What is Soul Cafe?
Soul Cafe is the restaurant that started one of North Scottsdale’s homegrown restaurant groups, and it is still the one its owner calls the most personal. It sits at 7615 E Pinnacle Peak Road, Suite 1, on the corner of Miller Road, in the stretch of Pinnacle Peak Road between Scottsdale Road and Pima where the Pinnacle Peak and Troon golf communities do their errands. By the restaurant’s own account it opened in 2010; Yelp dates it to 2011, and the press we found does not settle the month.
The owner and executive chef is Sheila Bryson. She was raised in a southern Italian family in Chicago, where her mother made meatballs and sausage every Sunday, moved to Arizona in 1981 and fell for green chile, and spent her first career as a State Farm lobbyist, a state health-department employee and a private investigator. At 49, a single mother with no restaurant training, she started cooking breakfast burritos and pancakes on a portable griddle in the back of a friend’s north Phoenix bakery. The line went out the door, she bought her first table and chairs at Fry’s, and the result was Heart and Soul Cafe and then Soul Cafe.
The menu is comfort food with a Southwestern accent rather than the Southern one the name suggests: a long list of omelets, pancakes that include savory corn-and-zucchini cakes with jalapeño bacon, a Benedict called eggs Jared with jalapeño cheese sauce, roasted tricolor potatoes, scratch pies, and buttermilk fried chicken that has been on the menu since the doors opened. The cocktail list matters to Bryson as much as the food; the Bloody Mary is made with house jalapeño-infused bacon vodka. The room has local art, a desert palette and floor-to-ceiling windows looking at palo verdes, saguaros and the McDowells, and the crowd is families, couples, golfers and boozy brunchers, most of them regulars.
Soul Cafe is the flagship of Soul Hospitality Group, which now also runs Pescada, Vic & Ola’s, Little Snitch and ALMA, all within a few miles. Our verdict: the most reliable brunch between Scottsdale Road and the mountains, and worth a dinner on fried-chicken night.
How to eat at Soul Cafe
Order the fried chicken. The buttermilk fried chicken is the dish the restaurant leads with, the one Arizona PBS’ Check, Please! Arizona panel told viewers to get in March 2026, and the one that has anchored the menu since the doors opened. At brunch it has turned up as Chicken and Toast, buttermilk fried chicken on cinnamon-swirl French toast with local honey, which New Times flagged on the specials sheet in 2018. At dinner it is a plate, and over the years the restaurant has run all-you-can-eat fried chicken nights, a Friday fish fry and pizza nights; ask what the weekly specials are, because they change.
Then the brunch plates. Eggs Jared is the house Benedict: bacon, tomato and a jalapeño cheese sauce New Times called light and creamy, with the signature roasted tricolor potatoes. Some Like It Hot is two savory pancakes of corn, zucchini, red pepper, jalapeño and onion with eggs and jalapeño bacon. Bacon Blue pancakes are bacon and blueberries with two eggs any style. The lunch side of the menu has run to hot and cold sandwiches, salads, burgers and rustic pizzas; a 2015 visitor had a grilled chicken sandwich on sourdough with havarti. The Check, Please! guest ate a caprese, salmon with squash, cranberries, corn and nuts, and a scratch blueberry pie. Bryson’s 86-year-old father Sal still comes in to make Sal’s Bowl of Balls, pork and beef meatballs in marinara with crusty bread. OpenTable puts the check at $30 and under a head; itemized prices are on the website menu.
Drink. There is no espresso machine. New Times praised the cold brew, the famous Bloody Mary with bacon vodka, and fancier mimosas and coffee martinis. Happy hour runs Tuesday through Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m. and is the cheap way into the cocktail list; see our happy hour guide for the rest of the north side.
Timing and booking. Hours are brunch Tuesday through Sunday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., dinner Tuesday through Saturday, 4 to 9 p.m., closed Monday. In 2015 the restaurant opened at 7:30 and served dinner five nights with live music nightly; the current schedule drops Monday entirely. Reservations run through OpenTable and the website and are worth making for winter weekend brunch, when the snowbird crowd is in; weekdays are walk-in. The corner lot is the only parking and it fills on Saturdays. For how it ranks against the rest of the city, see our list of the best brunch in Scottsdale.
The griddle that became a restaurant group
Sheila Bryson’s story is the one Scottsdale restaurateurs usually tell in reverse. Most of the city’s independent rooms were opened by cooks who came up through hotel kitchens or chains and then went out on their own. Bryson came from lobbying, state government and private investigation, opened a boutique selling custom boots and jewelry, and only found the restaurant business because a friend’s bakery needed breakfast. She told New Times in April 2026 that selling is the same no matter what it is, you just have to understand people, and that the early years were frightening: no investors, her own money, and a tendency to take a returned plate personally.
Heart and Soul Cafe came first; Yelp places it in Cave Creek in 2009, and it was there that Food Network’s Outrageous Food filmed her Suicide Stack in 2011. Heart & Soul is under new ownership now. Soul Cafe on Pinnacle Peak, open since 2010 or 2011 depending on who you ask, became the base. New Times’ 2018 Breakfast Beat review captured what it had settled into: a neighborhood where casual dining meant Tomaso’s instead of Mastro’s, and a comfortable, friendly room that did not sacrifice the menu to get there. Next door at the time was Bryson’s shop, Lost Soul, selling high-end cowboy boots and things made of horseshoes.
The pandemic was the turning point. Instead of closing, Bryson ran a fried-chicken-and-cocktails pop-up with a local band playing in the parking lot, a tailgate that she says routinely split $700 a night in tips among the staff she had kept on. The group that followed is now five restaurants within a few miles of each other: Pescada, a Mediterranean seafood room with a raw bar and a tinned-fish habit she picked up in Spain; Vic & Ola’s, upscale Italian named for her Calabrian grandparents, with a custom stained-glass window; Little Snitch, a floral-heavy cafe that started as a grab-and-go coffee counter; and ALMA, a New Mexico-style restaurant that is moving next to Little Snitch at The Citadel in late 2026. What the record does not say is the size of Soul Cafe’s room, the opening month, or who runs the kitchen day to day while Bryson moves between five restaurants.
Honest assessment: Soul Cafe is not the most ambitious of Bryson’s rooms and does not try to be. It is a very good neighborhood brunch house with a real fried chicken, a real pie case and a bar that takes mornings seriously, in a part of North Scottsdale where the competition is mostly resort breakfast buffets and chains. Bryson says she will probably never win a James Beard award but gets a lot of thank-yous. For a restaurant on a corner at Pinnacle Peak and Miller, that is the right scorecard.