What is Prep & Pastry?
Prep & Pastry is a Tucson brunch restaurant that moved north and found its best address. It wraps the ground floor of the Broadstone Waterfront apartments at 7025 E Via Soleri Drive, on the northeast corner of Goldwater Boulevard and the Arizona Canal, the canal-side block of the Scottsdale Waterfront just south of Fashion Square. It opened on Tuesday, September 17, 2019, as the brand’s third location and its first in the Valley.
The owner is Nathan Ares, who worked for Fox Restaurant Concepts and RA Sushi and at Tucson’s North and The Abbey before opening the first Prep & Pastry in December 2013 at 3073 N Campbell Avenue, a 2,600-square-foot, 90-seat room in a former cafe, with chef-partner Kyle Nottingham. A second Tucson location followed in 2016, and a dinner restaurant, Commoner & Co., in 2015; the company calls itself the Ares Collective and dates its founding to 2014. “After six years in Tucson,” Ares said at the Scottsdale opening, “it just felt like the right time and the perfect place to come to Scottsdale.”
The Scottsdale room seats 140 inside and out, with the indoor-outdoor line running along the canal. The kitchen does made-to-order breakfast and lunch: a Cast Iron Duck Confit with cherries and goat cheese mousse, a Sweet Potato Hash, a Poblano Beni on a biscuit with carnitas, Chicken and Toast with chiltepin maple syrup, a Harissa Shakshuka, and at lunch a double-patty Commoner’s Burger and a Shaved Steak Sammie. The pastry case, baked daily in limited numbers, is the other half of the name: croissants, Earl Grey scones, candied maple bacon dossants and seasonal pieces like a Pumpkin Dossant. The bar pours $12.50 cocktails and $10.50 mimosas from opening.
Phoenix New Times put it on its list of ten new breakfast spots in February 2020 and named it Best Brunch in the 2021 Best of Phoenix. It is for the Waterfront’s residents, Old Town visitors who want a real breakfast within walking distance, and anyone who takes pastry seriously. Our verdict: the best weekday breakfast in Old Town, and on weekends worth the line.
Ordering at Prep & Pastry
Start at the case. The pastries are baked fresh each morning in limited quantities, so the first move is to look before you sit. The dossant, the house croissant-doughnut, the Earl Grey scone and whatever seasonal croissant is on the board (a Toffee Apple Crème Croissant and a Cherry Brioche Donut in the fall) go first. New Times’ 2021 award praised the croissant’s “puff and shatter,” a passion fruit pavlova and a praline eclair.
Order the duck. The Cast Iron Duck Confit ($19), braised duck with spinach, cherries, goat cheese mousse, potatoes and over-easy eggs, is the dish the restaurant has led with since 2019 and the one the critics name. The Smoked Salmon Hash ($19) and Smoked Salmon Beni ($19.75) are the other top-of-menu plates. For value, the Simple Breakfast is $11.50, the Biscuits and Gravy with duck fat sausage gravy $11.50, and the weekday Prep Combo ($13.50, with drip coffee) gives you a simple breakfast with bacon or a half omelette and half French toast. The Poblano Beni ($16.50), Chicken and Toast ($17.75), Monte Cristo ($17) and Harissa Shakshuka ($16.50) are the plates that make it a brunch rather than a breakfast. The PB&J French toast on Japanese milk bread and the breakfast poutine with pork belly that New Times praised in 2021 come and go with the menu.
Lunch is real. From the opening the kitchen has run a lunch list past noon: a Fried Chicken Sandwich with gochujang aioli ($17.75), the double-patty Commoner’s Burger ($17.75), a Shaved Steak Sammie ($18.75), a Kale Salad ($11.50) and, on weekdays, All Hail the Special, half a sandwich with half a salad or soup for $16.50.
Drink. Cocktails are $12.50: Prep’s Bloody Mary, a Cold Brew Martini, a Pickle Michelada, a Cool as a Cucumber gin drink. Mimosas are $10.50 in eight flavors, including prickly pear, and the build-your-own set with prosecco and three juices is $42. Spirit-free versions run $7.
Timing and parking. Hours are 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday through Sunday. There are no reservations; the website has a skip-the-wait link for the waitlist. The Broadstone garage is for residents, so park free in the Waterfront garage off Camelback or at Fashion Square across the canal. Afterward, the Arizona Canal path runs past the door to the Soleri Bridge. For the rest of the field, see our best brunch in Scottsdale guide.
The Tucson brunch that fixed the Waterfront’s morning problem
The Scottsdale Waterfront was built in the mid-2000s as a canal-side promenade of condos, offices and restaurants, and for most of its first fifteen years it had a dinner problem solved and a breakfast problem not. Olive & Ivy served the canal in the evening; the mornings belonged to the coffee bar. When Alliance Residential finished the Broadstone Waterfront apartments on the Goldwater corner, the ground floor needed a tenant that would bring people at 8 a.m., and Ares signed for it.
He was ready. Prep & Pastry had opened in December 2013 in a 2,600-square-foot former cafe on Campbell Avenue in Tucson, with Ares and two partners on the business side and Kyle Nottingham in the kitchen; BizTucson’s 2017 profile has the general manager calling the menu “brunch food on crack.” The second Prep opened in a new 6,000-square-foot building at Grant and Wilmot in July 2016 with 120 seats, and Commoner & Co. had given the company a dinner service in 2015. Ares’ Phoenix background with Fox Restaurant Concepts and RA Sushi meant he knew what the Valley’s brunch market looked like, and he brought the Tucson name rather than inventing a new one.
The timing was poor and then very good. Prep & Pastry opened in September 2019, made New Times’ February 2020 list of new breakfast rooms to try, and five weeks later the pandemic closed every dining room in the state. A 140-seat restaurant with half its seats on a canal patio was better placed than most, and when New Times handed out its 2021 Best of Phoenix awards it gave Best Brunch to Prep & Pastry, with the “on-canal” Scottsdale location named as the place where brunch, which “almost never actually delivers,” finally did. By 2025 Scottsdale.com’s brunch lists still carried it, alongside Hash Kitchen and Breakfast Club a few blocks south.
What the record does not say is as much as what it does. New Times once reported a Gilbert Prep & Pastry in the works; the company’s site today lists only Tucson and Scottsdale, and we found no account of the Gilbert store opening. The site also shortens the Scottsdale weekday hours to 8 to 2, a change from the 7-to-3-daily schedule the restaurant opened with, and the press has not explained why. Nottingham’s current role is not described anywhere we found beyond “chef-partner.”
Honest assessment: Prep & Pastry is a chain of three that cooks like a restaurant of one, and the Scottsdale room is its best by location. The pastry program is the real thing, the duck confit has earned its place, and the prices, mostly $15 to $19 a plate in 2026, sit below the Old Town brunch rooms that trade on bottomless mimosas. The weekend line is the cost of the 2020s brunch boom; the weekday 8 a.m. seat on the canal is the reward for ignoring it.