What was Super Chunk Sweets & Treats?
The best pastry chef in Old Town spent the 2010s selling caramel corn out of a storefront on 6th Avenue, and the neighborhood was lucky to have her there.
Country Velador built her reputation as executive pastry chef of Cowboy Ciao and Kazimierz World Wine Bar, the Stetson Drive rooms where Peter Kasperski’s eccentric, wine-soaked vision of Scottsdale dining played out through the 2000s. Her desserts closed those meals. In the early 2010s, she and her husband and partner Sergio Velador opened Super Chunk Sweets & Treats at 7120 E 6th Ave, a short walk from the restaurants, as a place to sell the things a dessert menu could not hold: candy, cookies, caramel corn, toffee, all made in house in small batches.
The signature was a collision. Velador took the American candy aisle — caramel corn, fruit roll-ups, licorice, chocolate chip cookies — and rebuilt it with Southwestern ingredients and a pastry chef’s technique. Mesquite went into the chocolate chip cookies. Bacon and chile went into the caramel corn. Duck fat went into the toffee. The licorice was made with fennel, anise and green chartreuse; the caramels came flavored with blue cheese and fig. There was semifreddo, and a lunch counter serving craft sandwiches on house-baked bread whose bagel sandwich developed a cult of its own.
It ran for roughly eight years, outlasting the restaurants that made its founder’s name, and closed in February 2022 when the lease ended. The honest verdict: it was the most original sweet shop Scottsdale has produced, and nothing since has attempted its particular mix of nostalgia and ambition.
What a visit was actually like
The room was small, bright and slightly chaotic in the way of a real working bakery — a case of confections up front, the lunch counter to one side, the smell of caramel and baking bread from the back. Regulars came in two waves.
Lunch was the first. The counter turned out craft sandwiches on bread baked in house, and the bagel sandwich was the order — a properly chewy bagel, a generous build, priced like a deli lunch rather than a Stetson Drive one. In a stretch of Old Town where a midday meal otherwise meant a resort-priced patio or a bar burger, Super Chunk was where the gallery staff, the shop owners and the restaurant workers on split shifts ate.
The case was the second. You did not order one thing. The chocolate bacon caramel corn was the entry drug, sweet and smoky and faintly spicy; the duck-fat toffee was the connoisseur’s pick, shatteringly crisp with a savory depth that made ordinary toffee taste like a candle. The mesquite chocolate chip cookies carried a nutty, desert sweetness from the flour; the house-made fruit roll-ups were a childhood memory rebuilt with real fruit. The licorice, spiked with green chartreuse, and the blue-cheese-and-fig caramels were the deep cuts — the things you bought once out of curiosity and then every time.
Everything was made in small batches, which meant the case changed, and regulars learned to ask what had come out that morning. The shop was, for years, the smartest edible souvenir in Old Town.
The Veladors were usually there — Country in the back, Sergio at the front — and the conversation was part of the purchase. It felt like a neighborhood shop because it was one.
The last outpost of the Cowboy Ciao era
Super Chunk was a satellite of one of the most important restaurant neighborhoods Scottsdale ever had. Through the 2000s, Peter Kasperski’s Stetson Drive cluster — Cowboy Ciao, Kazimierz behind it, Sea Saw — made a few blocks of Old Town the Valley’s most adventurous dining address, and Country Velador’s desserts were part of the reason. When she and Sergio opened their own shop around the corner, it read as the cluster growing a retail limb: the pastry program with its own door.
That context matters for understanding what the shop was. It was not a cupcake bakery riding the 2010s dessert boom; it was a serious pastry chef’s laboratory disguised as a candy store, and its Southwestern ingredients — mesquite, chile, local fruit — placed it squarely in the Arizona-terroir movement that FnB was building on the savory side a few blocks away in Craftsman Court. Velador was doing for candy what Charleen Badman was doing for vegetables.
Then the cluster collapsed. In October 2018, Cowboy Ciao and Kazimierz closed amid Kasperski’s bankruptcy, and Stetson Drive’s identity as Old Town’s serious-food corridor went with them. Super Chunk, independently owned, kept going — for three more years it was the surviving outpost of that era, the last place you could taste something with a direct line to those kitchens.
The end was quiet. On February 2, 2022, the Veladors announced that their lease was up and the shop would close permanently, thanking customers for eight years. No scandal, no drama — just the arithmetic of Old Town rent in a post-pandemic market that had no room for a small-batch candy counter.
Honest assessment: Super Chunk was too small, too idiosyncratic and too dependent on its founders to have become an institution on the scale of the Sugar Bowl or Sweet Republic. But for eight years it was the most interesting sweet thing in the neighborhood, and the duck-fat toffee alone earns it a place in Scottsdale’s dessert history.