What was Liquor Pig?
Liquor Pig was the gastropub that opened in mid-March 2025 in a 1950s house at 7217 E 4th Avenue, at Fourth Avenue and Winfield Scott Plaza a block east of Scottsdale Road in Old Town, and closed on May 30, 2026, after fourteen months, two best-new-restaurant awards, the loss of both founders and a lawsuit. The house did not go dark. A week later it reopened as Wayward, with the same owner and the same chef, which makes Liquor Pig a lost restaurant whose room you can still sit in.
The founders were Steven “Chops” Smith, a chef known for handmade pasta at Fat Ox and Atria in Flagstaff, and Scott Casey, a sommelier and restaurant consultant who had worked under the Liquor Pig name since 2014. They had met more than twenty years earlier at A Different Pointe of View and had been planning the restaurant since 2021. The building had been chef Lenny Rubin’s Medizona; they rebuilt it in brick and wood, with 80 seats, a 20-seat bar and a gold-mirrored backbar, and soft-opened with help from chefs Payton Curry, Cory Oppold of Course and Rochelle Daniel of Atria, who made the desserts and the dense RoRo’s Bread.
The idea, in Smith’s phrase, was food “how we grew up,” meaning classics reworked: a $47 Libertine board of bone marrow with oxtail marmalade, beef tartare and foie gras ganache; shakshuka with lamb merguez meatballs; braised pork schnitzel; a duck carnitas chimichanga; tom kha gai with scallop crudo; veal pappardelle. Casey’s 50-bottle wine list was meant to make people geek out. The bar made the restaurant famous within a week: the Spam Folder, a whiskey-and-rum tiki drink served in a Spam can with a broiled slice of Spam on top, was the most photographed cocktail in the Valley that spring.
The honeymoon lasted four months. Smith left in July 2025 over a menu dispute, C.J. Kahley took the kitchen, and the restaurant, improbably, got better reviews. In November Phoenix Magazine named it one of the ten best new restaurants of 2025, and New Times put it on its best-new and Top 50 lists. By then the ownership fight that would end it was already under way. Our verdict: Liquor Pig was one of the best things to open in Old Town this decade, and it was undone by the deal that built it.
What the menu and the room were
The drinks were the hook. New Times’ first-taste piece in April 2025 put cocktails at $15 to $26 and reported that three of the four bartenders competed on the cocktail circuit. The Spam Folder (whiskey, rum, cinnamon demerara, amaro, pineapple, lime, a broiled Spam slice) was the viral one; Diamond Eyes was an olive-oil fat-washed dirty martini; Look to the Light was a citrusy whiskey sour; Natural Born Artist was mezcal-based and lush. The cocktail menu came illustrated with famous quotes. The wine list, Casey’s project of many months, ran to about 50 esoteric bottles.
The food outgrew the bar. New Times called it a bar with great food rather than a full restaurant, with entrées at $21 to $36, and then described heavy hitters. After Kahley took over in July, Phoenix Magazine’s Nikki Buchanan found the kitchen “masterful”: the bone marrow poutine ($37), fries under foie gras gravy, Oaxacan crema, pickled onions and a Flintstone-size bone; Korean pork belly tacos ($26) with a quail egg; a pomegranate-glazed pork porterhouse ($36), chop and tenderloin on one bone over heirloom grits, which the magazine later cited in a piece on the Valley’s swine-steak trend; a Little Gem salad ($19) with pancetta and dates; and a Noble Bread boule ($12) with house-cultured butter that replaced Daniel’s loaves after Smith’s exit. Doppio tortelloni carried the pasta flag.
The room. Eighty seats in a one-story house, brick walls, dark wood and leather, a glass wine display and that gold mirror behind the 20-seat bar; “stylishly subdued,” in Buchanan’s phrase, and cozy enough that people stayed past one drink. Hours by late 2025 were Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday 4 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., closed Monday, which made it one of the few places on the quiet side of Scottsdale Road open after midnight on weekends.
Who went. The first wave was social media and the industry; the Spam can did that. The second wave, after the reviews, was the Old Town dinner crowd that wanted a table on a side street rather than a stool in the Entertainment District. Regulars learned to book, to sit at the bar, and to order the poutine for the table. Parking was the Civic Center garage or a lot off Winfield Scott; the curb spaces on Fourth Avenue turned over slowly.
What to skip, in hindsight. Nothing on the plate drew real complaint in print; Buchanan’s only quibble was sweet pomegranate on the grits. What regulars could not see was the balance sheet. By the time the November reviews ran, one founder was gone, the other had two months left, and the restaurant’s name belonged, by his account, to him.
The deal that built it and the lawsuit that ended it
Liquor Pig took nearly five years to open and less than a year to come apart, and the two facts are related. Smith and Casey leased the Fourth Avenue house in 2022 and hired Christina Foster’s firm, CNC Contracting, to build it out. From there the stories diverge. Casey’s lawsuit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court in April 2026, says the founders paid the Fosters “a large sum,” that the couple “ceased work and contact for over a year,” and that in early 2024 they returned with an offer: finish the build for a stake. A handshake deal followed. Casey and his wife took out an $865,000 business loan; he says he also put in $300,000, equipment and labor.
The Fosters’ response, filed the week Wayward opened, says the founders’ company, Knife & Spirit, paid $120,000, could not pay for the rest, and owed CNC about $350,000 by 2023, and that Casey and Smith “lured” the couple into taking over the restaurant, its lease and its equipment on projections of “great profit.” In 2024, they say, they assumed about $2 million of debt, the loan included; the founders got jobs, with equity only after the debt was retired. A joint LLC formed in May 2024 with Foster at 70 percent was terminated by October. Business records list Foster as sole owner of MJR Investments, which held the liquor license.
Against that backdrop the restaurant opened in March 2025 and was, by every public measure, a success. Then the people left. Smith departed in July after what Phoenix Magazine called a menu dispute; he went to Pretty Penny downtown in August. Casey was “terminated” as general manager in January 2026 and received a letter telling him he had no ownership and not to trespass. Still on the hook for the loan, he sued in April, asking for about $16,150 in back pay, his investment, and an order stopping the Fosters from using the Liquor Pig name and logo. Foster’s reply to New Times: the suit has no merit, and she is the rightful owner.
The name question explains the ending. On Saturday, May 30, 2026, Liquor Pig served its last drinks. On Friday, June 5, the door reopened as Wayward: Foster as owner, Kahley as executive chef and now an owner, and Kyla Hein, from Rough Rider, Coabana and Pigtails, as operating owner. The menu kept the pork belly tacos and the poutine, added a binchotan grill and handmade tortillas, and dropped the Spam. The Fosters’ filing that week added Smith to the case. What the record does not say is how the lawsuit resolves; it was open when the sign changed, and we have found no ruling.
Honest assessment: Liquor Pig was a very good restaurant built on a very bad set of agreements, and the 2020s have produced few cleaner examples of an Old Town opening winning every award in town and still not belonging to the people who dreamed it up. The food under both chefs was better than most of what the district serves, and the cocktail program was the most inventive on the side streets. Most of that survives at Wayward, which is why Liquor Pig sits in the lost column of every bar and club in Scottsdale with an asterisk: closed, but not gone.