What is The Stand?
The Stand is an open-air frybread kitchen at 3996 N Alma School Road, on the corner of Alma School and Indian School Road in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, a few minutes east of the Loop 101 in the stretch our site files under Talking Stick and Salt River. Michael “Mick” Washington, whose heritage is Pima, Maricopa and Tohono O’odham, and his wife Cindy Washington, a Tohono O’odham cook, opened it in 2008, by the family’s account to DiningOut in 2026; Phoenix New Times, visiting in 2013, put it at about five years old, which agrees.
There is no building. The kitchen stands under a roof of cactus ribs and arrowweed thatched with palm fronds gathered near the Salt River, with chicken wire holding the thatch in place. The seats are stumps and a couple of tables, the floor is dirt, and the ceiling, as New Times put it, is the sky. You order at the window, pay in cash (there is no card reader), and wait while a ball of dough is slapped flat and dropped into the fryer for fifteen or twenty seconds a side. Cindy’s recipe was her mother’s: flour, salt, baking powder and vegetable shortening, never lard, which she said makes a puffier bread.
The menu is short. Frybread comes plain, with honey, with beans and cheese, or under red or green chile; the Stand Taco adds beans, ground beef, lettuce, cheese, tomatoes and onions. There are burritos on hand-flattened tortillas, red and white menudo, and cake for dessert. Prices on the most recent listing we found run $3 for a plain frybread, $5 for a chile frybread and $7 for the taco; the chile frybread was $4 in 2013 and $6 in 2018.
In February 2026 USA Today named The Stand one of its 39 Restaurants of the Year, one of three in Arizona alongside Huarachis in Phoenix and Indibar in Scottsdale. Mick Washington’s response was “Wow, what an honor.” Cindy, whose fork lifted the frybread in every photograph of the place for a decade, is described as his late wife in the 2026 coverage; the press we found does not say when she died.
Our verdict: this is the best frybread within reach of Scottsdale and one of the most honest meals in the Valley, and the only good reason not to go is that you forgot to bring cash.
How to eat at The Stand
Bring cash and go early. The Stand is open Monday through Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. and closed Sunday, according to the listings we found and an October 2026 travel feature, but it is a family operation on tribal land and the hours bend to the weather and the dough. Reviewers note that on windy days the tortillas cannot be made, and New Times’ 2013 visit found a dining area of two tables with chairs for one of them. There is no card reader. Stop at an ATM before you cross Pima Road.
Order the red chile frybread. Cindy Washington told New Times in 2018 that red beef chile was the topping to get, and the paper called it rich, beefy and amply portioned; the 2013 columnist preferred the green chile with beans added, which thickens the chile. Either way you get a Frisbee-sized disc that is crisp outside and marshmallow-soft inside. Open the wrapper right away: the crispness, as that column warned, is fleeting if the bread steams in its paper. The Stand Taco ($7) is the full meal and the dish USA Today cited in 2026. A plain frybread with honey, $2 in 2013 and $3 now before the honey, is dessert.
Do not skip the tortillas. The burritos get less press than the frybread, but the tortillas are flattened by hand and cooked on a repurposed tractor disc harrow blade over an outdoor gas burner, which gives them a char and chew that the machine-pressed tortillas in town do not have. Menudo, red or white, is the regulars’ order on a cold morning.
Who is there. Cindy estimated in 2018 that three quarters of the customers were Native American, and Mick described the stand as a place where people from the Community run into friends and family by accident. The rest are Scottsdale people who read about it, spring-training crowds from Salt River Fields a few miles north in March, and, in the 2018 story, visitors from as far as Japan. Other Indigenous-owned vendors sometimes set up alongside; New Times mentioned the lemonade cart DankDrankLemonade in 2022.
Getting there. From Scottsdale take Indian School Road east across the 101 and the Pima Road line onto the Community; Alma School Road is the next major cross street, and the stand is on the corner, with some listings giving the address as 4020 rather than 3996. Park on the dirt shoulder. It is about ten minutes from Talking Stick Resort and fifteen from Old Town, and nothing about the drive prepares you for a kitchen made of cactus.
The frybread stand the food press could not stop finding
Frybread is a young food with a hard history, dough made from government rations after the forced marches of the 1860s, and the argument over whether it belongs on a Native menu is still live; our lexicon entry covers that ground. Cindy Washington had her own version of the history. “A long time ago, fry bread was never deep fried,” she told New Times in 2018. “It was just cooked on the rocks.” Deep frying, she said, came when local people got metal pans, and metal makes a puffier bread. That is the bread the stand has sold since 2008 from a shade of cactus ribs on the corner of two roads named for a school and a people, in a Community whose own name for its peoples is Onk Akimel O’odham and Xalychidom Piipaash, the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash.
The Stand opened in 2008 with no publicity and stayed that way until the Cooking Channel show Eden Eats filmed there in the fall of 2012. New Times’ JK Grence, writing in April 2013, confessed he had never heard of a place twenty minutes from his desk and called it possibly the best-kept secret in metro Phoenix. From then on the paper could not leave it alone: Chris Malloy opened his 2018 fry bread feature on the dusty shoulder of Indian School Road, the stand led his 2020 list of essential Indigenous kitchens, and it made the 2022 list of the Valley’s top frybread spots. The location page the paper keeps for it says, simply, that it is one of its favorite places to eat in metro Phoenix.
The 2026 USA Today award is a different order of attention. The Restaurants of the Year list is chosen by the chain’s food writers nationally, and The Stand shared Arizona’s three slots with a Phoenix taqueria and a modern Indian room on Scottsdale Road. The Arizona Republic photographed Mick Washington making frybread in November 2025, and when the list ran in February he called it a pleasure and a surprise. By then the coverage described Cindy as his late wife. The record we found does not give the date of her death, the exact opening date in 2008, or who else works the fryer now; a 2026 reviewer mentions an owner who makes the dough at 5 a.m.
The Stand belongs to a small Valley tradition. The Fry Bread House in Phoenix, open since 1992, won a James Beard award in 2012; the Sacaton trucks on the Gila River community sell frybread and ceme’t on Wednesdays and Fridays; and in 2025 Old Town got its first Indigenous gastropub. None of them is a shade structure on a reservation corner, and that is the point of this one.
Honest assessment: The Stand is a stand. There is no restroom to speak of, no shade beyond the kitchen’s, no card reader, and summer afternoons at a fryer in the open are brutal; the hours are short and can change without notice. Judged as food, the frybread is the best we have eaten near Scottsdale, the chile is serious, and the price has barely moved in a decade of national press. It is the one place in our Talking Stick and Salt River guide that has nothing to do with the casino, and the best argument for driving east past it.