arizona restaurant in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
It took a while. In January 2022 What Now Phoenix found a new liquor license on file and the space still under construction, held up by supply-chain problems, with Sodano hoping to open by March. The restaurant was reported open in April 2023.
What arrived was larger than a pizzeria: 4,200 square feet and 160 seats, a full dining room, a cocktail bar and a patio, with the wood-burning oven in view and a mozzarella high table in the center like the counter of an Italian deli. The menu was Neapolitan pizza and Campanian cooking, built, the company said, on ingredients imported daily from Italy.
It lasted about two and a half years. It closed in September 2025, and another Scottsdale Italian restaurant, DiMaggio’s, moved in within weeks. Our verdict: a real Neapolitan pizza oven in a neighborhood that had few of them, run by a franchisee with an unusual story, which never quite became a neighborhood habit.
What the menu and the room were
The pizza came first. Fratelli la Bufala’s entire identity was Neapolitan pizza from a wood-burning oven, and the Scottsdale room was laid out so diners could watch the pies go in and out. The company’s pitch was the mozzarella: buffalo mozzarella and water-buffalo meat imported from Italy, with “a strong accent on the Neapolitan tradition,” as its opening announcement put it. For comparison, Scottsdale’s Naples-certified pizza is at Pomo Pizzeria in Gainey Village.
Beyond the pizza. The launch menu named gnocchi alla Sorrentina with house ricotta gnocchi; parmigiana in carrozza, a fried eggplant parmigiana ball with tomato sauce and basil; croccantino caprese, fried fior di latte with tomatoes and olive oil on arugula; a grass-fed Angus Arizona Burger; and cannoli filled with ricotta, dark chocolate, pistachio and almond. The starter for the table was Il Tagliere, imported cured meats and cheeses with fig jam, olives, giardiniera and pizza bread from the wood oven. There were vegetarian, gluten-free and children’s pizza and pasta options. The coverage we found never printed prices.
Happy hour at the bar. The bar was the best deal in the house: happy hour at the bar only, 3 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, with house red and white wine, a house espresso martini and a cocktail called the Luna Rossa, plus a mini calzone, calamari fritti and mini burgers.
Timing. At opening it served lunch, happy hour and dinner every day from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., which made it as much a lunch spot as a dinner one. Its neighbors at The Grove included Luci’s and an OBON Sushi Bar Ramen, according to New Times, so it was one stop in a small dining cluster rather than a destination on its own, and the kids’ menu signaled who it expected: McCormick Ranch families more than Old Town visitors.
What regulars learned. Sit where you can see the oven, start with the tagliere or the parmigiana in carrozza, and treat the burger as the concession to Arizona it was named for.
An international chain in a neighborhood center
Fratelli la Bufala was one of the international names that reached Scottsdale in the 2020s, and it chose a neighborhood center rather than Old Town or Kierland. The chain had tried the United States before: its Upper West Side restaurant in Manhattan opened around 2012 and closed in 2014, according to the West Side Rag, and its Miami Beach location was its only other U.S. outpost when Scottsdale opened. “With Scottsdale being an epicenter for massive culinary growth,” he said in the opening announcement, the city was a natural choice for bringing Naples to Arizona.
The record of its run is thin. We found opening coverage and the closing notices, and little in between: no full newspaper review and no published prices. New Times’ November 2025 closings roundup said only that the restaurant had served wood-fired pizzas, pastas and desserts at The Grove, and that DiMaggio’s taking over the space confirmed the closure. Phoenix Magazine’s September 2025 list said it “has closed and will reopen as DiMaggio’s Italian Restaurant.” No reason for the closing was reported.
The successor is a local story. DiMaggio’s began when former New Yorkers Brandon and Michele Gioffre sold hand-pulled mozzarella and zeppole at farmers markets in 2021 as A Taste of Italy, took over The Blind Pig near Hayden and Osborn roads in 2022, and renamed it for a regular turned partner, Frank DiMaggio, a former professional baseball player related to Joe DiMaggio. They closed that room on October 12, 2025, and reopened at The Grove on Saturday, October 18, in a space with more than twice the seats, a kitchen with a wood-fired oven, and a 15-person booth Gioffre calls “The Godfather table.”
Honest assessment: Fratelli la Bufala delivered what a franchise delivers, a consistent product with an imported pedigree, in a room built for 160 that needed to be full. The two-year run, the silence at the end and the swift handoff suggest the numbers did not work, though no one said so on the record. A Southern Italian chain gave way to a Southern Italian-American family restaurant, and McCormick Ranch kept its wood oven.