What is Hash Kitchen?
Somewhere around 2015, Scottsdale decided brunch was a lifestyle, and Hash Kitchen is the restaurant that made it official.
Chef Joey Maggiore opened the original in July 2015 at the Shops at Gainey Village with his wife Cristina and partner Flora Tersigni, and the pitch was shameless in the best way: a brunch-only restaurant engineered for maximum morning joy. The build-your-own Bloody Mary bar — a groaning altar of 50-plus toppings, from spice rims to bacon to entire garnish skewers — became the icon. The Cap’n Crunch French toast became the photo. The DJ became the weekend soundtrack. And Scottsdale, a town that has never once been accused of restraint, adopted the whole package instantly.
There’s a serious restaurant pedigree underneath the confetti. Joey is the son of the late Tomaso Maggiore, the Roman-born chef whose Tomaso’s defined Phoenix Italian fine dining for decades. Hash Kitchen is what happens when a kid raised in white-tablecloth kitchens aims all that training at hangovers: the hashes are legitimately cooked, the excess is deliberate, and the operation runs tighter than its party exterior suggests.
Eating there on a Saturday feels like brunch crossed with a club opening — loud, celebratory, slightly absurd, completely Scottsdale. It worked so well it spawned locations across the Valley and, after a 2022 announcement, beyond Arizona. The Gainey original is where the formula was invented.
How to do Hash Kitchen right
Respect the wait math. Weekend mid-morning is peak — the lobby fills with birthday squads, golf groups, and bachelorette parties in matching shirts, and the wait gets real between roughly 9:30 and noon. Get on the list before you arrive hungry, go early, or go on a weekday, when the same menu comes with a fraction of the crowd and the staff has time to talk you through the Bloody Mary bar like sommeliers of brunch.
The Bloody Mary bar is a system, not a suggestion. You order the base at the table, then build at the bar: rims, spices, hot sauces, pickled everything, meats, cheeses, skewers. Veterans build tall but coherent — a theme, not a landfill. It’s the rare restaurant gimmick that’s actually fun the third time.
Order in balance. The menu splits into sweet spectacle and savory substance. The Cap’n Crunch French toast is the mandatory first-visit order, but it’s dessert wearing a breakfast costume — pair it with one of the namesake hashes, which are the kitchen’s real work: skillets built on crispy potatoes, slow-cooked meats, and properly cooked eggs. Splitting one of each per pair is the move; soloing the French toast is a rookie sugar crash.
The room itself is part of the show — big, bright, and built for groups, with weekend DJs pushing the energy somewhere between bottomless-mimosa and actual nightclub. If that sounds exhausting, aim for a Tuesday. If it sounds perfect, you are the target demographic, and Gainey Village on a Saturday is your Coachella.
The Maggiore dynasty and the brunchification of Scottsdale
Hash Kitchen’s deeper story is generational. Tomaso Maggiore arrived from Rome and built Tomaso’s into one of Phoenix’s defining fine-dining rooms — the kind of place that taught the Valley what serious Italian service looked like. His son Joey grew up in that world, and Hash Kitchen was his declaration that the second generation would speak the Valley’s new language: casual, visual, high-energy, built for how people actually celebrate now. The bet paid off spectacularly, and the Maggiore Group’s newer concepts all trace their DNA to the Gainey Village original.
The timing was flawless. By 2015, Scottsdale’s breakfast scene was already crowded with beloved daytime rooms — pancake houses, diners, and the first wave of chef-driven morning spots like Breakfast Club and Morning Squeeze in Old Town, with stalwarts like Butterfield’s Pancake House serving the classicists. What nobody had built was brunch as event — a room where the meal came with a soundtrack, a ritual, and a reason to dress up. Hash Kitchen imported nightlife mechanics into daylight hours and discovered that Scottsdale’s party infrastructure had simply been lying dormant before 11 a.m.
It also caught the Instagram economy at its exact inflection point. The Bloody Mary bar and cereal-crusted French toast weren’t just menu items; they were content, engineered to be photographed and shared. Every garnish skewer that hit a feed was free advertising, and the restaurant scaled on that flywheel — more Valley locations, then the 2022 national expansion announcement, all from a strip-center brunch spot at Scottsdale and Doubletree.
The honest assessment: this is maximalism, and it knows it. Purists who want a quiet three-dollar diner breakfast should head elsewhere and will be happier for it. But dismissing Hash Kitchen as a gimmick misses the craft — the hashes are genuinely good, the operation is disciplined, and the Maggiore family has now shaped two entirely different eras of Valley dining. The first ran on tableside Caesar. This one runs on bacon skewers and a beat drop, and it’s just as much a Scottsdale institution.