What is Lior the Baker?
Lior the Baker is a kosher Israeli bakery in Suite 105 at 10953 N Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, in the Palo Verde Square center just north of Shea Boulevard on the Scottsdale Ranch side of town. Lior and Lily Ben-Shushan opened the storefront around the end of 2015 under the name Jerusalem Bakery AZ, renamed it in fall 2017, and have run it three mornings a week ever since.
The owners are both from Israel: Lior from Jerusalem, Lily from Be’er Sheva. For about a decade they ran the kitchen at Congregation Magen David Sephardim, an Orthodox Sephardic synagogue in San Francisco, catering and baking challah, before moving to the Valley in October 2013. Lior worked for a few months at Kitchen 18, the kosher restaurant on Scottsdale Road, then the couple rented a kitchen in Mesa, baked at night and sold by day at the Anthem, Sun City and Phoenix Public markets. The Jewish News wrote them up in July 2014 as a market stall with a storefront “someday.”
Someday was the end of 2015. The shop is small: a cookie table at the door, a case, shelves, challah cooling on racks. The sign says “Taste of the Holy Land.” What it sells is eggless Jerusalem-style challah, chocolate and halva babka, rugelach, bourekas, almond croissants, cheese danish, marmalades, and on Fridays a Moroccan flatbread spread with green za’atar and baked on flat river stones, which Phoenix New Times called one of the best things it had eaten in Arizona.
New Times named it the Valley’s Best Bakery three times, in 2016 as Jerusalem Bakery AZ and in 2018 and 2019 as Lior the Baker. Nothing else in Scottsdale fills the slot Karsh’s Bakery left when it closed, and this is the place our guide to Jewish Scottsdale sends people for Shabbat bread. Our verdict: the best bakery in the city, open so rarely that you have to plan for it.
How to shop at Lior the Baker
Check the hours first. This is a three-day bakery and the days have moved. New Times printed Wednesday through Friday, 8 to 3, in 2018; the 2016 feature had it open Tuesday through Friday. In 2026 the listings put it at Thursday 9 to 2, Friday 8 to 3 and Sunday 9 to 1, closed Saturday for Shabbat and closed Monday through Wednesday, and Tripadvisor has Thursday starting at 8. Call (480) 451-0011 before driving out. It also closes for Jewish holidays, and the first morning of Hanukkah 2025 produced an hour-long line with one person at the counter, according to a review.
Go early. Reviews from October 2025 say the croissants were gone by about 10 a.m. after an 8 a.m. opening, and a 2022 visitor found the babka sold out and was told that arriving after 11 usually means none is left. Friday is the busiest day because it is challah day and flatbread day.
Order the bread. The Moroccan za’atar flatbread, Fridays only, is fluffy and buttery with a pocked surface, and it is the reason to come. The challah is Jerusalem-style, made without eggs, in plain, sesame, poppy, almond and sometimes raisin or chocolate chip; it comes out braided, knobbed and glossy. Rye and sourdough appeared on weekdays in the Jerusalem Bakery years. Fresh pita is usually in the case.
Then the pastry. The babka, chocolate or halva (sweet sesame paste), was $17 in 2018, laminated and proofed for two days. The almond croissant was $5.13 after tax that year and was the pastry New Times kept praising. Add bourekas (cheese; mushroom, cheese and onion; spinach), rugelach in several flavors, apple strudel, hamantaschen in season, sesame and butter cookies, and house marmalades (lemon, strawberry, orange, and a peppery cherry tomato that the 2016 reviewer liked best). Bread is pareve; the pastries are dairy. Listings say it ships nationwide, which we could not confirm on the site.
Parking and the room. Palo Verde Square has its own lot off Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard and the suite faces it. There is no real seating, so plan to take things home or eat on the way to the 101. Expect reviews that call it overpriced and reviews that call it the best bakery in the Valley; in our experience both are describing the same croissant.
The bakery that filled the hole Karsh’s left
When New Times reviewed Jerusalem Bakery in April 2016, the paper framed it as the answer to a loss: Karsh’s Bakery, “widely recognized as the best Jewish bakery in metro Phoenix,” had closed about two years earlier, and the Valley’s Jewish community, a large share of which lives along the Shea corridor and in Scottsdale Ranch, had nowhere to buy a proper challah. The Ben-Shushans had been selling eggless challah at farmers markets for two years by then. The storefront, “four months” old at the time of the article, put the bread within a mile of the synagogues.
The couple’s path is in the record. In San Francisco they fed a Sephardic congregation; Lior traces his baking to a great-grandmother, Simcha, who made bread and cookies in Jerusalem. The Valley’s weather, he told the Jewish News in 2014, felt like home. That year the bakery was already supplying challah to the Temple Kol Ami early childhood center and talking to other schools, and the couple were expecting their first child in November. The Best Bakery award came in 2016 while the shop was still a year from kosher certification; it had kept kashrut informally, dairy only, no meat, since the market days.
The rename to Lior the Baker in fall 2017 came with certification by the Greater Phoenix Vaad Hakashruth, as Kosher Phoenix reported that October. New Times’ Chris Malloy came in June 2018, bought almond croissants, babka and the Friday flatbread, and wrote, “Lior and Lily know baking.” The 2018 and 2019 Best Bakery awards followed, the second one with the warning about limited hours that every writer since has repeated.
What the record does not say is as interesting as what it does. The suite was Gina’s Homemade’s cheese shop from June 2012 until sometime in the mid-2010s; nobody has written about the handover. The New Times location page claims the family’s staff “has operated since 1977,” which does not fit a couple who arrived in 2013 and may describe a Jerusalem family business. And no outlet has reviewed the bakery since 2019, so the picture of it in 2025 and 2026 comes from customer reviews: a 4.8 Google rating, sold-out mornings, and complaints about the single-person counter.
Honest assessment: this is the best bread in Scottsdale, and the hardest to buy. The hours are a function of a two-person operation that bakes at night and closes for Shabbat, not a marketing pose, and the prices reflect that too. If you keep kosher it is essential. If you do not, the Friday flatbread alone justifies learning the schedule. Pair it with the rest of our Jewish Scottsdale guide, which covers the delis and the synagogues around Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard.