What is Luna Gelateria?
Luna Gelateria is what happened when a man trained to make gelato finally stopped making only pizza. Stefano Fabbri grew up in his family’s gelateria and cafeteria in Emilia-Romagna, finished the program at the University of Gelato in Bologna, and came to the Valley intending to open either a pizzeria or a gelato shop. He chose pizza, and Pomo Pizzeria Napoletana became one of the better pizza rooms in the city. In February 2018 he turned the suite next door, his former Italian market and mozzarella bar Forno Fabbri, into Luna, at 8977 N Scottsdale Road, Suite 504, in The Shops at Gainey Village at Doubletree Ranch Road.
The gelato is made the way his parents made it, with better equipment. Milk comes from Danzeisen Dairy in glass bottles. The bases go straight into a chrome Frigomat GX8, an Italian batch freezer with eight spinning wells, and come out in about 15 minutes, warmer and lighter than the hard-packed gelato of most American counters. Flavors run traditional, Sicilian pistachio, stracciatella, fior di latte, a yellow vanilla colored with egg yolks, gianduja, and the house flavor, The Luna, is a pistachio stracciatella with salted caramel, Valrhona chocolate and Sicilian pistachios. The sorbetti are fruit, water and sugar and nothing else.
Then there is the bread. Fabbri bought an oven for one purpose: Recco-style focaccia, the yeastless, paper-thin specialty of a town on the Ligurian coast, filled with golf-ball-sized pieces of Stracchino cheese and served plain, with honey or with truffle. Phoenix New Times named it Best Focaccia in the 2018 Best of Phoenix. The counter also does Roman-style pizza, salads, soup and a porchetta panino, and the screens above the gelato case play RAI.
Who it is for: the after-dinner crowd from Pomo and Soi 4, Gainey Ranch families, the health-club set at 8 a.m. with an espresso, and anyone in Gainey Ranch who has been to Italy and knows what the texture should be. Our verdict: the best gelato in Scottsdale by a clear margin, in a strip-mall counter that is also, quietly, the only place in the city making Recco focaccia.
Ordering at Luna Gelateria
Order The Luna first. The house flavor is the one to measure the shop by: pistachio stracciatella base, salted caramel, Valrhona chocolate, Sicilian pistachios. Pair it with a fruit sorbetto, the mango when it is in the case (New Times called it “lush and deep and tropical”), or with gianduja. The reviews on the aggregator sites mention passion fruit, chocolate hazelnut, salted butter caramel, Ferrero Rocher and, lately, ube and rose, so the rotation runs well past the traditional list. A handmade waffle cone is the 2019 New Times recommendation, and a large cup holds three flavors. The shop has not published a price list online; the 2019 anniversary promotion sold $1 scoops that the shop said saved customers $3, so figure a few dollars a scoop.
Then the focaccia. Three Recco-style versions: plain Stracchino, Stracchino with honey (New Times’ choice, “excellent”), and Stracchino with truffle oil and truffle sauce. It is less a bread than a cheese-filled crisp, with snap and air, and it is the thing to carry home. The Roman-style pizza by the slice is a decent lunch, and the porchetta panino is the best savory thing on the counter: pork belly cooked 24 hours with fennel and rosemary, then finished in the oven and dressed with a salsa verde of Fresno chiles.
Timing. The Gainey Village directory lists Luna open 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, though other listings show a later, shorter day, so call before an early visit. Mornings are coffee and focaccia with the gym crowd; afternoons are families and the Gainey Ranch school run; the real hour is after 8 p.m., when the Pomo and Soi 4 tables empty into the counter. The shop counts on heat: it has sold $1.10 mini cones on days the temperature reaches 110, and ran a $1-scoop party for its first anniversary on February 21, 2019.
Getting there. Luna is in the north building of the center on the Scottsdale Road frontage, between Pomo and Soi 4, with the center’s shared lot in front. Lunch and Sunday morning are the hard hours to park; evenings are easy. Takeout pints are the move for a dinner party anywhere in McCormick Ranch or Gainey.
What to skip. The salads and soup are there because the sign still says cafeteria. The gelato rolls and spiked sundaes Fabbri talked about in 2018 come and go; ask what is on today rather than expecting them. And do not make the mistake of treating this as a second-string Pomo: the pizza here is Roman, by the slice, and the Neapolitan pies are next door.
The gelato shop that took eight years to open
The story New Times’ Chris Malloy told in March 2018 was about a man returning to the family trade. Fabbri had come from a gelato family, trained as a gelataio, and then spent most of a decade in Arizona as a pizzaiolo, building Pomo at Gainey Village and downtown Phoenix into the Valley’s standard for certified Neapolitan pizza. Forno Fabbri, the market next door, was the first attempt at something else; it sold mozzarella and imports and did not last. When it became Luna in February 2018, the headline was that Fabbri “has opened a gelateria that does crazy things,” and the crazy things were technique, not gimmicks: the Frigomat, the glass-bottled Danzeisen milk, the GX8 cleaned every 72 hours and the flavor log kept to the minute, the yeastless Ligurian dough, the dedicated oven. A September 2019 profile in Scottsdale Airpark News, which we could not read in full, reported that the name honors a gelateria Fabbri’s father opened in Italy.
The awards came quickly. Best Focaccia in the 2018 Best of Phoenix was for a dish most of the paper’s readers had never heard of. The paper’s August 2019 guide to eating at Gainey Village put Luna alongside Pomo, Soi 4, Hash Kitchen and Village Tavern as part of what it called a mini-metropolis of dining, and the anniversary and 110-degree promotions got the shop onto local television. A second counter followed inside Pomo’s downtown Phoenix pizzeria at 705 N 1st Street, and by 2026 the shop’s website describes both as Pomo Restaurant Group.
What the record does not say is as much as what it does. We found no published price list, no seat count, no exact opening date beyond “last month” in a March 12, 2018 review, and no coverage of the shop since 2020 beyond its continued listing in the Gainey Village directory and a steady stream of customer reviews. One gift-card listing credits “the Fabbri and Proto families” with the shop; no press we found names a second family, so we leave it as Fabbri’s. The 2010s wave of Italian specialists that gave central Scottsdale a certified pizzaiolo, a gelataio and, briefly, a mozzarella bar in one strip, has otherwise gone unrecorded.
Honest assessment: Luna is the rare dessert counter that is better than the restaurant that spawned it, and Pomo is good. The gelato is lighter than purists expect and the shop is honest about why; the focaccia is unique in the city; the hours and prices are a little vague online, which is the only thing Fabbri does badly. For the full Gainey Village evening, see our guides to the Shops at Gainey Village and the Gainey Ranch district; this is where it should end.