What is La Locanda?
Fifth Avenue has two ends. The east end, near Scottsdale Road, is the busy one: coffee lines, gallery traffic, the restaurants every visitor has heard of. The west end, where the avenue bends down to meet Indian School Road, is where the street exhales. La Locanda Ristorante Italiano sits there, in Suite 108 of a low retail block at 6830 E 5th Ave, and it suits the neighborhood: unhurried, dinner-only and built for conversation.
A locanda is an inn, the kind of place in an Italian town where the food is the reason you stay. The menu here keeps that promise in a classic register. Homemade gnocchi with prosciutto, mushrooms and peas in tomato cream; pappardelle Bolognese made with pork and veal; linguine frutti di mare with mussels, scallops, salmon, shrimp and calamari in a Calabrian chili tomato sauce; and the big plate, osso buco, a braised veal shank done Milanese style over risotto. The chicken piccata, marsala and parmesan trio is there for the traditionalists, and the cannoli and tiramisu close the meal the way they should.
The restaurant describes its style as “an Italian grandmother dancing the tango with Sinatra hipsters,” which is a fair summary of the room: candlelit, a little old-school, not stiff. It also has an unusual strength for a red-sauce Italian place, a full plant-based menu with Beyond sausage arrabbiata and a vegan Caesar, so mixed tables do not have to negotiate.
It is not trying to be the scene. It is trying to be the Italian dinner you can actually get a table for on a Saturday, a short walk from the boutiques, and on most nights it is.
Happy hour, the order, and getting there
Start at the bar. The weekday happy hour runs from the 4:30 opening until 6 p.m. in the bar, with small bites (bruschetta, calamari, a penne Bolognese, truffle fries), house wines by the glass and a couple of dollars off cocktails and beer. The cocktail list leans Italian and bright: a Limoncello Drop made with the chef’s own limoncello, a limoncello margarita, an Italian greyhound with Aperol. It is the best-value early evening on the west end of the avenue.
Order pasta, then decide. The gnocchi is the dish regulars mention, and the menu’s pasta section is where the kitchen is most at home. If the table wants one showpiece, it is the osso buco; if someone wants fish, the salmon piccata and the seared scallop risotto, done carbonara-style with pancetta and peas, are the lighter routes. Ask about the daily seafood special and the chef’s soup.
Book, but don’t panic. Reservations go through OpenTable or the phone, and weeknights are generally easy. Weekend prime time in the January-to-April high season is when you want a booking, especially on ArtWalk Thursdays, when the gallery crowds spill onto Fifth Avenue looking for dinner. For a birthday or office dinner, the restaurant offers semi-private dining and books private parties.
Park at the west end. This end of Fifth Avenue sits close to Indian School Road and well away from the garage scrum near Scottsdale Road, so arriving by car is easier here than almost anywhere in Old Town. After dinner, the Fifth Avenue shops and the 1955 lane of Craftsman Court are a ten-minute stroll east if you want a walk.
The west end of Fifth Avenue
Fifth Avenue was never meant to be a nightlife street. It was cut in 1950 by artists burned out of the Arizona Craftsmen center, named as a joke after New York’s swankiest shopping boulevard, and filled through the 1950s with silversmiths, leather designers and the boutiques that sold to winter visitors. The shopping identity held at the east end, around Craftsman Court and the Bronze Horse Fountain at Marshall Way.
The west end went its own way. From 1982 to 2007 the neighboring address, 6820 E 5th Ave, belonged to Anderson’s Fifth Estate, downtown’s longest-running restaurant-nightclub, burgers by day and a packed dance floor by night. When that era ended in a rebrand and a string of short-lived successors, the bars and clubs moved east toward the entertainment district, and the far end of the avenue settled into something calmer: offices, small shops and a handful of restaurants that rely on regulars more than on foot traffic.
La Locanda fits that second life. It operates as a pair with La Locanda Italian Bistro on Scottsdale Road, which takes the lunch trade, leaving the Fifth Avenue room to do dinner, happy hour, catering and private parties. It is a neighborhood Italian restaurant in a neighborhood that mostly gets written about for its rooftops and its brunch lines.
The honest assessment: La Locanda is not a destination for culinary fireworks, and nobody will mistake it for the chef-driven rooms at the other end of the street. But a reliable plate of homemade gnocchi, a bar that pours a fair glass at happy hour, a real vegan menu and a dining room where you can hear each other are rarer in modern Old Town than they should be. At the quiet end of Fifth Avenue, that is the point.