What is ZuZu?
Most restaurants decorate. ZuZu inherited.
It occupies the heart of the Hotel Valley Ho, the 1956 landmark that was once old Hollywood’s Scottsdale hideaway — the place stars slipped away to when they wanted desert sun without photographers, back when Scottsdale was a small town that could keep a secret. The hotel spent decades declining under remodels and neglect, came within a vote or two of the wrecking ball, and was then rescued by a meticulous 2005 restoration that returned its butterfly rooflines, glass walls, and optimism to factory settings. ZuZu opened with that rebirth as the hotel’s restaurant, designed not as a nostalgia act but as a continuation — turquoise banquettes, a sunken lounge, mid-century lines that are load-bearing rather than thematic.
The menu plays along gracefully: retro American classics with modern execution, served breakfast through dinner daily. And then there’s the icon. The Show Stopper milkshake — a monthly-rotating tower of ice cream, cake, and structural audacity — became one of the most photographed desserts in Arizona and single-handedly introduced a generation raised on Instagram to a hotel their grandparents flirted in.
Eating at ZuZu feels like being handed Scottsdale’s most glamorous decade on a room-service tray. The light comes through 1956 glass, the banquettes curve the way the future used to, and somewhere between the burger and the shake you understand why the stars drove out here in the first place. It’s the city’s Hollywood-hideaway history — still open daily, still taking your order.
Shakes, seats, and the all-day strategy
The Show Stopper is a plan, not an impulse. Each month brings a new over-engineered flavor — built with whole dessert components and garnishes that qualify as cargo — and the devoted track releases like sneaker drops. Come early in the month for the full spectacle, bring accomplices (this is a sharing-size object with a one-person name), and know that walking in just for a shake is completely legitimate ZuZu behavior. The kitchen has watched a thousand tables order dinner as a pretext.
Choose your era of day. ZuZu runs breakfast through dinner daily, and each shift has its personality. Breakfast is the connoisseur’s window — morning light through the original glass, hotel calm, the mid-century room at its most cinematic. Lunch brings the pool-day and meeting crowds. Dinner turns on the lounge glow, and weekend brunch is the busiest, sunniest scene. The retro-classic menu holds steady throughout: elevated comfort — burgers, salads, updated diner DNA — priced at an accessible middle for a resort address.
Sit where the history is. Ask for a turquoise banquette or gravitate to the sunken lounge-side seating; the room rewards positioning. Before or after, take the self-guided wander the hotel happily tolerates — the lobby, the breezeways, the pool with its movie-set geometry. Few restaurants come with a free architecture tour attached.
Timing intel: spring high season and event weekends fill the dining room — reserve for dinner and brunch. Summer is the local move: the Valley Ho’s staycation energy peaks, the room stays cool and blue, and the Show Stopper tastes 20 percent better as heat relief. Old Town’s core is a short walk, making ZuZu a natural first or final act for a night out.
The hotel that almost wasn’t, and the restaurant that keeps it alive
ZuZu’s significance is inseparable from the near-death experience of its building. The Valley Ho opened in 1956 — the same boom moment that produced the Sugar Bowl down Scottsdale Road, as the town doubled and redoubled through its great postwar costume change (a story our 1950s history page tells in full). The hotel’s genius was discretion: close to Hollywood by air, invisible to its gossip apparatus, it hosted stars in a desert-modern setting airy enough to feel like the future. Its restaurant-and-lounge culture, including a famed Trader Vic’s outpost in the 1960s, made the property a social capital of young Scottsdale.
Then came the long insult: decades of ownership churn, bad remodels that entombed the architecture, and by the 1990s a serious flirtation with demolition — the fate that erased most of mid-century Scottsdale. The 2005 restoration was a landmark act of preservation economics, betting that the building’s 1956 identity was the asset, not the obstacle. ZuZu was that bet’s dining-room expression: rather than install some imported concept, the hotel built a restaurant whose entire personality is the building’s. Every turquoise cushion is an argument that preservation pays.
The Show Stopper era added the unexpected coda. When the shake went viral in the 2010s, it did for the Valley Ho what the Family Circus cartoons did for the Sugar Bowl — converted a local landmark into shareable culture and recruited a generation with no memory of 1956 into caring about it. Alongside retro peers like Hula’s Modern Tiki up the street, ZuZu anchors Old Town’s small but mighty district of mid-century revivalism.
Honest assessment: the cooking aims for pleasing rather than profound, and food-first diners will find better pure kitchens nearby. But no table in Scottsdale serves more history per square foot — and only one dessert in town arrives with its own skyline.