What is Pizzeria Virtù?
The best story in Scottsdale pizza is a chef returning to the first kitchen that hired him — this time with his name over the door.
Pizzeria Virtù opened in January 2020 at 6952 E Main St, the corner building at Main and Goldwater that Old Town had known for about eighteen years as Grazie Pizzeria & Wine Bar. When Grazie closed on December 28, 2019, the space went straight to Gio Osso, the chef whose Virtù Honest Craft had made the Bespoke Inn courtyard on Marshall Way a national destination since 2013. The symmetry was real: Grazie was the first restaurant Osso worked in when he moved to the Valley roughly seventeen years earlier, and its well-seasoned Valoriani oven came with the building.
Osso is a certified pizzaiolo of the Accademia della Pizza Napoletana, and the pizzeria is the proof — properly Neapolitan pies with leopard-spotted rims, a dozen-plus on the list, headlined by the salsiccia bianca, the Milano, and the Calabrese (a nod to his parents’ region). Around the pizza sit polpette, orto insalate — vegetable salads cooked in the wood fire — and a bar program of Italian classics, Negroni and Americano first, with Italian wine behind them. The room is black and white with a custom copper bar top, and there is a patio on Main Street.
The verdict: this is the Virtù you can go to on a Tuesday. It carries the same seriousness about ingredients as the flagship at a fraction of the price and none of the ceremony, and it has been the Main Street arts district’s neighborhood pizza room for six years and counting.
Eating at the oven
Come for the pizza, stay for the vegetables. The pies are the reason to visit, and the salsiccia bianca — white base, sausage, no tomato to hide behind — is the one that shows what the oven can do. But the sleeper is the orto insalate section: vegetables blistered in the wood fire and dressed simply, the kind of thing a certified pizzaiolo with a fine-dining background puts on a menu because he cannot help himself. Order one per two people. The polpette are the right starter, and the Italian cocktails are made properly.
Timing. The room is small, and the patio is the good seat when the weather allows, which in Scottsdale means October through May. Thursday nights bring the ArtWalk crowd down Main Street — busy from 6:30 to about 9, then suddenly calm; the late seating after the galleries lock up is the local move. In the January-to-April season, book weekends; the rest of the year, walk in and take the bar.
Money and logistics. Prices land at a fair level two — a pizza, a salad, and a Negroni per person runs well under what the same evening costs on the Waterfront. Parking is the usual Old Town arrangement: metered street spots on Main and the side streets, or the free public structures a few blocks toward Scottsdale Road. The address is a five-minute walk west of the bar district, which keeps the room civilized on weekend nights.
How it fits the family. If you want the full Osso experience, this is the first act: pizza here on a weeknight, then the tasting-menu evening at Virtù Honest Craft on Marshall Way for the occasion.
A succession, a shutdown, and a second act
The handoff from Grazie to Pizzeria Virtù was the kind of succession Scottsdale rarely gets. Most closed restaurants here become something unrelated within a year; the Main Street corner instead went from one wood-fired pizzeria to another, with the same oven burning and a chef who had once worked the space returning to run it. Grazie’s owners closed on their own terms after eighteen years, and Osso — by then the most decorated independent chef in Old Town, with an Esquire best-new-restaurant nod and a James Beard semifinal listing behind him — had the credibility to take over the address without a redesign campaign.
Then the 2020s happened, immediately. Pizzeria Virtù opened in January 2020 and closed six weeks later when the pandemic shut Old Town down. It reopened, and its casual format turned out to be the right one for the years that followed: pizza travels, patios were safe, and a neighborhood room a few blocks from the bar district had a built-in local clientele that the tourist restaurants did not. The pizzeria became the family’s stabilizer while the flagship weathered the tasting-menu drought.
Osso’s later attempt to scale — Piccolo Virtù, opened in December 2022 in the former Nonna Urban Eatery courtyard at the east end of Main Street and closed a year later with “mixed emotions” — makes the pizzeria’s endurance more notable. Three formats at three price points on two blocks proved one too many; two held. The pizzeria’s job was never to be a statement. It was to feed the arts district well, and it does.
Its context is a Scottsdale pizza landscape that improved dramatically in the same decade — Pomo brought certified Neapolitan pizza to the Waterfront. Pizzeria Virtù’s edge is the chef: a Neapolitan-certified pizzaiolo with a fine-dining palate, cooking in an oven with two decades of seasoning. Honest assessment: it is not a revelation the way Virtù Honest Craft was in 2013, and it does not need to be. It is the neighborhood pizzeria the arts district deserved, run by the person best qualified in the city to run it.