What is IL Bosco Pizza?
IL Bosco Pizza at 11108 N Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, Suite 114, is the north-of-Shea outpost of a pizzeria that has been one of Scottsdale’s quiet constants since May 2012. The original is on Becker Lane, a side street northwest of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard, in the row next to Handlebar J. Founder Bill Forrest built it around a single idea, a 900-degree Valoriani wood-fired oven, and sold the business in 2019 to Jeff Carlberg and John Dorsey, who have spent the years since opening copies: Roosevelt Row in Phoenix, this one in the Ancala Village center at Frank Lloyd Wright and Via Linda, and a south Tempe shop in 2025.
The Ancala location took over the former Spinato’s, announced in April 2024 for later that year. It serves dinner only, from 4 p.m., which tells you what it is: a neighborhood pizza room for Scottsdale Ranch, Ancala and the subdivisions along Via Linda, where families eat at 6 and the bar fills with people who walked over. The room is bright and modern with a large marble bar that looks into the pizza kitchen, so the oven is the show.
The menu is the Becker Lane menu: more than two dozen pizzas, hand-stretched, topped with imported cheeses, house-made sauces and seasonal vegetables and meats, plus antipasti, salads, roasted vegetables with burrata and a short list of wine, draft beer and cocktails. The company makes a point of gluten-free crust and vegan cheese. The signature pie is the Divina, prosciutto and sopressata with caramelized onion, peppadew and serrano.
Our verdict: not the most ambitious Neapolitan pizza in the city, but the most dependable one east of the 101, in a part of Scottsdale that had been waiting for a wood oven.
How to eat at IL Bosco Ancala
Order the Divina and one white pie. The Divina (prosciutto, sopressata, caramelized onions, peppadew peppers, serrano peppers, mozzarella, red sauce) is the pizza the company puts forward as its signature and the one that shows the oven best: leopard-spotted crust, a little char, a thin center. Reviewers at this location also name the Valentina; at Becker Lane the Emilia with peaches has a following. Start with the roasted seasonal vegetables with burrata or the Caprese with homemade pesto. The company does not publish prices on its website, and we have not seen a printed menu with them, so budget as you would for any mid-range pizza room.
Use the happy hour. It runs Monday through Friday, 4 to 5:30 p.m., the first stretch of every weekday service, with a select list of wines by the glass and bottle, beer on tap and cocktails. The marble bar facing the oven is the best seat in the house at that hour and the easiest to get.
Timing. Hours are Monday through Saturday 4 to 9 p.m. and Sunday 4 to 8 p.m. There is no lunch. The room is listed on OpenTable as IL Bosco North Scottsdale and gets busy on Friday nights, when one reviewer found it nearly full; Saturdays vary and Sunday is the quiet night, with an early close. Takeout and delivery run through the company’s online ordering, and catering for 20 to more than 250 people is arranged by email.
Getting there. Ancala Village is the shopping center at Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard and Via Linda, near the Ancala Country Club neighborhoods. Park in the center’s lot. For a comparison, the Mercado at Scottsdale Ranch farther west along Via Linda has the lake and the older neighborhood restaurants, but no wood oven.
What to skip. Do not come for a long cocktail night; the bar is short and the kitchen’s rhythm is pizza in, pizza out. And do not expect the Roosevelt Row lunch hours here: the Phoenix and Tempe shops open at 11:30 on weekends, the two Scottsdale shops do not.
The oven on Becker Lane and the spaces it grew into
IL Bosco belongs to the 2010s wave that taught Scottsdale the difference between a pizza restaurant and a pizzeria. When Forrest opened in 2012, the city’s Neapolitan reference points were Old Town rooms like Grazie and the Bianco empire in Phoenix; north of Shea, pizza meant chains and the family-style Spinato’s, which was good at what it did but not this. Becker Lane was a strange address for a destination, a quiet residential street behind a honky-tonk, and that was part of its charm. The oven did the marketing.
The 2019 sale to Carlberg and Dorsey changed the ambition without changing the recipe. Their first attempt at a second shop, at Higley and Chandler Heights in Gilbert, fell through; the next, on Roosevelt Row at Fifth Street, worked, and gave the brand a downtown Phoenix audience. The Ancala shop was the third, announced on the company’s own website and reported by What Now Phoenix in April 2024 as a replacement for Spinato’s, to open later in the year. By August 2025, when Mouth by Southwest covered the fourth location in the Changing Hands plaza in south Tempe, the Frank Lloyd Wright and Via Linda shop was simply listed as open. The press we found does not record the opening day, and the company’s site does not either, so we date it to 2024 on the company’s stated schedule.
What the move north says about the Scottsdale Ranch corridor is worth noting. Via Linda and Frank Lloyd Wright have had the same shopping centers since the 1990s, and their restaurant turnover tends to be chain for chain. A locally owned pizzeria taking a Spinato’s is the kind of swap the neighborhood had stopped expecting. Spinato’s itself remains a Valley institution elsewhere, and the two brands now sit a few miles apart serving different ideas of a pie.
The record is thin in the ways a neighborhood pizza room’s record usually is. There are no major reviews of the Ancala location, no awards, and no owner interviews beyond the expansion coverage. What there is: a 4.7 rating across dozens of OpenTable reviews, an official site that lists the hours and the oven, and a company that has grown from one shop to four without changing the menu.
Honest assessment: IL Bosco is a very good neighborhood pizzeria rather than a great restaurant, and at Ancala Village that is exactly the right thing to be. The crust is the real Valoriani article, the toppings are honest, the bar is small and the hours are short. If you live east of the 101 it is the best pizza you can reach in ten minutes; if you are staying in Old Town it is not worth the drive when the Becker Lane original is closer and identical.