What is The Italian Daughter?
The Italian Daughter is the restaurant a daughter opened in her father’s room, two months after he died. It sits at 23655 N Scottsdale Road, Suite 120, on the east side of Scottsdale Road at Pinnacle Peak Road, the commercial corner where North Scottsdale turns into the Pinnacle Peak and Troon foothills, and it opened in April 2021. The full name, used in its first press and on its own early materials, is The Italian Daughter Cucina + Cocktails.
The father was Tomaso Maggiore, the Sicilian chef who opened Tomaso’s on Camelback in 1977, launched more than fifty restaurants in Arizona and California, and in June 2017 opened a 5,000-square-foot, 180-seat Roman trattoria in this suite, Tomaso’s When in Rome, renovated and reopened in September 2019 as Tomaso’s Italian Kitchen. The pandemic closed it. The daughter is Melissa Maggiore Meyer, who had grown up in his kitchens, opened her own restaurants in La Jolla, Encinitas and Carlsbad, and come back to Arizona with her husband Kevin when he fell ill. He suggested she take the north Scottsdale room; she hesitated, she told the Scottsdale Progress, because it was farther north than she wanted. He died of lung cancer at 73 in January 2021, and she opened The Italian Daughter that April, naming it for the one thing about herself she was sure of.
What it serves is the Maggiore repertoire: handcrafted pasta, stone-fired Roman pizza, seafood, veal, craft boards, and the family sauces, the Bolognese, marinara, meatballs and Norcina that Tomaso’s on Camelback shares. The bestseller is Papa’s Cioppino, cooked his way. Around the food is the thing that makes the room different from every other north Scottsdale Italian restaurant: a piano lounge with live music seven nights a week, a bar that opens at 2 p.m. with a long happy hour, and an enclosed patio with a fireplace. The crowd is Troon, Pinnacle Peak and DC Ranch, older than Old Town and happier for it.
In 2025 the family added a second room nine miles north, Patricia’s Pizza at the Summit, named for Melissa’s mother. Our verdict: the most personal Italian restaurant in Scottsdale, run with the hospitality its founder was taught, and the right answer when someone in the north end asks where to go on a Thursday night.
How to eat at The Italian Daughter
Book the dining room, or arrive early for the lounge. Reservations are through OpenTable or (480) 404-6085, dining room only, with a two-hour limit for parties of nine or fewer and two and a half hours for ten or more. The bar and lounge are walk-in, first come, first served, with the same two-hour clock. The room opens at 2 p.m. every day and closes at 10. Live music starts around 6 and the lounge fills by then on weekends; see our live music guide for the rest of the city.
Use the happy hour. It runs daily in the bar and lounge from 2 p.m., to 9 by the location page and 10 by the menu page: a rotating red or white at $7, domestic and imported beer $6, well drinks $10, and $2 off specialty cocktails and wines by the glass, with a lounge menu alongside. Monday through Thursday from 2 to 4 there is also a $33 prix fixe with a small tiramisu or mini cannoli, the cheapest way to eat the kitchen’s food. Neither runs on major holidays. Our happy hour guide has the comparisons.
Order the family dishes. Antipasti run $10 to $26: Sicilian arancini ($23), handcrafted meatballs ($17), prosciutto di Parma and burrata ($20), the TID antipasto board ($25), Vittorio’s PEI mussels ($17), beer-battered lobster tails ($26). Pastas are $24 to $45: Tomaso’s Signature Lasagna with a meatball ($26), Zitone Bolognese ($26), Penne Norcina ($27), Golden Tomato Picchio Pacchiu ($24), Linguine Vongole ($32), Lobster Tagliatelle ($44), seared scallops with sweet corn risotto ($45). Secondi: Papa’s Cioppino ($55), Chicken Parmigiana ($30), Barolo-braised short rib ($32), veal scallopini piccata or marsala ($45), a 14-ounce pork chop saltimbocca ($48). Pizza is Roman, a flatbread or a thin pinsa with gluten-free crust available, $17 to $22. Gluten-free penne is also on hand.
Come on Sunday. Papa’s Sunday Sugo ($30) is Sundays only, and the Sunday Family Feast, $40 a person for four to six, served in the dining room only, ends with a cannoli or tiramisu and is the closest thing to the Maggiore Sunday dinner the owner describes. October brings regional Italian dinners for Italian Heritage Month under chef Vittorio Colafranceschi, who also runs the pizzeria’s kitchen.
Patio and parking. The enclosed patio holds 24 to 50 with heaters, fans, misters and a fireplace, and is the seat to ask for in patio season; the whole restaurant holds 125, or 175 with the patio, for private events. Parking is the center’s lot off Scottsdale Road.
The room Tomaso opened and the daughter who kept it
The Maggiore story in Scottsdale is two generations and three rooms. The first was Hash Kitchen, the brunch spectacle Joey and Cristina Maggiore opened at the Shops at Gainey Village in 2015, which made The Maggiore Group a Scottsdale name. The second was Tomaso’s own, the Roman trattoria he opened at Scottsdale and Pinnacle Peak in 2017, when he was 69 and had been cooking for the Valley for forty years: a 180-seat room with columns and murals, reopened in 2019 under a plainer name. It was the last restaurant he opened. When it closed in the pandemic and his health failed, the question was what to do with it.
Melissa’s answer was the restaurant she believed her father would have been excited to see, as she told AZ Big Media in January 2022, nine months after opening. She had run restaurants since, in her phrase, she was in diapers, and had opened and sold three in California. What she kept from him was not a menu but a manner. “I believe when you come into The Italian Daughter, you’re coming into my house,” she told the Scottsdale Progress in 2025. The food is his: the recipes are shared with Tomaso’s on Camelback, the cioppino is made his way, and the Sunday sugo and family feast recreate the dinners she grew up on. What she added was the lounge. Live music was five nights a week in 2022 and seven by 2025, and it turned a trattoria into the north end’s night out, the room Troon and DC Ranch go to when they do not want to drive to Old Town.
The press has been steady rather than loud. AZ Big Media called it “as authentic and amazing as it gets” in 2022 and put it among five Valley Italian hotspots in 2026; OpenTable gave it a Diners’ Choice badge in 2024. The 2020s expansion followed: a lease in April 2023 on a former Pei Wei at the Summit, announced as The Italian Daughter Pizzeria, which opened in January 2025 as Patricia’s Pizza, named for her mother and the pizzeria her parents opened in Garnerville, New York, in 1969. A second full Italian Daughter has been mentioned as a longer-range plan; the record does not say when.
Honest assessment: The Italian Daughter is a very good neighborhood Italian restaurant and a better story, and the story is doing some of the work. The pastas and the cioppino are serious, the prices are North Scottsdale prices ($26 lasagna, $55 cioppino), the lounge can be loud, and the two-hour clock is enforced. None of that is a reason to stay away. It is the one room in the north end where the music is live every night and where the Maggiore family’s marinara, forty-nine thousand pots of it by the family’s count, is still being stirred.