What is Guido’s Chicago Meats & Deli?
Guido’s Chicago Meats & Deli is the Italian grocery with a cafe attached at 10893 N Scottsdale Road, Suite 121, in the Scottsdale Shea Center on the west side of Scottsdale Road between Shea Boulevard and Cactus. James and Theresa Guido and their son Joe, then 26, opened it in 1983, and Joe and his wife Araceli run it today, which makes it one of the oldest family restaurants on the Shea corridor.
The family was in the grocery trade long before Arizona. In 1957 four Guido brothers, Joseph, Luigi, James and Pasquale, opened Guido’s Finer Foods near Cumberland and Lawrence in Chicago’s western suburbs, and over the next twenty years added seven more stores in Berkeley and Addison before selling up and leaving Illinois for warmer weather. (The website also says “in business since 1947,” a date its own history page does not explain.) In Scottsdale the deli began as a 1,400-square-foot takeout counter on what Joe calls the outskirts of town: “We got here right after the cowboys and Indians left,” he told the Scottsdale Progress in 2021. “They were riding horses behind the store.”
James added seating, which the Chicago stores never had, Theresa contributed her home recipes, and the shop grew in place to more than 3,000 square feet with about 50 seats, booths in the back, a deli case in front and a mini-mart of imports along the wall. Everything is made in-house: the Italian sausage, the mozzarella, the sauces and dressings, the lasagna, the roast beef and the Italian beef cut daily from top round. Araceli, who is Mexican, runs the desserts, the Italian cookies and the arancini, and makes tamales about every six weeks for a call list of regulars.
It is a Chicago deli, so the sandwiches are Italian beef and sausage, there is broasted chicken, and the wings are big. Arizona PBS put it on Check, Please! Arizona in February 2025. Our verdict: the best Italian sub and the best Italian beef in Scottsdale, in a room that has not needed to change in forty years.
Ordering at Guido’s
Order the sandwiches. The menu lists subs whole and half, and the half is a full lunch. The Chicago Italian combo, house-roasted Italian beef and homemade sausage together, is $22.99 whole, $12.99 half; the Chicago-style roast beef with Italian beef gravy and mozzarella is $17.99 / $12.99; the homemade Italian sausage sub is $16.99 / $11.99; the cold Italian sub of salami, mortadella, capocollo and provolone with Italian dressing and onions is $16.99 / $11.99. New Times in 2014 found the Italian beef thicker and chewier than Portillo’s “but tastes better,” and the Italian sub “satisfying, if salty.” Meatball and eggplant parmesan subs come on bread from a bakery up the street.
Then the chicken and the wings. Broasted chicken, pressure-fried, is the dish the shop says has put it on television three times: a two-piece meal is $12.99, four pieces $15.99, pieces by the piece. It is best eaten in the room; New Times found the white meat dry when it had sat for takeout. The buffalo wings are large, sauced with green onions in the mix, and the Check, Please! guest in 2025 called them the best he had had in a while. He also praised the chicken parmesan and took leftovers home.
Dinner. Pastas are priced lunch and dinner: lasagna with house sausage $17.99 / $19.99, gnocchi pomodoro the same, spaghetti with meatballs or sausage $16.99 / $18.99, linguini and clam sauce $22.99 / $24.99, which the menu calls a family favorite for more than 30 years, and dinner-only frutti di mare at $39.99. Pizzas start at $15.99 for a 12-inch cheese, $19.99 for 16 inches, with a sausage combo at $29.99 and a $49.99 family special. Salads run $13.99 for a Caesar to $19.99 for the antipasto. Dessert is Araceli’s: cannoli, sfogliatelle, biscotti, fig cookies, cheesecake.
Timing and the line. Hours are 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, to 10 on Friday and Saturday, closed Sunday. The lunch line starts before noon and reviewers have complained about it for years; 11:30 on a weekday is the window. Takeout was built in from the start, which is why Joe Guido says the pandemic cost him only one slow month.
Shop on the way out. The mini-mart is the original business: prosciutto, cheeses, tomatoes and oils from Italy, frozen ravioli and stuffed shells from Perfect Pasta in Chicago and Pastosa in New York, ladyfingers and mascarpone, gelato. It is a smaller, older cousin of the counter at AJ’s, stocked for people who grew up on the specific brands.
A Chicago grocery family on the edge of 1983 Scottsdale
In 1983 the Scottsdale Shea Center sat at the north end of the built city. Shea Boulevard was the line past which the 1980s subdivisions were still being graded, and a Chicago family opening an Italian grocery there was betting that the transplants would follow. They did. Joe Guido’s regulars from day one are now bringing grandchildren, and he has catered a customer’s wedding and, a quarter century later, the wedding of that customer’s daughter.
The family’s method was the one that worked in the suburbs of Chicago: a grocery first, with a counter for sandwiches, and the trust that comes from making the sausage yourself. The difference in Arizona was the seating. James Guido added tables because, as the history page puts it, that was a feature the Chicago stores lacked, and the takeout counter became a restaurant with a deli and a catering business attached. Joe, who learned the trade from his father’s stores and says he has been in it more than 50 years, took the business over as his parents aged; Theresa’s cookie recipe is still in use, and she still visited the shop as of the family’s own account.
The press has treated Guido’s as a constant rather than a discovery. New Times’ Eric Schaefer, who ate here as a child in the mid-1980s, came back in June 2014 to check his memory and found the marinara “resplendent and nuanced,” the lasagna a standout and the meatballs on bread from John Anthoney’s up the street; the shop made New Times’ Scottsdale and Shea dining guide in 2019 and 2021, which counted the 3,000 square feet and 50 seats. The Scottsdale Progress marked 38 years in April 2021 with Joe’s line about cowboys. Arizona PBS brought Check, Please! in February 2025, and Joe’s quote there, that it is a place where you can be assured you will feel welcome, is the same pitch he has made for four decades.
What the record does not settle: the website’s “since 1947” alongside the history page’s 1957, the ages of the next generation, and whether Joe’s children, who help out, will take over. He has said he has no plans to retire. Along this stretch of Scottsdale Road the deli has watched the rest of the corridor turn over twice; the Jewish delis of the city, Chompie’s and Goldman’s, are its only peers for age and for a counter you shop as well as eat at.
Honest assessment: Guido’s is not refined and does not try to be; the room is plain, the portions are big, the chicken can be dry if you take it home, and the line is real. It is also the most authentically Chicago Italian food in the Valley, made by the family whose name is on the door, at prices that have crept up but still land a full lunch under $15. If you have one deli visit on the Shea corridor, it is this one.