What is Luna by Giada?
When Caesars decided its first hotel without a casino would rise in Scottsdale, it needed a headliner for the dining room. It got one of the most famous faces in American food: Giada De Laurentiis, whose Luna opened with the hotel in 2024 as her flagship Arizona restaurant.
The setting is Caesars Republic Scottsdale, a glossy tower at Goldwater and Highland staring straight across at Scottsdale Fashion Square’s luxury wing — which makes Luna the anchor tenant of the most concentrated stretch of name-brand dining in Arizona. The concept is the cooking De Laurentiis built an empire teaching: her Roman heritage and family recipes, brightened with the California produce-forward instinct that made her Food Network’s most-watched Italian ambassador. Pastas are the spine of it, plated with more polish than the home versions but recognizably from the same lineage.
The room runs high-energy by design. This is hotel-lobby-adjacent dining in the best sense — live music at the bar, a rooftop-pool crowd filtering through, date nights and girls’ trips and mall shoppers who upgraded their evening. It feels less like a hushed Italian temple and more like the Vegas-honed idea of a night out, transplanted to Old Town with the volume tuned for Scottsdale.
Why it matters: Luna’s arrival confirmed Scottsdale as a mandatory stop for national celebrity-chef brands, not a maybe-market. When a name that big plants her flagship here rather than another resort city, the scene has changed weight class.
Eating at Luna: pasta first, scene second
Order Roman. The heart of the menu is the pasta list, drawn from De Laurentiis’s family repertoire — the Roman classics her television career spent two decades teaching America to crave, executed here by a professional line with better equipment than your kitchen. Build the table around a couple of pastas, add an antipasto or two for the front of the meal, and treat proteins as the supporting cast. The California influence shows up in the brightness: vegetables and citrus doing work that heavier Italian-American kitchens assign to cream.
Know your two rooms. The dining room is the reservation — book ahead for prime hours, and well ahead during the winter-spring high season when the hotel runs full. The bar is the scene: live music, walk-in-friendly, full menu, and the property’s best people-watching as the lobby traffic flows past. On a weeknight, the bar is genuinely the superior seat.
Use the location. Luna sits at the hinge of the Fashion Square district, which has become Scottsdale’s celebrity-chef row — within a short walk you can triangulate against Nobu, Toca Madera, Francine and the rest of the mall’s luxury-wing lineup. That makes Luna an easy act one or act three: aperitivo at the bar before dinner elsewhere, or the full dinner after a shopping afternoon. During Phoenix Open week and other peak events, everything in this orbit books solid — plan accordingly or eat at odd hours.
One expectation to set: this is a celebrity chef’s flagship, so you’re paying for polish, room and brand along with the food. Come for a lively, confident Italian dinner in a scene; the value calculation works best when you wanted the scene too.
The celebrity-chef wave hits Goldwater Boulevard
Luna is best understood as a flag planted in a land rush. Through the early 2020s, the blocks around Fashion Square transformed into Arizona’s marquee dining district — the mall’s luxury wing filled with national names, and the 2020s hotel boom gave each new tower a statement restaurant. Caesars Republic, the brand’s first non-gaming hotel anywhere, was the boldest bet of the cycle, and attaching De Laurentiis to it was the point: her name told travelers exactly what caliber of trip this was supposed to be.
There’s a neat symmetry in who she joined. Scottsdale’s Food Network era arguably began when Scott Conant planted The Americano in the north end of town in 2021; De Laurentiis — his longtime network colleague — bookended it with Luna in the south. Add the established heavyweights around the mall and Old Town’s own homegrown stars, and Scottsdale in the mid-2020s hosts a density of name-brand chefs that only a handful of American cities can match. This is a genuine break from the city’s earlier eras, when national operators tested Scottsdale cautiously and the biggest culinary names were local.
The skeptic’s case writes itself: celebrity flagships can coast on the name, and the chef is not in the kitchen on your Tuesday. The honest rebuttal is that Luna’s version of the model is competently ambitious — a real menu with a point of view (Rome, lightened), a room engineered for fun rather than reverence, and a hotel with every incentive to keep its headline tenant sharp. It is not chasing the tasting-menu vanguard, and it isn’t pretending to.
What Luna signifies may outlast any single review: Scottsdale stopped being a market national food brands expand into and became one they launch in. A camera-ready Roman dining room across from a shopping mall, packed on a Wednesday — that’s the mid-2020s Scottsdale scene in a single image, for better and mostly for better.