What is Olive & Ivy?
Scottsdale spent a century treating the Arizona Canal as plumbing. Olive & Ivy was in the vanguard of the argument that it was actually waterfront — and nearly two decades later, its canal-side patio remains the proof.
The restaurant opened in 2007 with the young Scottsdale Waterfront development, a bet by hometown restaurateur Sam Fox that the canal bank behind Fashion Square could feel like somewhere. His Fox Restaurant Concepts was then still an ambitious Arizona group; Olive & Ivy became one of its defining originals — a Mediterranean restaurant fused with a marketplace cafe, so the same address could pour morning espresso, plate business lunches, host mezze-and-wine evenings and hand commuters a pastry on the run. The format was unusual then and remains the house signature now.
The patio made it an institution. Sprawling along the canal with the water below and Camelback Road’s bridge lights beyond, it’s one of the Valley’s definitive outdoor rooms — big enough for the whole district’s social calendar, positioned steps from Fashion Square’s doors.
The parent company’s story ran national — Fox’s group grew into one of America’s most-watched restaurant developers and was acquired by The Cheesecake Factory in 2019 — but Olive & Ivy stayed exactly what it was: one of the longest-running Scottsdale-born concepts in the portfolio, still busy through 2026, still the Waterfront’s dining anchor. Eating there feels like the district working as designed: water, weather, mezze, and half of Scottsdale walking past.
Mezze, brunch and the best-placed patio in the district
Order horizontally. The menu’s Mediterranean heart rewards the mezze approach — spreads, dips and small plates blanketing the table — over the appetizer-entrée march. Build a first round of mezze for the table, then add wood-fired mains or seafood as the second wave. It’s the format the kitchen was designed around, it feeds mixed appetites gracefully, and it stretches a canal-side evening the way the setting deserves.
Brunch is the heavyweight daypart. Weekend mornings on that patio are a Scottsdale institution in their own right — the district’s shoppers, hotel guests and locals converging over Mediterranean-inflected brunch plates and coffee from the marketplace side. In season, book it; the patio’s prime brunch tables are among the Waterfront’s most contested real estate.
Use the marketplace. The attached cafe is the concept’s quiet genius and most under-used feature: proper coffee, pastries and a grab-and-go case that makes it the district’s best quick breakfast, no table required. Regulers treat it as a separate establishment that happens to share a kitchen wall.
Play the calendar. The patio faces the canal’s event stage of record — when Canal Convergence lights the water each fall, this is effectively front-row dining, and booking that week early is a veteran move. High season generally (roughly January through April) keeps the whole Waterfront humming; summer flips the patio to evening-only sanity.
Logistics: garage parking in the Waterfront works painlessly, Fashion Square is a two-minute walk over the canal bridge, and the location makes it the natural before-or-after for anything in the district — a shopping day, a movie, or a bigger dinner elsewhere you’d like to warm up for with a glass of wine over water.
The Fox original that anchored a district
Olive & Ivy is best read as a founding document of two empires at once — the Scottsdale Waterfront’s, and Sam Fox’s.
Start with the district. Mid-2000s Scottsdale was betting heavily that the blocks around Fashion Square could become a genuine urban quarter, and the Waterfront development — towers, shops and a landscaped canal bank — was the centerpiece wager. A development like that lives or dies on whether anyone actually lingers, and Olive & Ivy was the linger machine: all-day service, a marketplace pulling foot traffic, and a patio that made the canal a destination rather than a backdrop. Nearly twenty years on, with the luxury-wing restaurant row booming across the water and celebrity flagships like Luna by Giada a block away, it’s easy to forget the district’s social gravity had to be invented. This patio did much of the inventing.
Then the empire. Fox Restaurant Concepts became one of American dining’s great development stories — the Arizona group whose concepts (Culinary Dropout, Flower Child, North Italia and the rest) scaled from Valley test kitchens to national rollouts, culminating in the 2019 Cheesecake Factory acquisition. Olive & Ivy occupies a special shelf in that story: an original hometown room that was never franchised into ubiquity, remaining essentially a one-of-one. For Scottsdale diners, that makes it the rare Fox concept that still feels like a local restaurant rather than a brand — because here, it is one.
Honest assessment: Olive & Ivy’s cooking is polished-crowd-pleasing rather than boundary-pushing, and it has outlived the era when its Mediterranean menu counted as novel. What it offers instead is harder to replicate: two decades of accumulated habit in the Valley’s most competitive dining district, a dual format nobody has bettered, and the single best canal-side seat in a city that finally learned to love its water. Districts get anchors right about once a generation. The Waterfront got its on the first try.