What is The Americano?
A steakhouse with an Italian soul, a celebrity chef with a Scottsdale zip code, and — as of 2026 — a second celebrity chef running the pass. The Americano manages to be all three without tripping over itself.
Scott Conant opened the restaurant in 2021 on North Scottsdale Road, in the affluent corridor near DC Ranch that had long deserved a flagship of its own. The premise is right there in the layout of a proper order: a dry-aged bistecca for the table, and beside it the dish Conant is most famous for anywhere — his spaghetti pomodoro, the deceptively simple tomato-and-basil plate that made his name. Steakhouse muscle, Italian heart, one menu.
Conant didn’t just license his name and leave. He took ownership of the restaurant with Creation Hospitality, planting his Arizona flag in it — a real commitment from a chef whose Food Network profile could have kept him comfortably bicoastal. Then came 2026’s plot twist: Beau MacMillan, the longtime Sanctuary resort chef and one of the Valley’s most beloved culinary personalities, assumed culinary direction of The Americano and its sibling Mora. One national TV name handing the kitchen to another is the most Scottsdale-in-the-2020s sentence imaginable, and it kept the restaurant squarely at the center of the city’s chef-personality scene.
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. Conant’s spaghetti pomodoro is the dish critics and Food Network cameras spent years canonizing — tomato, basil, technique, nothing to hide behind. Regulars slot it 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 2021 arrival — 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 story deserves its footnote in the city’s celebrity-chef history. Scottsdale has hosted famous names before, but Conant went further than most: from menu consultant to owner, with Creation Hospitality, making this his flagship rather than an outpost. 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 2026 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 pomodoro is real, the beef program is real, and the restaurant’s role in rebalancing Scottsdale’s dining map northward is already history, not hype.