What is Sauce Pizza & Wine?
The Scottsdale Waterfront is where Old Town keeps its expense-account restaurants: Maple & Ash, the glossy patios of Olive & Ivy, the original P.F. Chang’s. Sauce Pizza & Wine is the one where a family of four can eat for the price of one steak.
Sauce is a fast-casual pizza chain born in the Valley. Sam Fox started it in 2003, early in the run that made Fox Restaurant Concepts the Valley’s busiest launcher of new restaurant ideas, and the idea was simple for the time: thin-crust “gourmet” pizzas, big composed salads and a real wine list, ordered at a counter and priced like a neighborhood pizzeria.
Fox sold the chain in 2015, and it has since grown under local ownership to more than a dozen Arizona stores. The Waterfront location is one of two in Scottsdale. The format has not changed much: you order at the register, take a number to your table, and the food comes out fast.
It is not a destination. It is the answer to a specific Waterfront problem: you want to sit near the canal, eat something good and not spend $150.
The order and the happy hour
Pick from the signature pies. The Prosciutto & Fig, a white pizza with black mission figs, goat cheese and arugula, is the one that defined Sauce in the 2000s. The Pig stacks bacon, Italian sausage, pepperoni, smoked ham and soppressata. The Spicy Chicken Sausage brings Hatch green chile and smoked mozzarella, the most Arizona thing on the menu. Wild Mushroom with truffle oil is the vegetarian pick, and the Bianca is the plain-white-pizza control.
Order a salad for the table. The salads are generous and the reason a lot of regulars come: Quinoa Beet & Arugula, Chicken Spinach & Apple, an Italian Chopped. Pastas (mac ‘n cheese, meatballs, baked lasagna) and paninis round it out for kids and picky eaters.
Time it for happy hour. Monday to Friday, 2 to 5 p.m., bottles of wine are half off, glasses are $2 off, beer is $1 off and one-topping pizzas are $6. That is the best-value happy hour on the Waterfront.
Use it as a pit stop. The Waterfront garage is typically free, the canal path runs past the door, and Fashion Square is across Camelback. Sauce also does takeout and catering, which makes it a sensible lunch order for anyone working in the Waterfront offices. In November, it is a cheap dinner before walking Canal Convergence.
A Sam Fox idea that left the family
Sauce belongs to an early chapter of the Sam Fox story. Through the 2000s Fox was building concept after concept: Sauce in 2003, then the rooms that became Valley institutions, including Culinary Dropout, Olive & Ivy and True Food Kitchen. Two of those, Olive & Ivy and Culinary Dropout, ended up at the Waterfront, which is part of why this stretch of canal can feel like a Fox showroom.
Sauce was the outlier: a cheap, counter-service chain in a portfolio drifting toward big design-forward dining rooms. In January 2015 Fox sold nine Sauce units to Sauce Holdings, a group led by Scott Kilpatrick, who had co-founded RA Sushi in Scottsdale in 1997 and sold it to Benihana in 2002. Fox kept only the store at Sky Harbor Airport. Under Kilpatrick’s group the chain kept the name and the format and kept growing across Phoenix, the East Valley and Tucson.
That history matters for how people describe it. Many guides, and plenty of locals, still call Sauce a Fox restaurant. It has not been one for more than a decade.
The honest assessment: Sauce is a chain, the room is functional, and nobody is crossing town for it. But on a canal where dinner for two can easily reach three figures, a $6 happy-hour pizza and a half-price bottle of wine at a sunny table is a real service, and the Prosciutto & Fig has held up for over twenty years.