What is Wayward?
Most Old Town restaurants that change their name are starting over. Wayward is closer to the opposite: the same small house, the same chef and much of the same appetite, with a new sign and a new set of owners’ names on the door.
The house is 7217 E 4th Ave, a 1950s-era cottage a block east of Scottsdale Road that was refitted in brick and wood and opened in March 2025 as Liquor Pig. That gastropub was one of the most talked-about openings of its year and one of Phoenix New Times’ best new restaurants of 2025. It was also a turbulent one. The founding chef left that summer, a co-founder left early in 2026, a lawsuit followed, and on May 30, 2026, Liquor Pig closed. About a week later the ornate wooden door opened again as Wayward.
The constant is CJ Kahley, who took over the Liquor Pig kitchen in 2025 and is now Wayward’s executive chef and an owner, alongside operating owner Kyla Hein and owner Christina Foster. His menu wanders on purpose. Corn tortillas are pressed in-house, skewers and fish go over binchotan charcoal, and the dishes swing from Korean pork belly tacos with ssamjang and a quail egg to black cod in tom kha, a duck bolognese mafaldine and a bone marrow poutine with foie gras gravy that feeds two. The team’s own description is “not fine dining, not casual dining” but “fun dining,” and the cocktail list, with drinks named for spaghetti westerns, plays along.
It is a small room, a short walk from the Brown Avenue saloons and the bars of the Entertainment District, and one of the few places in this part of Old Town where the cooking is the reason to go.
How to eat at Wayward
Order for the table, not the plate. The menu is built for sharing. Start with the koreano garlic buns (Oaxaca cheese, aged Parmesan, gochugaru, black sesame) and the elote arancini, then a round of tacos on the housemade tortillas: pollo asado with salsa macha, the beer-battered Baja black cod, and the pork belly. The birria kushiyaki, a Japanese-style beef skewer with adobo and cotija crema, is the dish that best explains the kitchen’s mash-up logic.
Then pick a direction. Couples should split the black cod in tom kha with crispy rice, or the duck bolognese mafaldine. Groups of three or four can order one of the large-format plates, a bone-in short rib or a “kan-kan” pork chuleta, and fill in with borracho beans, tallow-fried tots and dynajang fried rice. The bone marrow poutine is a commitment; share it.
Use the happy hour. From 4 to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, the bar runs a short menu of the hits at lower prices, and a $5 “mystery mix” cocktail. It’s the cheapest way to see what the kitchen does, and the bar is the best seat in the house anyway.
Know the calendar. Wayward is closed Mondays, opens at 4 p.m. on weekdays and 2 p.m. on Sundays, and stays open until midnight on Friday and Saturday. Sunday brings live music, which fills the house. Reserve through OpenTable for weekends; park in the Civic Center garage or a nearby public lot and walk, because Fourth Avenue’s curb spaces turn over slowly. For a drink before or after, the Old Town nightlife guide maps out the blocks to the north.
From side-street house to Liquor Pig to Wayward
Fourth Avenue is one of the short east-west streets between Scottsdale Road and the Goldwater-Drinkwater loop, a part of downtown that grew up as homes and small offices behind the Western storefronts of Main Street and Brown Avenue. As the 2010s and 2020s pushed bars and restaurants into every available building, the little houses on these blocks became some of Old Town’s most sought-after spaces: small, characterful, and a few steps from the busiest corners in town.
Liquor Pig made the most of one. Steven “Chops” Smith and Scott Casey, two Valley restaurant veterans, opened it in March 2025 in a house that had last been Medizona. They kept the scale small, about 80 seats with 20 at the bar, used brick and wood, and served what Smith called food from “how we grew up”: classical dishes reworked into contemporary ones, with desserts from Flagstaff chef Rochelle Daniel. Critics loved it. New Times named it among the best new restaurants of 2025, and Phoenix Magazine’s critic reviewed it with obvious pleasure that fall, by which time C.J. Kahley was running the kitchen after Smith’s departure in July.
The business side was harder. Casey left in January 2026, and in April he sued co-owner Christina Foster and her husband in Maricopa County Superior Court. Foster has called the suit meritless, and the case was still open when Liquor Pig closed at the end of May. Rather than leave the house dark, Foster reopened it within a week as Wayward, keeping Kahley and adding Kyla Hein to run the room.
The honest assessment: Wayward is too new to judge as more than a continuation, and the menu’s range from aguachile to saltimbocca won’t suit anyone who wants a restaurant to pick a lane. But the reason Liquor Pig mattered was the cooking, and the cook stayed. In a district that changes names every season, it’s a side-street house where you can tell somebody is still trying.