What is The Americano?
A steakhouse with an Italian soul on north Scottsdale Road, and the room that two of the Valley’s best-known TV chefs have run in turn.
The Americano opened in February 2020 at 17797 N Scottsdale Rd, in the affluent corridor near DC Ranch that had long deserved a flagship of its own. That same year Scott Conant and his team took over the kitchen, with Creation Hospitality as owner, and built the menu people still order from in spirit: a dry-aged bistecca for the table and a pasta course beside it. Steakhouse muscle, Italian heart, one menu.
In May 2024 Creation Hospitality announced that Conant was stepping away and that Beau MacMillan, the longtime chef of elements at Sanctuary and one of the Valley’s best-loved culinary personalities, would take over The Americano and its sibling Mora, which closed that summer. That same year Tell Your Friends, the speakeasy two flights below the dining room, opened. Conant now cooks in Tempe.
Eating there feels like North Scottsdale at full wattage: a handsome, buzzing room where the corridor’s residents celebrate, negotiate and date, loudly enough to be fun and politely enough to still hear the wine list.
Ordering the mashup correctly
The Americano punishes diners who treat it as only a steakhouse or only an Italian restaurant. The room’s native logic is both at once, and the best tables order accordingly.
The beef program is serious. Dry-aged cuts headline — the bistecca-style presentations are built for sharing, which is the move: one big cut for two or three, sliced, so the table’s budget concentrates on quality over quantity. Around it, the menu runs the modern steakhouse gauntlet of raw-bar starters, salads and sides with an Italian accent doing the differentiating.
The pasta course is non-negotiable. Under Conant the tell was his spaghetti pomodoro, the tomato-and-basil plate that made his name; the menu has changed hands since, but the habit holds. Regulars slot a pasta as a shared mid-course between starters and steak, Italian-style. If you order one thing off-script, this is the script.
Timing and tactics. Book well ahead for Friday and Saturday, and treat January through April as playoff conditions — the Phoenix Open at nearby TPC Scottsdale and Barrett-Jackson week turn every high-end room in North Scottsdale into a scrum. The bar is the walk-in valve and a legitimate destination itself: a full-menu seat with the best view of the room’s social theater. Sunset patio hours in shoulder season are the sleeper reservation.
Budget honestly. This is flagship-steakhouse pricing, and the check builds the way steakhouse checks do — cut, sides, bottle. The Italian half of the menu is the escape hatch for a lighter night; a pasta and a glass at the bar is the corridor’s better-kept secret.
North Scottsdale gets its own dining gravity
For decades, a big Scottsdale night out meant driving south — Old Town, the resorts, the Camelback corridor. The Americano is a landmark in the counter-migration: the building of a self-sufficient fine-dining scene along the northern stretch of Scottsdale Road, where DC Ranch, Silverleaf and Troon’s residents represent some of the highest spending power in the state and increasingly refuse to commute for dinner. Conant’s arrival in 2020, a national name choosing the north corridor over an Old Town address, ratified what locals already knew: the gravity had shifted. Neighbors in ambition now include Mastro’s City Hall’s lineage downtown and the Dominick’s Steakhouse tier at the Quarter, but the Americano gave the far north its own flagship rather than a satellite.
The Conant years deserve their footnote in the city’s celebrity-chef history: a national TV name running a kitchen in north Scottsdale rather than lending it a menu from a distance. That set the template the mid-2020s wave followed; Luna by Giada, planting Giada De Laurentiis’s flag by Fashion Square in 2024, is the same play run downtown.
The 2024 MacMillan handoff is the fascinating chapter. Beau MacMillan is Valley royalty — the chef whose years at Sanctuary’s Elements made him arguably the most locally beloved figure in Arizona food, with his own national TV résumé. Bringing him in to direct The Americano and Mora reads as a maturation: the celebrity-chef restaurant evolving from a name on the door to a genuine local institution with succession planning. It also hedges the model’s classic risk — that the founding star’s attention wanders — by installing a star who actually lives here.
Honest assessment: The Americano is a scene first and a kitchen a very close second, and the check reflects both. But the beef program is real, the pasta course is real, and the restaurant’s role in rebalancing Scottsdale’s dining map northward is already history, not hype.