What is Hand Cut Chophouse?
Hand Cut is the steakhouse that Scottsdale’s biggest nightlife company built when it wanted a restaurant that was mostly about the food. Riot Hospitality Group, the company behind El Hefe, Whiskey Row and Farm & Craft, opened it on the Scottsdale Waterfront in late October 2016, across Camelback Road from Fashion Square.
It started with a split personality. As Hand Cut Burgers & Chophouse, it served burgers fast-casual at lunch and switched to a full-service chophouse at night, with steaks, pork chops and steakhouse sides. Riot sold the meat program hard from day one: grass-finished beef from an Arizona farm at launch, and an enclosed butcher prep area where diners could watch the cutting. The room was marble counters, brass and reclaimed wood.
Ten years on, the name has been shortened to Hand Cut Chophouse and the restaurant now presents itself as a modern steakhouse: hand-cut steaks and chops, specialty burgers, seafood, pastas, shareable sides and a full cocktail bar, with live music and an energetic room. In 2023 Riot took the brand to downtown Nashville, so the Scottsdale address is now the original of two.
It is the most restaurant-first venue in a company better known for bars, and the location, beside the canal and steps from P.F. Chang’s original, gives it a steady stream of shoppers and hotel guests.
Chops, burgers and the timing
Decide what kind of visit it is. Hand Cut runs two ways. At the bar and during happy hour, it is a burger-and-cocktail stop for Fashion Square shoppers. On a dinner reservation, it is a steakhouse, and the order is a hand-cut steak or chop with sides for the table. Midweek, the house runs a “Happiest Meal Wednesdays” promotion, which is worth checking before you book.
Book the right hour. The room skews celebratory on weekend nights, with music and birthday tables. Couples who want conversation should come early on a weeknight. Groups can book group dining or private events, and the Waterfront’s January-to-April season, from the Barrett-Jackson auction through spring training, fills the restaurant row.
Park once. The Waterfront garage is the easy play. After dinner, the canal path runs west to the Soleri Bridge and the Marshall Way galleries, and in November the whole stretch becomes Canal Convergence.
Know the neighbors. Hand Cut sits in the same complex as Maple & Ash, the Waterfront’s big-ticket steakhouse. Hand Cut is the more casual of the two, with burgers on the menu and a lower ceiling on the bill.
A nightlife company’s steakhouse
Riot Hospitality Group was founded in 2010 by Arizona native Ryan Hibbert, and through the 2010s it built much of the modern entertainment district on Saddlebag Trail and Stetson Drive. Its formula was venues that served dinner and then turned into bars, so customers stayed all night. Hand Cut, in 2016, was the company stepping a block north, out of the bar district and onto the Waterfront’s restaurant row, with a concept where the kitchen was the point.
The original pitch was of its moment. Mid-2010s Old Town was full of better-burger concepts and sourcing language, and Hand Cut offered both: grass-finished Arizona beef, a visible butcher, and burgers at lunch prices. The chophouse half of the name was the evening upsell. Over time the steakhouse half won, and the restaurant’s own description now leads with steaks and chops, live music and an “energetic, upscale atmosphere.”
The 2023 Nashville opening, on Demonbreun Street near Broadway, made Hand Cut one of the few Old Town concepts exported under its own name, and Riot’s 2025 opening of Shiv on Camelback showed the company pushing further into high-end dining.
The honest assessment: Hand Cut is not trying to be Scottsdale’s most serious steakhouse; that competition is fought at Maple & Ash and in north Scottsdale. It is a lively, well-located room that does a steak, a burger and a cocktail without fuss, and in Waterfront terms that is a useful thing to be.