What is Spinato’s Pizzeria & Family Kitchen?
Ask a Chicagoan what pizza from home means and — once they finish correcting you about deep dish — they’ll describe tavern style: thin, crackly, square-cut, sauce leading the band. That’s what the Spinato family carried to Arizona in the 1970s, and it’s what they’ve been serving ever since, long enough that Spinato’s stopped being a Chicago transplant and became an Arizona institution with a Chicago accent.
The Scottsdale-area location at The Block on Via de Ventura is the group’s outpost in Talking Stick territory, minutes from the casino towers and Salt River Fields. Inside it does what every Spinato’s does: red-sauce classics, salads slicked with the house Italian dressing people buy by the bottle, and pizzas cut into squares the way God and Cook County intended.
Then there’s the spinach pizza — the pie that made the name. A creamy garlic-and-spinach sauce stands in for tomato, and what sounds like a health-food hedge turns out to be one of the Valley’s great comfort foods, ordered by people who otherwise regard vegetables as garnish.
What eating there feels like is the point: this is a family kitchen in the literal sense, run by Spinatos across generations, built for Little League teams, grandparents’ birthdays, and the reliable Tuesday night out. In a Scottsdale dining scene that turns over concepts like poker hands, a family that’s been rolling the same dough for fifty years is quietly radical.
Ordering like a Spinato’s regular
The spinach pizza first. It’s the signature for a reason — the creamy garlic-spinach base against that crisp tavern crust is a combination nobody else in the Valley does at this level, and first-timers who order around it always end up back for it. Tables that can’t commit go half-and-half with the Italian sausage, which is the correct diplomatic solution.
Respect the tavern cut. These pies come thin and square-cut, which means the corner pieces are all crust-crunch and the center squares are pure sauce delivery. Order a size up from your instinct; thin crust eats fast and regret eats slow.
Don’t skip the rest of the kitchen. The “Family Kitchen” half of the name is real — baked pastas, meatballs, and salads that people order as mains, all in the red-sauce register. The house Italian dressing is a genuine local cult item; the bottles by the register are the move, and half the checkout line has one in hand.
Time it around the neighborhood. This location lives at the hinge of the Talking Stick entertainment district, which means March is its Super Bowl: Cactus League spring training at Salt River Fields floods The Block with jerseys before and after every game. Go early or go late on game days, or come on an off night when the room settles back into its family rhythm. Concert and casino nights at Talking Stick bring their own waves — the kitchen handles it all without blinking, but a table is easier at 5:30 than 7.
Prices sit comfortably in the take-the-whole-family zone, which is exactly the audience.
Fifty years of family pizza in a franchise town
The Spinato story is the immigrant-restaurant arc done patiently. The family’s pizza traditions came from Chicago’s neighborhood-tavern culture, arrived in Arizona in the 1970s, and grew one location at a time into one of the Valley’s most beloved family-run restaurant groups — an expansion measured in decades, not funding rounds. That patience shows in the product: fifty years on, the crust is still the crust, the spinach pie is still the spinach pie, and there’s still a Spinato minding the store.
That makes Spinato’s an interesting counterpoint to how Scottsdale pizza usually happens. The city’s pizza history runs from old-guard parlors through the imported-prestige era — Brooklyn’s coal ovens arriving via Grimaldi’s, Neapolitan certification landing at Pomo, craft-beer pairing perfected at Craft 64 — plus the homegrown juggernaut of Oregano’s selling its own version of Chicago nostalgia. Spinato’s predates nearly all of it, and it competes not on pedigree or scene but on the older metric of being somebody’s family recipe, executed daily, forever. In the tavern-style renaissance that swept national pizza discourse in the 2020s, Arizonans got to be smug: we’d had it the whole time.
The Via de Ventura location also tells a Scottsdale land story. The Talking Stick corridor on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community boomed through the 2010s — casino, ballpark, entertainment district — and it needed exactly this: a restaurant with roots, where a family of five and a bachelor party could coexist over the same square-cut pie. Spinato’s slotted in as the neighborhood elder statesman of a neighborhood that was brand new.
The honest assessment: Spinato’s is not chasing anyone’s best-pizza-in-America list, and it doesn’t need to. It’s chasing your Tuesday, your kid’s team dinner, your out-of-town in-laws — and it has been winning those, in the same family’s hands, since the 1970s. That’s a harder trick than the lists.