What is Lo-Lo’s Chicken & Waffles?
Scottsdale imports most of its food ideas from the coasts. This one came from four miles away, and it is better for it.
Lo-Lo’s Chicken & Waffles is the Scottsdale outpost of the Phoenix soul food restaurant that Larry “Lo-Lo” White opened in 2002 in a little house on Yuma Street downtown. White is the grandson of Elizabeth White, whose Mrs. White’s Golden Rule Cafe fed Phoenix for decades, and Lo-Lo’s began as his modern spin on the family’s home cooking: extra-crispy fried chicken over golden, cinnamon-kissed waffles, plus shrimp and grits, fried catfish, mac and cheese and red velvet cake. Phoenix New Times spent the 2000s handing it awards, and Muhammad Ali, Charles Barkley and Amar’e Stoudemire were among the original’s regulars.
The Scottsdale room was open by 2010, when the restaurant was advertising Monday Night Football nights with pro players in the house, and in 2014 it moved into its current home at 3133 N Scottsdale Rd, south of Osborn on the stretch of Scottsdale Road that belongs to the neighborhood rather than the tourists. It is a big, casual, family-style restaurant: booths, sports on the screens, plates that arrive stacked, and a menu that serves breakfast at every hour.
Honest verdict: this is the best fried chicken on Scottsdale Road and one of the few restaurants in south Scottsdale with genuine Phoenix roots. The Scottsdale location is one of the chain’s two Arizona anchors, and it earns the drive from anywhere in the city.
Ordering the spread
Start with the namesake. The chicken and waffles come in more combinations than seems necessary — wings, breasts, thighs, mixed — and every one of them works because the chicken is fried hard and crisp and the waffle is sweet enough to stand in for syrup you will add anyway.
Then go sideways into the soul food. The shrimp and grits are the dish that converts skeptics who came for the novelty. Fried catfish is the sleeper, and the PHAT AZZ Samich — chicken or catfish with bacon, cheese, lettuce and tomato — is the lunch order for people who need one thing and a nap. The hot wings are among the best in the area. The mac and cheese is the side. The red velvet cake is the ending, and it once won its own award.
Breakfast is all day, which is the practical magic of the place. Omelets, chorizo and eggs and a waffle breakfast sandwich with your choice of meat mean the 3 p.m. hangover crowd and the 8 a.m. family crowd eat from the same menu. Weekends bring a wait; weekday afternoons are the calm window.
Logistics: the restaurant has its own lot off Scottsdale Road, a few minutes south of Old Town and a few minutes north of the McDowell corridor. It is louder and more crowded than Butterfield’s and less scene-driven than the Old Town party-brunch rooms; it sits closer in spirit to the Breakfast Club — a place that takes the first meal seriously without dressing it up. Prices are moderate and portions are not, so budget one plate per person and expect leftovers.
A Phoenix institution’s Scottsdale chapter
The story behind Lo-Lo’s is older than the restaurant. Mrs. White’s Golden Rule Cafe, run by Elizabeth White in downtown Phoenix, was for generations the city’s reference point for Southern home cooking — the room politicians, ballplayers and neighbors shared. Her grandson Larry grew up in that kitchen’s orbit and, in 2002, opened a restaurant that took the family’s fried chicken and gave it a hook a new century could remember: chicken on a waffle, all day, in a house on Yuma Street.
It worked immediately, and the original eventually moved to a larger building on Central Avenue. Expansion followed — Sky Harbor, Gilbert in 2015, then Las Vegas and Grapevine, Texas — and Scottsdale was among the first steps out of the city. By late 2010 the Scottsdale location existed and was hosting football nights; in 2014 it moved to its present address on the neighborhood stretch of Scottsdale Road, near Atlas Bistro and the rest of the strip-mall talent that gives south Scottsdale its underrated food reputation.
The Scottsdale room matters for a reason beyond the chicken. Scottsdale’s dining history is largely a story of resort rooms, steakhouses and imports, and it has few restaurants rooted in the Black culinary traditions of the Valley’s own city center. Lo-Lo’s carried one of those traditions north across the city line and made it a fixture — the kind of place a south Scottsdale family goes on a Sunday without thinking of it as a destination, which is the highest compliment a neighborhood restaurant gets.
The chain’s 2024 Gilbert closure was a pruning, not a retreat; the company said the Phoenix and Scottsdale rooms were “still going strong.” Honest assessment: Lo-Lo’s is not refined and does not want to be, and the waffles are a delivery system for chicken rather than a pastry achievement. It is, however, the real thing — a family recipe with a family name on it, cooked the same way on Scottsdale Road as on Central Avenue — and in a city that spent decades looking elsewhere for authenticity, that is worth more than a Michelin nod.