What is Slanted Rice Vietnamese Bistro?
Slanted Rice is the Scottsdale branch of a Vietnamese restaurant family. It sits at 6149 N Scottsdale Road in the Shops at Hilton Village, the locals’ center on the west side of Scottsdale Road just north of Lincoln Drive and the Hilton Scottsdale Resort, where Scottsdale meets Paradise Valley. It opened in November 2013, and it has been owned and run since then by Hue Tran, a native of Vietnam, and Ty Chu, who were engaged when they opened it.
The family came first. Hue and her sister Lan Tran opened Rice Paper, a modern Vietnamese restaurant in Phoenix, in 2011; the family ran Saigon Kitchen, a traditional place in Surprise; and in October 2012 the sisters added Bonjour Vietnam, a French-Vietnamese room inside the Hotel San Carlos. When Phoenix New Times announced Slanted Rice in 2013, it described the plan as a combination of Rice Paper and Saigon Kitchen, modern and traditional in one dining room. The restaurant now calls itself the family’s fourth in the Valley and lists Poki Bar Central as a sibling.
Hue Tran describes the menu as 90 percent Vietnamese and 10 percent fusion. That means vegetable-packed egg rolls meant to be wrapped in lettuce and mint, fresh spring rolls, marinated wings, salt and pepper shrimp with jalapeños, lemongrass rice plates, vermicelli bowls, pho, potstickers, shishito peppers, and the crispy clay pots, jasmine rice seared in a clay vessel until it crackles, with chicken or other toppings. There is a full bar, a cozy dining room and a patio that faces the parking lot and, past it, Camelback Mountain.
In 2018 Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives put the egg rolls and the clay pot chicken on national television, and the restaurant has worn the Triple D sticker ever since. It is for the Hilton Village neighborhood first, Paradise Valley and the Camelback Corridor second, and the Fieri pilgrims third. Our verdict: a steady, family-run Vietnamese bistro whose best dishes are the plain ones, and the place to eat pho on this stretch of Scottsdale Road.
Ordering at Slanted Rice
Eat the television dishes properly. The Crispy Pork Egg Rolls are long, smooth, fried rolls of pork and glass noodles served on romaine with mint and a sweet dipping sauce with a trace of fish-sauce funk. Hue Tran showed Fieri how to eat them: wrap a roll in the lettuce, pile on the mint, dunk. New Times’ Chris Malloy, who ate everything Guy did, found the mint made the dish and asked for more of it. The Crispy Clay Pot Chicken comes to the table hissing; the jasmine rice is still cooking against the clay and will burn your tongue if you go in before five minutes, and the crust on the bottom is the reward. Malloy compared it to bibimbap.
Then eat like a regular. The lemongrass rice plates and the vermicelli bowls are the weekday orders, the salt and pepper shrimp with jalapeños and onions is the best of the fried things, and the pho list includes a vegetarian version and the full pho dac biet. The Food Network listing recommends the vegetable-packed rolls; the house also runs marinated wings, garlic edamame, pork riblets, a grilled artichoke, firecracker shrimp, potstickers, shishito peppers and a filet mignon for the person who will not eat Vietnamese. The restaurant has not published prices online in the sources we found; expect a neighborhood-bistro check, roughly $15 to $30 a head before drinks.
Hours and booking. Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, lunch through dinner without a break. The restaurant recommends reservations for the dining room and bar; call (480) 696-3116, since there is no online booking. The room is small, so weekend dinner is the time to book. The Hilton Village directory lists a daily happy hour with discounted appetizers, which makes the bar at 4 p.m. the cheapest way to try the egg rolls; details are not published, so ask.
Where to sit. The patio looks over the parking lot to palm trees and most of Camelback Mountain, which Malloy watched “purpling as the sun sinks behind the hump.” It is the better seat from October through April and at any sunset. Inside is a cozy dining room with a bar along one side.
Getting there and around. Hilton Village is the strip of shops between the Hilton and the Lincoln Drive light, with its own lot; park anywhere and walk. Goldman’s Deli is a few minutes east on Hayden if the table wants matzo balls instead of pho, and the center’s own guide covers the rest of the row. For a Scottsdale Asian dining tradition of comparable age, Flo’s in north Scottsdale and Malee’s on Main Street are the elders.
The Tran sisters, Hilton Village and the Triple D sticker
Vietnamese food in metro Phoenix lives mostly in the west Valley and along the Phoenix side of the Camelback Corridor; Scottsdale had almost none of it in the 2010s. The Tran sisters were building a small chain on the Phoenix side when they looked east. Rice Paper (2011) was the modern one; Saigon Kitchen in Surprise was the family’s traditional kitchen; Bonjour Vietnam at the San Carlos was a 2012 experiment in French-Vietnamese. Slanted Rice, announced in the fall of 2013 and open that November, was the first time the family tried Scottsdale, and the location was shrewd: Hilton Village, built in the 1970s, draws from Paradise Valley and the Lincoln Drive resort strip, neighborhoods with money and very few Asian restaurants.
Hue Tran ran it with her fiancé, Tyrone Chu, and the two still own it. For four years it was a neighborhood secret. Then the Food Network came. The Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives segment aired in January 2018 in Season 27, in an episode listed as “Poutine, Pizza and Pork,” and showed Tran mixing a soy and sesame dipping sauce that made Fieri declare he would eat it on a shoe, then building a clay pot while he teased her about overcooking the rice. New Times’ Malloy, who admitted the place had not been on his radar, went to eat the same dishes and wrote a fair verdict: egg rolls just above average without the mint and very good with it, a clay pot that was exactly as hot as Fieri warned, and a restaurant that was not a diner, drive-in or dive. ABC15 has kept it on its running list of Arizona Triple D restaurants ever since.
What the record does not say is the exact opening date beyond “November,” the seat count, or the dates of the daily happy hour. The family’s spelling of Chu’s first name shifts between Tyrone and Ty depending on the source, and the restaurant’s own site now describes the menu as modern and traditional together rather than the Rice Paper-plus-Saigon Kitchen formula of the announcement. The pandemic years passed without a press trail, which for a strip-center restaurant means it survived them.
Its place in the city is modest and real. Scottsdale’s Asian dining has run to sushi and Thai, with Chinese-American rooms like Flo’s and a handful of pan-Asian lounges; a Vietnamese bistro with a full bar on the Camelback Corridor end of Scottsdale Road was a first and is still close to the only one. Its nearly 600 Yelp reviews say the neighborhood noticed.
Honest assessment: Slanted Rice is a good neighborhood restaurant that television made into a destination, and the two things are in mild tension. The Fieri plates are fine and fun, the lemongrass plates and the shrimp are better, the room is small, and the bill is fair. If you live within three miles it should be in your rotation; if you are driving from Old Town for a Triple D pilgrimage, go at sunset, sit outside, and order past the sticker.