What is Kitchen18?
Kitchen18 is the restaurant that lets an observant family eat out in Scottsdale. It occupies a storefront at 10211 N Scottsdale Road, on the east side of Scottsdale Road just south of Shea Boulevard, in the Shea Corridor, and it has been the city’s one full-service glatt kosher meat restaurant for as long as anyone in the press has been writing about it. The number is the Hebrew letters for chai, life, the figure Jewish families give in multiples of eighteen.
The founding is the thin part of the record. Directory listings date the restaurant to 2012; none of the newspaper coverage names who opened it. From about 2016 it belonged to Nathan Uvaydov, born in Russia, raised in New York, who opened his first Phoenix restaurant at 19 and whose family runs the kosher LaBella Pizzeria and Cafe Chenar in Phoenix. Kitchen18 was his sixth. He built a catering business feeding kosher travelers at the big resorts, remodeled and slightly expanded the room during the pandemic, and then, on May 1, 2021, sold it to a regular.
That regular was Rabbi Jordan Brumer, a friend of 15 years who had spent 16 years directing Jewish Arizonans on Campus and had never run a restaurant. Uvaydov trained him and walked him through the vendors; Brumer’s wife, Risa, took over the campus organization. Phoenix Magazine’s headline, “Local Rabbi Buys Scottsdale Kosher Restaurant,” told the story in a line.
The menu is a kosher restaurant’s answer to being the only one in town: it has to be everything. Chicken matzo ball soup, shawarma, falafel bowls and hummus on one page; a pastrami burger and four-hour barbecue ribs on another; a Chinese section of sesame chicken, kung pao and lo mein; and a sushi list. Supervision is by Chabad of Scottsdale under Rabbi Yossi Levertov, the kitchen is dairy-free, and the doors close Friday at 3 p.m. for Shabbat. In January 2025 Brumer turned a storeroom into NOSH 18, a small kosher market. Our verdict: not a destination for the uninvolved, but an essential, generous, well-run kitchen for the community it serves, and the only Scottsdale address where “is it kosher?” is never a question.
Using Kitchen18 well
Know the calendar. The listed hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday, closed Saturday and closed for Passover. The restaurant builds a sukkah for Sukkot and runs a Nine Days menu before Tisha B’Av, and holiday hours shift, so call (480) 284-6001 around the festivals. Call ahead for Sunday dinner and the nights before holidays. See our guide to Jewish Scottsdale for the synagogues and the J, both of which send their visitors here.
Order the meat. Uvaydov’s two biggest sellers, still on the menu, were the barbecue ribs, braised four hours in the oven, and the pastrami burger, a lean 90/10 grass-fed patty with fried New York pastrami and onions, served with fries; the Great Kosher Restaurants listing still calls the burger the bestseller. The shawarma is dark-meat chicken seasoned Mediterranean style, the falafel, hummus and baba ghanoush are made in house, and the pitas are flown from Israel. Chicken schnitzel, a steak baguette, an 18 Reuben, Moroccan salmon, spaghetti bolognese and grilled or citrus-dressed red snapper fill out the American and Mediterranean pages. Portions are large; the Progress reported staff boxing dozens of leftovers a night.
Then the surprises. The Chinese section, run by a chef who trained at a Chinese cooking school, is a kosher rarity: sesame chicken, kung pao chicken, beef with mixed vegetables, beef fried rice, lo mein without the Parmesan, hot and sour and wonton soups, vegetable egg rolls. The sushi list, which did not exist when Uvaydov told the Progress in 2021 that he served fish but no sushi, now runs nigiri, sashimi, tempura rolls, a sushi pizza, veggie rolls and poke bowls; a beer-battered kani-stuffed jalapeño is the crowd-pleaser. Brumer added Impossible burgers for vegetarians and a short cocktail list of margaritas, strawberry daiquiris and piña coladas beside the kosher wine and beer. Desserts (apple strudel, fried banana, a warm chocolate chip cookie) come with non-dairy ice cream.
Prices. The restaurant publishes its menu as PDFs and only a few figures appear in text: grilled chicken adds $11 to a salad and grilled salmon $13. Uvaydov told the Progress he priced competitively despite the supervision costs; expect $15 to $30 a head at dinner, and more for steaks and sushi.
Shabbat and the market. Order Shabbat takeout early in the week from the regular or Shabbat menu for Friday pickup. NOSH 18, through the dining room, sells challah, babka, rugelach, deli meats, salami, milk and candy from Brooklyn and New Jersey vendors, and a rotisserie chicken by request. For catering, the restaurant quotes parties of five to 500 and has fed kosher groups at the Scottsdale resorts for years. Parking is the lot in front off Scottsdale Road.
The only kosher table in a city of 20,000 Jews
Scottsdale’s Jewish population, which the Scottsdale Progress put at 15,000 to 20,000 in 2021, has always been served from Phoenix. The kosher butchers, the bakeries and the deli counters sat on Seventh Street and Glendale Avenue; Scottsdale got Goldman’s, a kosher-style deli, and the J’s cafe on north Scottsdale Road, but a sit-down restaurant where a Chabad mashgiach watched the kitchen was something the city did not have until Kitchen18 opened on the Shea corner in the early 2010s. The Uvaydov family, Bukharian Jews from Uzbekistan by way of Russia and New York, were the Valley’s kosher restaurateurs of that decade, with LaBella and Cafe Chenar in Phoenix, and Kitchen18 became their Scottsdale outpost.
Nathan Uvaydov’s version was a hustler’s restaurant in the best sense. He served Chinese food because, as he told the Progress in March 2021, a kosher restaurant that is the only one in town has to offer variety; he flew pitas from Israel and pastrami from New York; he catered the resorts for kosher-keeping tourists; and he spent the pandemic, when most owners were cutting, remodeling the dining room and kitchen. By the time New Times listed the city’s seven kosher restaurants in 2020, Kitchen18 was the Scottsdale entry, with beef sliders and chicken fried rice on the same ticket.
The 2021 sale was unusual because the buyer was not a restaurateur. Jordan Brumer was a campus rabbi who had been eating here for years and told Jewish News that owning it was a dream come true. He kept the staff, the menu and the supervision, said he would change nothing significant, and then changed things at the margins: vegan burgers, cocktails, a sushi bar, and in January 2025 the NOSH 18 market, built after travelers and locals kept asking where in Scottsdale to buy kosher candy, challah and deli meat. The answer had been the Fry’s at Tatum and Shea or Imperial Market in Phoenix. Now a Brooklyn bakery and a New Jersey candy store ship through a Jersey City trucker, four days on the road, to a shelf inside a Scottsdale restaurant.
What the record does not say is who opened Kitchen18 and when, what Uvaydov paid or Brumer paid, the seat count, or how large the resort catering trade is. For a restaurant this important to its community, the newspaper trail is thin, and most of it was written at the 2021 sale and the 2025 market. The Yelp count, a little over 200 reviews, is a fraction of what a Shea Corridor restaurant of this age would normally carry, which says that its customers are regulars, not reviewers.
Honest assessment: Kitchen18 is good at what it must be and uneven at what it chooses to be. The pastrami burger, ribs, matzo ball soup, shawarma and Shabbat takeout are solid and generous; the Chinese food and sushi exist so that a kosher family in Scottsdale can have them at all, and should be judged on that curve. The room is plain, the prices are fair for the supervision they carry, and the Friday close is non-negotiable. For the family it serves, it is one of the most important restaurants in the city; for everyone else, it is a well-made kosher deli and grill at Shea that happens to be the only one, and we would rather have it than not.