What was Molise Cucina Italiana?
Before south Scottsdale’s strip malls became a running joke about hidden gems, one of them held a 120-seat Italian dining room run by a family that worked every station. Nobody called it a gem. They just went every Friday.
Molise Cucina Italiana opened around 1995 at 2515 N Scottsdale Rd, in a shopping-strip storefront on the neighborhood stretch of Scottsdale Road south of Thomas. Its owners were Anthony and Filomena Di Franco, who named the restaurant for the mountain region of Molise and ran it the way such families do: everyone works, and the point is that it tastes good. “We don’t believe in fancy decor,” Filomena would later say of the family’s next restaurant. “But the food? It’s gotta be good.”
The room was large and airy and furnished like a relative’s house — an ornate antique breakfront, a huge wood armoire loaded with wine bottles, a music system that might produce anything — with a cheery, eager-to-please staff and a kitchen that, as Phoenix New Times put it in a 1999 review, had not spent its years “reconceptualizing Italian gastronomy” but instead focused on getting familiar dishes right. Homemade pasta, veal, the dishes you already knew, at prices the ranch-house grid could afford.
Around 2005 the Di Francos sold it and opened Tesoro, a 45-seat room in Ancala Village on Via Linda, where their children could cook and serve. Molise closed under its new owners within two years. It left no awards and no famous dish — only a decade of Friday nights, and a strip-mall address that would later prove, with Atlas Bistro, that south Scottsdale had been hiding serious food all along.
Friday night at the Di Francos’
Dinner at Molise ran on the rhythms of a family kitchen, and the regulars learned to order accordingly.
The pasta was made in-house, and the smart move was to ask what had been rolled that day rather than to scan the printed list. Veal was the other pillar — the scaloppine-and-parmigiana canon that every neighborhood Italian room of the 1990s carried, but here cooked with the attention of people whose name was on the door. The wine came from the armoire in the dining room, an antique loaded with bottles that doubled as the cellar and the decor.
Service was family. The Di Francos worked their own room, and the staff had the eager, slightly formal warmth that critics noticed and neighbors took for granted. You were seated, fed, and remembered the next time. The music was a standing joke — the system might swing from opera to something no one could identify — and it made the big room feel like a party at someone’s house with 120 chairs.
The room filled on weekends. Molise drew from the southern half of the city — Coronado-side families, Motorola engineers, people who had tried the Old Town trattorias and preferred not paying for the tourists’ rent. Dinner ran Tuesday through Sunday, and weekend reservations were the difference between eating at seven and at nine.
Price was the quiet argument. Molise charged neighborhood prices for scratch cooking, which was possible only because the family did the labor and the landlord charged strip-mall rent. Every later south Scottsdale success — Atlas Bistro, Chula Seafood — would rediscover that equation. The Di Francos got there first.
The strip mall before it was a statement
Scottsdale’s Italian dining history mostly happened somewhere else. The grand rooms — Avanti with its black-and-white glamour, Veneto Trattoria at Hilton Village — served the resort corridor and the gallery crowd. South Scottsdale, meanwhile, ate Italian at Molise, in a strip on Scottsdale Road between Thomas and McDowell that no concierge ever mentioned.
The Di Francos belonged to a specific Valley tradition: immigrant families who opened where rent was cheap and built a clientele by feeding it well for years. The Andreoli and DeFalco’s families would carry the same idea into grocer-cafes; the Di Francos did it as a full dining room, and a big one. Their decade on Scottsdale Road coincided with the neighborhood’s hardest stretch — Los Arcos Mall dying at the end of the 1990s, the McDowell corridor emptying — and Molise’s crowded weekends were a small counterargument that the south side would still spend on dinner if someone cooked it honestly.
The sale around 2005 was a family decision, not a failure. Tesoro, the 45-seat room the Di Francos opened next in Ancala Village, was a deliberate downsizing: Anthony and daughter Sonia in the kitchen, Ania and Maurizio waiting tables, a tiramisu that critics called among the best around. “Sometimes we feel guilty,” Filomena said of the demand that a smaller room created, “but this feels just right.” Molise, under whoever bought it, did not outlast Tesoro’s second birthday.
The coda: the same strip later gained Atlas Bistro, the BYOB tasting-menu room that turned a strip mall into an insider destination and made “hidden south Scottsdale” a brand. Molise lived the premise for ten years before anyone named it.
Honest assessment: Molise was a good neighborhood restaurant, not a landmark; its fame extends about as far as the people who ate there. It fed the ranch-house grid when the city’s dining conversation skipped it entirely, and the family that ran it kept cooking. Ask around south Scottsdale about Italian food in the 1990s, and the name still comes up first.