What was Macayo’s Scottsdale?
Macayo’s Scottsdale was the Scottsdale Road store of Macayo’s, the Phoenix Mexican chain that Woody and Victoria Johnson started in 1946, one of the oldest names in Valley Mexican food. It stood at 11107 N Scottsdale Road, near the Shea Boulevard intersection in the Shea Corridor, on the stretch of Scottsdale Road just north of Shea.
By 2017 it was, as Phoenix New Times put it, the last Scottsdale outpost of the chain; KTAR noted that another Scottsdale Macayo’s had already closed. It served its last meals after business on Saturday, August 19, 2017, when the lease ran out. The company’s director of marketing, Ashley Negron, told ABC15 that it was a very tough decision but the end of the lease, and that Macayo’s was reinvesting in Woody’s Macayo, a smaller restaurant opening on Central Avenue in Phoenix, where the Scottsdale store’s test kitchen would move.
What the record does not give is the store’s opening year. The three closing reports we found, from ABC15, KTAR and New Times, give the address, the date and the reason, and none says how long the restaurant had been there. We have left the opening year blank rather than guess, and we would welcome a dated menu, matchbook or newspaper ad that settles it.
The chain’s story is better recorded. Macayo’s is the restaurant that says its founder invented the chimichanga, and for decades it was one of the Valley’s default Mexican dinners, with 14 metro Phoenix restaurants and three in Las Vegas by 2012. Our verdict: the Scottsdale store was a dependable chain room rather than a destination, and its closing marked the moment Scottsdale stopped being part of the Macayo’s map, a gap the chain’s 2021 return at Pima Crossing did not close for long.
What the menu was
The chimichanga was the order. Macayo’s built its identity on the claim that Woody Johnson invented the deep-fried burrito, and its chimichangas came with shredded beef, chicken or carnitas. New Times critic Nikki Buchanan, comparing it with El Molino’s in 2012, found a decently crisp flour shell but objected that the chain had no machaca chimi, that sour cream and guacamole cost extra, and that the kitchen automatically ladled a mild, tomato-based relleno sauce over the top. The beef, she wrote, was soft enough not to need teeth and tasted a little too much like roast beef.
Ask for it dry. Her advice for any chimichanga applies here: the point is the crisp, flaky tortilla, so order it without sauce. The critic’s complaint about Macayo’s in general was that it cooked for diners scared of chiles, and that the rice and refried beans were the weak point of the plate.
The rest was the Sonoran-American standard. Listings for the chain describe tacos, burritos, chimichangas and salads made from family recipes, with cheese crisps and carne asada fries among the popular orders, and margaritas as the other reason to come. The chain’s current specials, a $5 house margarita, $3 crispy tacos on Tuesdays and weekday lunch specials, are a fair picture of how it priced itself, though we found no published menu or prices from the Scottsdale Road store itself.
Why so little was written. Chain stores on suburban arterials rarely get reviewed, and we found no review of this one, no account of its room and no record of its hours. Its closing made the news anyway, on ABC15 and KTAR in the same week, because Macayo’s was a name everyone in the Valley knew.
Where to go now. Macayo’s own site lists no Scottsdale location in October 2026. The closest restaurants on that list are in Mesa and Ahwatukee. In Scottsdale, the old-guard alternatives are Los Olivos in Old Town and our guide to the best Mexican restaurants in Scottsdale.
The chain that claimed the chimichanga, and its retreat from Scottsdale
Woody and Victoria Johnson opened Woody’s El Nido on McDowell Road in 1946. By New Times’ account, Little Woody’s followed three years later and the first restaurant called Macayo’s, the great big one on Central Avenue, a year after that; later reports date the Central Avenue restaurant to 1952. It was a 20,000-square-foot building shaped like a Mayan temple, and for decades it was the flagship of a family company that spread across the Valley and into Las Vegas. The children, Sharisse, Gary and Stephen Johnson, ran it by 2012.
The Scottsdale closing in 2017 was part of a deliberate contraction. The temple-shaped Central Avenue flagship closed and was demolished, New Times listing its closing in March 2017, and the company replaced it with Woody’s Macayo, a smaller restaurant named for the founder, at 3815 N Central Avenue, opening that October. The lease on Scottsdale Road was nearly up, and the company decided, as a spokeswoman told the Phoenix Business Journal, that it was time to move on. After the closing, ABC15 reported, the chain had ten restaurants in the Valley and two in Las Vegas.
Two years later the family sold. In 2019, after 73 years, Kind Hospitality of Mesa, owned by Nava Singam, bought the Macayo’s name and six of the eight remaining Valley restaurants; the Johnsons kept Woody’s Macayo and the Depot Cantina in Tempe. Kind brought the brand back to Scottsdale in June 2021, in the former Scottsdale Beer Company space at Pima Crossing, Loop 101 and Shea, about two miles from the old store. Listings now mark that restaurant closed, and the company’s own site, under later owner Horizon Hospitality, lists no Scottsdale store; we found no dated report of when it shut.
What the record does not say is when the Scottsdale Road store opened, what replaced it, or how many Scottsdale Macayo’s there were over the years beyond the two the press mentions.
Honest assessment: Macayo’s Scottsdale was never a restaurant critics wrote about, and that is its place in the city’s dining history. It stood for the 1990s-and-earlier Valley of family Mexican chains on suburban arterials, and its quiet exit at the end of a lease, in the same year the temple on Central came down, marks the end of that era in Scottsdale more clearly than any review could.