What is Paradise Valley Burger Company?
Paradise Valley Burger Company is a 35-seat burger counter at 15689 N Hayden Road, in the Sonora Village shopping center at Hayden and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, on the edge of the Scottsdale Airpark. It has been there since October 25, 2024. Before that it spent 13 years at 40th Street and Bell Road in north Phoenix, which is why a Scottsdale restaurant carries the name of a Phoenix neighborhood and why people still call it PV Burger.
The owner and chef is Bret Shapiro, born in Brooklyn, raised in the Valley from age 12, and a career restaurant cook who opened the original shop in 2011 as his first solo venture, in a space whose previous tenant had failed. He decided hamburgers were the way to go and then spent a decade proving that a quarter-pound patty is a blank canvas: by 2023 he told Arizona PBS he had created about 500 burgers. The famous one is the Burger Brulee, whose bun is coated in raw sugar and torched until the crust tastes, as New Times put it, part caramel and part campfire. The infamous one is the Booze Burger, two beer-battered patties under a green chile, vodka and bacon cream sauce, which is the burger Guy Fieri ate on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives in 2015.
Television made the place. The shop appeared in a second episode, and Fieri returned for Triple D Nation in 2025; Man v. Food filmed there too. The plaques ran out of wall in Phoenix, so when leasing problems ended the Bell Road run, Shapiro moved the whole operation, every staff member included, to a newer and larger Scottsdale space with the flat-top and fryers in full view, a 20-seat patio, beer and wine, and room on the menu for chicken sandwiches and onion rings.
It serves the Airpark lunch crowd, families from the Shea Corridor and burger pilgrims who saw it on cable. Our verdict: the most inventive burger kitchen in Scottsdale, and the rare TV restaurant that is better in person than on screen.
Ordering at Paradise Valley Burger Company
Order the Brulee first. It is a quarter-pound patty with bacon, an over-easy egg, Havarti, lettuce, pickled red onion and Thousand Island dressing on the torched sugar bun. The yolk breaks about three bites in and becomes a second sauce; the sweet crust makes the bacon taste better than it has any right to. Delivery apps have listed it around $16.50 and a plain Paradise Burger around $12, though menu prices in the shop differ from app prices and change with the specials. The Booze Burger and the Country Fried Burger (lightly fried beef, jalapeño and thyme reduction, fried onion) are the Fieri pair. The Fritter, introduced just before the move, stacks bacon-fat guacamole, green chile, a corn-muffin fritter, blueberry-habanero preserves, grilled poblano and cumin ranch. There are three roasted-chile burgers, all patties are hand-pressed, and the chiles are roasted in house.
Do not skip the sides. The jalapeño fries are battered shoestring jalapeños served with brown sugar and truffle ketchup. Los Onion Rings are chorizo-spiced with rosemary and hot honey. Tater tots and salads round it out, and the house milkshakes, made at a station behind the counter, have run to maple pecan bacon and Lucky Charms marshmallow. Scottsdale added beer and wine, which Phoenix never had.
Watch the calendar. Specials rotate roughly every two weeks, and there are full holiday menus: the 4/20 menu with Nugs (sugar-and-spice fried Brussels sprouts) and Pre-Rolls (Southwest egg rolls), and a Halloween menu with a pumpkin creme brulee shake and the Frankenstein Burger, which borrows one ingredient from every burger on the board. The Doritos-crusted burger built for Fieri’s 2025 visit ran as a limited special at both shops.
Timing and logistics. Hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, the same schedule the Bell Road shop kept. It is counter service, no reservations, 35 seats inside and 20 outside. Park in the Sonora Village lot, which it shares with Thai House, Veggie Village and the O.H.S.O. distillery. For the wider field, see our note on what to eat in Scottsdale and compare the burger at Rehab Burger Therapy in Old Town, which finished ahead of it in the 2026 Ranking Arizona poll.
The burger joint that moved its whole staff across the city line
Shapiro’s story is the one Valley restaurant people tell about doing one thing well for a long time. He opened on Bell Road in 2011 with no partners, and the shop stayed small, a chill room New Times compared to a college cafeteria, while the burgers got stranger and the press got louder. In 2015 Fieri’s crew turned up, and Shapiro has said the first Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives airing produced a noticeable jump in business. New Times put the Brulee Burger at No. 39 on its 2018 list of 50 essential Valley dishes. Arizona PBS featured it on Check, Please! Arizona in February 2023. By then he had opened Paradise Valley Pizza Company next door, ridden out the pandemic and, after six years of planning, opened a 2,100-square-foot second burger shop at Baseline and Rural in Tempe in April 2023, about 40 percent bigger than the original.
The Scottsdale move was forced rather than chosen. What Now Phoenix, citing AZCentral, reported leasing issues at the Phoenix space in September 2024; Shapiro’s own framing was that the new room was newer, remodeled and more suitable, and that he had tried to stay as close to the old location as possible. Sonora Village is a few miles east of Bell and 40th, across the city line, in the strip-center belt south of the Scottsdale Airport. He turned off the Phoenix flat-top on Thursday, October 24, 2024, and opened Scottsdale at 11 a.m. on Friday the 25th with poster boards in the windows reading “Burger time baby!” Every original employee transferred.
The timing put it inside a run of good press. Fieri returned for Triple D Nation in March 2025, in a season that also revisited Perk Eatery and The Thumb, and Shapiro’s Doritos burger for the taping made the news again. In May 2026 Ranking Arizona readers voted the shop No. 10 among the state’s hamburger restaurants, behind Rehab Burger Therapy and Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers. Shapiro has said more locations are the plan once this one is, in his words, purring.
What the record does not say is how the Scottsdale room has changed the menu beyond the obvious additions; the shop’s website did not load when we checked, so the menu lives on the wall, on Instagram and in the delivery apps, and we have given prices only where a published source listed them.
Honest assessment: this is a better burger than most of the $25 versions in the resort restaurants up Scottsdale Road, served in a strip mall with no pretension and a line at lunch. The sugar bun is a gimmick that happens to work, the Booze Burger is a stunt you should try once, and the sides are where the kitchen’s judgment shows. It belongs in the first rank of the 2020s Airpark arrivals, and it got there by being 13 years old already.