What was Tesoro Ristorante Italiano?
Tesoro was the second act of a Scottsdale restaurant family, and the smaller one on purpose.
It opened about 2005 at 11219 E Via Linda, Suite D1, in Ancala Village, the shopping center at the southwest corner of Via Linda and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, a mile north of Shea Boulevard on the Scottsdale Ranch and Ancala side of town. Its owners were Anthony and Filomena Di Franco, natives of Abruzzo, who had spent the previous decade running Molise Cucina Italiana, a 120-seat trattoria in a strip on south Scottsdale Road. They sold Molise around 2005 and opened Tesoro, which means treasure, as a 45-seat, 12-table room where the whole family could work: Anthony and daughter Sonia in the kitchen, daughter Ania and son Maurizio on the floor.
New Times’ Michele Laudig reviewed it in March 2007 under the headline “Family Style,” and the paper’s Best of Phoenix that year named it Best Corner Italian Restaurant. The food was the Molise repertoire tightened for a small kitchen: escargot ravioli in Pernod cream, crespelle, lasagna, chicken saltimbocca, veal, fresh seafood, homemade pasta, and a tiramisu the critics kept mentioning. It was dinner only, 5 to 9 on weeknights, later on weekends, and from 3 on Sundays. Neighbors on review sites described a tiny, warm little place in a strip mall, informal and fun, a date-night room and a neighborhood gem.
Who it was for: the Ancala and Scottsdale Ranch households who had followed the Di Francos north, or found them, and who wanted a family Italian dinner without driving to Old Town. Via Linda had few such rooms then and has few now.
It closed around 2018. There was no announcement in the press we could find, only a diner’s note on the restaurant’s listing, “just heard Tesoro closed,” a dead website and a dead phone, and then two Indian restaurants in the suite. Our verdict: a well-loved family room that did exactly what it set out to do for a dozen years, and whose ending nobody wrote down.
What the menu and the room were
The food was the family’s. Laudig’s 2007 review is the fullest record of the menu. The escargot ravioli in Pernod cream was the dish that separated Tesoro from the corridor’s red-sauce rooms; the crespelle (Italian crepes), the lasagna and the chicken saltimbocca were the Molise standards carried north. Later diners filled in the rest: a fresh Bolognese, homemade noodles, a fish piccata that showed up as a special, chicken Parmesan, spaghetti with tiny meatballs, bruschetta, and the tiramisu that one reviewer called the best they had ever had. The family’s line was that they served specialties from all over Italy, veal, seafood and plenty of perfectly cooked homemade pasta.
The room was twelve tables. Forty-five seats in a Via Linda storefront, dim lighting, casual but, as one Google reviewer put it, elegant. That size was the point. Filomena had told New Times that the demand a smaller room created made the family feel guilty sometimes, but it was what they wanted after a decade of filling 120 seats. The hostess could be brisk, more than one reviewer noted, and the service had the slightly formal warmth of a family that owns the place.
Hours and booking. Dinner only: 5 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 5 to 10 Friday and Saturday, 3 to 8 Sunday, at (480) 767-1990. With a dozen tables, weekends were a phone call ahead. The restaurant ran Groupons in its later years, and the reviews that mention them tend to mention feeling like second-class citizens for using one, which is worth knowing about how small family rooms feel about discount traffic.
Prices. Neighborhood Italian prices, in the $15 to $30 range per person that the Di Francos had charged at Molise; no menu with prices survives in the record we found.
The neighbors. Ancala Village was and is a convenience center: a Dairy Queen, a Fantastic Sams, an eye clinic in Suite D3. The restaurant trade on this stretch of Via Linda runs to the Mercado at Scottsdale Ranch two miles west, where Eggstasy and Goldie’s hold the corner, and to the Ancala Country Club dining room up the hill. Tesoro was the one place between them where a family cooked.
The family that downsized on purpose
The Di Francos belong to a specific Valley tradition: immigrant families who open where the rent is cheap, feed a neighborhood for years, and move when the family’s needs change rather than when a lease does. Molise, which they opened around 1995 on south Scottsdale Road, was the big room, 120 seats of antique furniture and homemade pasta that New Times called the picture of the friendly neighborhood restaurant. By 2005 the children were grown and the parents were tired of 120 seats. Selling Molise and opening a 45-seat Tesoro twelve miles north, in the newer neighborhoods along Via Linda where their regulars were increasingly living, was a family decision, and the 2007 review treated it that way, as a story about four Di Francos and twelve tables.
The 2000s were kind to that kind of room in north Scottsdale. Ancala, Scottsdale Ranch and the Via Linda corridor were filling with households that wanted a reliable neighborhood dinner, and the Best of Phoenix “corner Italian” award in 2007 captured exactly what Tesoro was: not a destination, a corner. The 2010s were harder. Chains took the Shea and Frank Lloyd Wright intersections, Groupon trained a discount crowd, and the family aged. A 2017 Nextdoor Neighborhood Favorite nod is the last dated evidence of a thriving business.
What happened next is a gap. The restaurant’s website stopped resolving; the phone went dead; a Birdeye review from about 2018 reports hearing it had closed. There is no retirement notice, no sale, no line in a roundup. Suite D1 reopened as Masala Indian Cuisine, which Uber Eats marked closed in October 2024, and then as Al Hamra, sharing the same phone, which Yelp marked closed by March 2026. Ancala Village’s leasing listing now advertises second-generation restaurant suites, which is commercial real estate’s phrase for a kitchen somebody else built.
The Di Franco name survives on this site twice, here and at Molise, and in the memory of the south Scottsdale diners who followed them. Their later successors in the family-Italian trade, Marcellino in Old Town and the grocer-cafe tradition of Andreoli, prove the formula still works; it just needs a family willing to work every station.
Honest assessment: Tesoro was a good small restaurant, not a great one. The escargot ravioli and the tiramisu were worth the trip, the veal was not always, and the room’s warmth depended on which Di Franco met you at the door. Its value was consistency, a dozen years of the same family cooking the same dishes on a stretch of Via Linda that has had nothing like it since. It goes in the lost column of what to eat in Scottsdale as the corner Italian that north Scottsdale had and did not replace.