What is Snooze, an A.M. Eatery at Kierland Commons?
Snooze, an A.M. Eatery is the breakfast restaurant on the Scottsdale Road frontage of Kierland Commons, at 15210 N Scottsdale Road, and it has been there since Wednesday, August 26, 2015. It belongs to a chain founded in Denver in 2006, which reached Arizona with a Central Phoenix restaurant in 2013, then Tempe and downtown Gilbert. Kierland was the fourth Valley Snooze and the first in Scottsdale. The opening ran two days as a fundraiser for the McDowell Mountain Conservancy and the Whispering Hope Ranch Foundation, which tells you the kind of neighborhood it was aiming at.
The room was custom built for the space and is compact by Snooze standards. Its defining feature is a rollaway garage-door window wall, described at the opening as a first for Kierland Commons, which lifts to join the dining room to a large shaded patio. The look is the chain’s, which AZ Golf Homes described at the opening as part retro, part futuristic and built for comfort. Then-CEO David Birzon said at the time that shopping centers can be “a little sleepy early in the mornings,” and the point of the restaurant was to fix that for the Commons, which until then had nothing open at 6:30 a.m.
What it serves is the Snooze menu, which is the reason the lines exist. Pancake flights let you pick three from the list; the pineapple upside down cake pancake is the one Phoenix New Times singled out in its 2020 guide to the center. There is a breakfast pot pie with rosemary sausage gravy, a deep Benedict section led by a prosciutto and Taleggio Benny on ciabatta with cream cheese hollandaise, breakfast burritos, huevos rancheros and a mimosa poured from house sparkling wine on tap. The kitchen opened with Cartel Coffee Lab, Hickman’s eggs and Cotton Country Jam, and the company says it recycles or composts up to 90 percent of its waste.
It is for the Kierland & Quarter morning: guests walking over from the Westin Kierland, families from the neighborhoods north of Greenway, and golfers off Kierland Golf Club. Our verdict: it is the most reliable breakfast in the district, a chain executed well, and the garage-door patio on a February morning is as good as a shopping-center breakfast gets.
How to eat at Snooze Kierland
Timing. Hours are 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 6:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends, which is the whole story of the place: it opens before anything else in the Commons and closes before the dinner rooms open. Weekdays before 8 a.m. you walk straight in. Saturday and Sunday from about 9 a.m. the wait climbs to an hour, longer during spring training and the week of the Phoenix Open, when the snowbird crowd and the resort fill every breakfast room north of Shea.
The waitlist. There are no reservations. Snooze runs a waitlist through Yelp that you can join remotely, and the Kierland directory lists it as the way to book. Join it from the car, then park and walk the shops; the quote is usually honest. Curbside and in-store pickup are also offered if you would rather eat on the patio at home.
Order the pancakes first. The pancake flight is the signature: three pancakes of your choosing. Put the pineapple upside down cake pancake in it. If you are not in a pancake mood, the Benedict section is the deepest part of the menu; the Benny Duo lets you split two half-Benedicts, and the smoked salmon Benny is the most expensive plate. The breakfast pot pie, a sausage gravy pie under a biscuit lid, is the dish to order once and then never again because it is enormous. Breakfast burritos come crispy or smothered. Prices on the delivery menus we found run from about $14 for buttermilk pancakes to about $17 for the OMG French toast, $18 to $20 for most Benedicts and about $25 for the smoked salmon one; in-store prices are a little lower.
Drink the morning cocktails. The mimosa pours from house sparkling wine on tap, and the Mayan Mocha, with chili-infused tequila and cinnamon, was on the opening list. Coffee was Cartel Coffee Lab from Tempe when the restaurant opened.
Getting there and who is there. Kierland Commons sits at Scottsdale Road and Greenway Parkway, mostly on the Phoenix side of the line, and Snooze faces Scottsdale Road on Level 1. Angled street spaces inside the center turn over quickly at breakfast; the garage behind the shops is the fallback. The crowd is families, hotel guests and golfers, with strollers everywhere on weekends; see our Scottsdale with kids guide and the best brunch in Scottsdale list for the alternatives. What to skip: the lunch side of the menu, which is fine but not why you waited.
The breakfast room that woke up the Commons
Kierland Commons was built around dinner. When it opened around 2000, its restaurant row was Zinc Bistro and North Italia, both from 2002, plus P.F. Chang’s, RA Sushi and later The Greene House, and the morning belonged to the Westin Kierland across the street. Macerich, which owns the center, spent the mid-2010s filling that gap. Snooze in August 2015 was the first move; Postino WineCafe opened next door within the year, and Shake Shack followed in September 2016. The January 2016 press release announcing Shake Shack already listed Snooze as part of the row, which is fast for a restaurant five months old.
Snooze was a good fit for the job. The chain had been built in Denver on the idea that breakfast could be a destination with a line, and its Phoenix debut in 2013 had drawn enough attention that New Times ran a story on whether the Central Phoenix store lived up to the hype. By the time it reached Scottsdale it had a formula: a bright room, a long pancake list, a cocktail menu at 7 a.m., and a sustainability pitch that included composting and 1 percent of sales to local causes. The Kierland version added the garage-door wall and the patio, which matter more here than in Denver; from November through April the whole point of a north Scottsdale breakfast is to eat it outside.
The press record after the opening is thin, which is what you would expect of a chain breakfast that simply works. New Times’ 2020 all-day guide to the Commons put it in the breakfast slot and called the room a vintage diner space with atypical fare. The chain later opened a second Scottsdale restaurant on Shea Boulevard, and the Kierland store stayed the busier one because of the resort and the shops. We could not find a reported seat count or square footage for the room, and the company’s own location page was unreachable when we checked; the hours above come from the Kierland Commons directory.
Honest assessment: this is a chain breakfast, and a few of the plates are sweeter than they need to be. It is also well run, open earlier than anything around it, and sited on the best breakfast patio in the district. For the Kierland & Quarter morning it is the default, and the default is good. If you want a local alternative with the same energy, Hash Kitchen and Butters are the names to know; if you want quiet, go at 6:30.