What was Gina’s Homemade?
Gina’s Homemade was a fresh-cheese shop at 10953 N Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, Suite 105, in the Palo Verde Square center just north of Shea Boulevard in the Scottsdale Ranch part of town. Gina and Chris Buskirk opened it in June 2012, after nearly two years of selling at the Old Town farmers market, and it was, for the few years it lasted, the only place in Scottsdale where someone pulled mozzarella by hand and sold it to you over a counter.
Gina Buskirk came to the market in late 2010 with biscotti. Her family was from Abruzzo and from Ponza, a small fishing island, by way of Detroit, and she started making cheese the hard way, hundreds of batches of mozzarella at two in the morning in a rented commercial kitchen until it worked. Ricotta came first, then mozzarella, then burrata, mozzarella stretched around a filling of curds and cream and sealed with a love knot, then mascarpone and crème fraîche. The milk was unhomogenized, from a California family farm with pastured cows. Chris, whom she had met at a rehearsal dinner in the mid-1990s, ran the business side; their four children, aged 5 to 13 in 2012, worked the Saturday stall. Edible Phoenix wrote them up in February 2012, and by then the burrata was on the plates of Beckett’s Table and in the cases at AJ’s and Whole Foods.
The shop was the next step, taken for production space as much as retail. It sat almost directly behind Blue Adobe Grille with no sign out front, open Monday through Saturday from 11 to 6, and sold the cheeses, butters (plain, sea salt, truffle), five or six ready-to-bake pizzas, seasonal soups, Olli salami, Chris Bianco’s canned tomatoes, imported pasta, McClendon’s produce and Bob McClendon’s honey. In 2013 it added pasta classes and five waxed aged cheeses.
Then the record stops. No outlet reported a closing; by about the end of 2015 the suite was Jerusalem Bakery, now Lior the Baker. Our verdict: a real artisan business that got its shop too early, and the best cheese Scottsdale has made.
What the shop and the market stall sold
The cheese came first. The method was Gina’s own, learned by trial: curds dipped in hot whey, stretched and kneaded until smooth, shaped into a ball with a love knot and set in ice water so it held its form (“If you put it in room-temperature water, the cheese flattens out,” she told Edible Phoenix). The burrata was the same mozzarella stretched around a mixture of curds and cream. Finished cheeses went into brine, which softened them and stretched shelf life from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. The line in 2012 was mozzarella, burrata, ricotta, mascarpone, crème fraîche and Bene Con Tutto, a fluffy herbed spread like fromage blanc that Chris recommended on crusted bread, hamburgers and morning eggs. Butters came plain, sea salt and truffle.
Then the pizzas. A customer at the market asked, “You already make great cheese, why not pizza?” and the shop opened with five or six ready-to-bake pizzas, margherita or ricotta with arugula among them, built on the house cheese and Olli salami from Virginia. Two or three seasonal soups were packaged for takeout; the biscotti that started the business stayed on the shelf and sold online in gift boxes for out-of-state customers.
The 2013 additions. In April 2013 the shop offered pasta-making classes, and in June it added five mild aged cheeses made scamorza-style, coated in wax and hung by string, each flavored: Truly Truffle (black truffle), Rhone Rhanger (herbes de Provence), Café Ole (espresso), Scarborough Fair (honey and lavender) and Keep It Green (jalapeño), in 4- to 8-ounce pieces at $6 to $12, sold at the shop, AJ’s, Whole Foods, Beckett’s Table and Grassroots Kitchen & Tap. Thanksgiving desserts and a June “food rave” made the New Times listings the same year.
Where regulars bought it. The Saturday stall at the Old Town market remained the public face; AJ’s and Whole Foods carried the cheeses and the family sampled there; and the restaurants, Beckett’s Table, Praying Monk, Prado and Grassroots, put the name on their menus, which is where many Valley diners first met it. Phoenix Magazine’s 2013 Ultimate Food Guide listed the shop.
The pantry. Beyond the house products the shelves were a small Italian grocery: Chris Bianco’s tomatoes, imported dry pasta, olive oils and vinegars, salamis, and organic produce from McClendon’s farm. It was the kind of store that Scottsdale’s 2010s food scene produced in Phoenix and Gilbert more often than at home, and it was a mile from the 101.
A market stall that got a shop, and the record that stops
The Buskirks’ story is the farmers-market story of the early 2010s, when the Old Town Saturday market was turning home cooks into brands. Gina’s biscotti became cheese; the cheese found chefs; the chefs’ menus made the name; and within two years of the first stall a family with four children had signed a lease in Palo Verde Square. New Times’ Nikki Buchanan reported the opening in June 2012 with the detail that the shop had no sign yet, and the PhoenixBites blog that July told readers the products were finally available somewhere other than the market and a few grocers.
The location made sense for production and less for retail. Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard north of Shea is a corridor of medical offices and neighborhood centers; Palo Verde Square’s suites face a parking lot behind a restaurant, and a cheese shop with no sign, closed Sundays, depended on people who already knew the name. The wholesale side was the real business. Edible Phoenix had Chris pointing at his wife and saying, “This is our future,” and the future, as far as the record shows, was the cases at AJ’s and Whole Foods and the burrata plates at Beckett’s Table.
What happened after 2013 nobody wrote down. The last press we found is the June 2013 cheese launch and the pasta classes. By about December 2015 the suite had a new tenant, Jerusalem Bakery AZ, which New Times described as four months old in April 2016 and which became Lior the Baker in 2017; the Ben-Shushans have never mentioned their predecessor in print. The ginashomemade.com site stayed up selling biscotti and gift boxes until at least November 2020, the last time the Internet Archive captured it, which suggests the business outlived the storefront in some form. A business directory later placed the company at a Paradise Valley home address. Yelp lists the shop as closed with its old weekday hours still posted; Tripadvisor agrees. We could not confirm whether anyone still makes the cheese.
That silence is typical of the artisan businesses of the decade. They opened in New Times’ food blog and closed in nobody’s; the lost-restaurant lists cover dining rooms, not cheese counters. Gina’s Homemade belongs on them anyway, because for three or four years a Scottsdale strip center had a cheesemaker in it, and the city has not had one since.
Honest assessment: Gina’s Homemade made the best burrata in Arizona, by the account of the chefs who bought it, and it ran a retail shop that the neighborhood did not need. The lesson is the one the Old Town market keeps teaching: the stall and the wholesale account are the business, and the storefront is the risk. The suite now holds a kosher bakery that is open three mornings a week and wins awards, which is the right kind of successor.