What is The Frybread Lounge?
The Frybread Lounge is the restaurant that grew out of a jewelry store. It sits at 7211 E Main Street, on the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Main, the first door of the Main Street arts district, next to Native Art Market at 7215. It opened in September 2024 and calls itself the first Indigenous-owned restaurant in Old Town, a claim nobody in the local press has disputed.
The owners are Heather Tracy and her mother Denise Rosales, Navajo women from Cameron, Arizona, who began Native Art Market in 2018 as a market program after Rosales, a weaver and jeweler, was turned away from an Old Town show for being a Native artist selling Native work. The Main Street storefront followed in November 2020, with Tracy’s sister Devin Shea Tunney as the third partner, and the city named it a Business of the Year in 2022. A restaurant was never the plan. The space next door had been renovated by other tenants whose ideas fell through, and the landlord asked the family if they wanted it. “It kind of fell in our lap,” Tracy told Phoenix New Times.
The chef is Darryl Montana, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, who had led the kitchen at Owamni in Minneapolis, the Indigenous restaurant that won the 2022 James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. Tracy met him there in 2023; after touring the Scottsdale space he agreed to come home and run it. Owamni is famous for a decolonized menu with no wheat, dairy or lard. In Scottsdale Montana does the opposite and embraces frybread, the flour-and-lard staple of the Southwestern Native diet for 160 years. “Frybread is resilient food,” he said.
The room is part cafe and part dim lounge, with a playlist of Indigenous musicians Tracy curated, and the menu is bison on frybread in every form, a house charcuterie of elk and venison, and cocktails named Desert Rose and Fire in the Sky. Phoenix Magazine called it Scottsdale’s first Indigenous gastropub. Our verdict: the most original restaurant to open in Old Town in the 2020s, and the one that belongs on Main Street most.
Ordering at The Frybread Lounge
Start with the frybread flight. The mini flight comes with local honey, prickly pear syrup and a white bean spread, and it is the right first order because everything else on the menu is built on the same dough: crisp, golden, airy enough that it crackles when torn, in Phoenix Magazine’s description. There is a dessert version with raspberry jam, whipped cream, berries and pepitas for the end of the meal.
Then the bison. The bison asada tacos, on blue corn tortillas with onion, tomato and cilantro and house red chile and tomatillo salsas, are the signature; the bison ribeye frybread sandwich ($23) with Indigenous pesto, greens and tomatoes was the opening special that stuck; the Rez burger is a half-pound bison patty on frybread with sriracha mayo; and the classic frybread taco ($15 to $20) stacks meat, cheese, tepary beans, lettuce, tomato and onion the way the Navajo taco has been served at every fair in Arizona. Sunset’s guide adds a bison birria to the list.
Do not skip the charcuterie. The Rez charcuterie board ($20) is house-made salumi of elk, venison, duck and bison with griddled flatbread, white bean puree and prickly pear sauce, and Phoenix Magazine’s critic Nikki Buchanan called it the standout, the garlicky duck salami in particular. The Three Sisters salad puts corn, beans and squash with quinoa, jicama, herb pesto and prickly pear vinaigrette. Ask for the weekly special; elk pozole and duck tinga tacos have been on that board, and Montana said at opening that quail and rabbit were coming.
Drink. It is a lounge, with beer, Arizona wine and cocktails. The Desert Rose is Casa Noble tequila, rose, lime, agave and black salt; Fire in the Sky is corn whiskey, chile liqueur, agave and Angostura under a smoke dome. The non-alcoholic list runs to Navajo tea and wild sweetgrass tea. Entrées run $21 to $30 by the Experience Scottsdale listing, and the kitchen buys heirloom and tepary beans from Ramona Farms on the Gila River Indian Community and bison from Prairie Harvest.
Timing and parking. The hours have shifted since opening. Mouth by Southwest reported a Tuesday closure in September 2024; Phoenix Magazine printed Wednesday through Monday, 11 to 9, in January 2025; the current listing says noon to 8 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, 10 to 9 Friday and Saturday, closed Wednesday. Walk in, or use the Waitly link on the Experience Scottsdale page. Thursday ArtWalk is the busy night. The free Old Town garage on Brown Avenue is a block away; for what to look for next door, see our note on buying Native American art.
The Native-owned corner on a street that sold Native art for seventy years
Main Street has sold Native American art since the 1950s, and for nearly all of that time the sellers were not Native. The galleries and trading posts of the Main Street arts district were Anglo-owned, buying from Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo makers through dealers. Native Art Market was built to change that, a store where the owner and every artist were Native and every sale was direct. The Frybread Lounge extends the idea to the table: a Navajo-owned restaurant with a Tohono O’odham chef, buying beans from Akimel O’odham farmers at Ramona Farms, on the most visited block of the most Western-themed street in Arizona.
Montana’s résumé is what makes the kitchen more than a concept. Owamni, under Sean Sherman, put Indigenous cooking into the national conversation in 2021 and 2022, and Montana led its kitchen before Tracy recruited him home. His approach in Scottsdale is to use five or six fresh ingredients and let the food speak, and to serve frybread without apology, a choice the decolonized-food movement debates and the Arizona reservations settled generations ago. Buchanan’s Phoenix Magazine review in January 2025 took the restaurant seriously as food, which a new Old Town restaurant rarely gets, and ended with the house slogan: indigenize your palate.
The city noticed quickly. In January 2025 the restaurant’s sold-out outdoor frybread class, taught by Diné cook Celeste Deschene with Rosales frying dough beside the canal, opened Scottsdale Western Week. Axios’ Bite Club column visited in June 2025. In 2026, Good Morning America’s 50 States in 50 Weeks series, built around the country’s 250th anniversary, chose The Frybread Lounge as its Arizona stop, “State 48,” with ABC15’s Jorge Torres on the sidewalk for the broadcast. For a restaurant open eighteen months, that is unusual attention.
The record has gaps. The press names Tracy as the creator and Rosales as the owner in different articles, and we read that as a mother and daughter who run it together, as Axios put it. No full menu with prices has been published beyond the three items Phoenix Magazine listed, the hours have changed at least twice, and the restaurant’s own website is a Square ordering page with little text. The James Beard connection is real but secondhand; Montana was Owamni’s chef, not its award-winning owner. See James Beard and Michelin for how such credits travel.
Honest assessment: The Frybread Lounge is a small, sincere restaurant with a real cook, a family story that is also a political one, and a menu that is better than its novelty. The room is modest, the hours are irregular and the prices sit at the high end for a frybread taco. None of that matters. On a street built on Native art sold by other people, this is the corner where the people are the owners, and it is the one restaurant in the district we would send a first-time visitor to without hesitation.