What is Press Coffee?
Shopping-center coffee is usually a warning label. Press Coffee at Scottsdale Quarter is the exception that’s been proving the rule since the center’s early days — a homegrown Arizona roaster holding prime retail ground with a program that would be credible in any coffee city in the country.
The company was founded in Phoenix in 2008, right as the Valley’s specialty coffee movement was finding its feet, and it made the decisive commitment early: roast your own. Press built its identity on sourcing green coffee with intention, roasting it in-house, and — the part most growing coffee companies fumble — training baristas to a standard that survives expansion. When Scottsdale Quarter rose on the old motorola-adjacent stretch of Scottsdale Road, Press took a corner of it and gave north Scottsdale something it conspicuously lacked: a serious cafe within walking distance of a mall directory.
The cafe experience is the modern specialty template done without preciousness — a flat white with proper milk texture, rotating single-origins, retail bags of whatever you just drank, and a room that functions as the Quarter’s de facto living room for laptop workers, post-Pilates meetups, and Airpark refugees between meetings.
Fifteen-plus years in, Press has grown into one of Arizona’s defining coffee brands with cafes across the Valley. The Quarter location remains the flagship experience for north Scottsdale — busy, consistent, and still a clear step above the coffee its neighborhood would otherwise settle for.
Ordering well and timing it better
The flat white is the benchmark. It’s the order that exercises everything Press invests in — the espresso roast, the extraction, the milk work — in one small cup. If the barista nails it (they usually do), you’ve learned everything about the program in four ounces. The cortado and a straight espresso are the other truth-tellers.
Ask about the single-origins. The rotating pour-over and featured-roast selection is where the sourcing shows. The staff can generally tell you where a coffee came from and why it tastes the way it does, which remains rarer than it should be even in the specialty era. If a cup impresses you, the same beans are on the retail shelf — the best souvenir the Quarter sells at any price point.
Time the room. Weekend mid-mornings are the crush: shoppers, gym crowds from the Quarter’s fitness tenants, and half of Kierland in athleisure. Weekday early mornings run brisk but efficient — the commuter window — while weekday afternoons are the sleeper slot, when the room quiets and the bar has time for care and conversation. The patio-adjacent seating makes a fine perch for watching the Quarter’s parade go by.
Food is supporting cast. There’s a competent lineup of pastries and cafe bites that will get you through a morning, but Press is a coffee program first — pair it with breakfast plans elsewhere if you’re hungry-hungry. North Scottsdale’s brunch heavyweights like Butters Pancakes & Cafe and Hash Kitchen are minutes away, and a Press flat white is the correct prologue or epilogue to either.
How an independent won the chain corridor
The Kierland-Quarter corridor is the most brand-dense retail stretch in Scottsdale — national tenants, national restaurants, national coffee. That an independent Phoenix roaster became its coffee anchor is a small story about a big shift in how the Valley drinks.
When Press was founded in 2008, metro Phoenix was a specialty-coffee frontier. The third wave — direct sourcing, lighter roasts, coffee treated as agricultural product rather than commodity fuel — had transformed Seattle, Portland, and the Bay, but the Valley’s independent scene was thin and scattered. Press was among the local pioneers who bet the desert would catch up, alongside the roasters who would later populate Old Town and the arts district south of it — Cartel working the indie end of the spectrum, Sip Coffee & Beer House fusing cafe and taproom. The bet paid: within a decade, specialty coffee went from curiosity to baseline expectation across Scottsdale.
Press’s particular genius was choosing ground the indie scene ignored. Old Town got the tattooed cafes; Press took Scottsdale Quarter — new, corporate, drenched in foot traffic — and proved a quality program could survive a mall address. That decision put genuinely good coffee in front of tens of thousands of people who would never have sought out a roastery, and it gave the company the volume to fund growth without diluting the product. It’s the same trick the best local restaurant groups pulled in the same corridor: meet the mainstream where it shops, and quietly raise its standards.
The contrast with Scottsdale’s older coffee tradition is instructive too. The city’s longest-running independent, Village Coffee Roastery in McCormick Ranch, represents the neighborhood-roaster model — one room, one community, decades deep. Press represents the scaled version: multiple cafes, a central roasting operation, wholesale reach. Scottsdale is lucky to have both ends of the spectrum still thriving, because plenty of cities lost one to the other.
Honest assessment: Press at the Quarter is not a hushed temple of coffee — it’s busy, it’s bright, and at peak hours it runs like the high-volume operation it is. But the cup quality holds under that pressure, which is the hardest trick in coffee. That’s why it’s lasted, and why the corridor’s coffee bar is set where it is.