What it’s actually like
Every resort corridor needs one grocery store that understands the assignment, and on the Paradise Valley border that store is AJ’s at Hilton Village. It sits at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive, the crossroads of the resort belt, in the retail complex attached to the Hilton with the bell tower. From here you are minutes from the Lincoln Drive and Camelback resorts, the Borgata, and several thousand Paradise Valley kitchens with very high expectations.
The store is built accordingly. The front third is essentially a restaurant that lets you take the food home: a long prepared-foods counter of salads, entrées and sides, a hot bar, a sushi station, a cheese case that would not embarrass a specialty shop, a bakery with real pastry and real bread. Behind that are the butcher and seafood counters, the produce, and the aisles — full-service grocery, tilted hard toward specialty and imported. Off to one side is the wine cellar, a proper room with a proper staff. There is a flower shop. There is a coffee bar. It is, without irony, pleasant.
The customers are half locals doing their real shopping and half people in resort-casual who have just realized what the in-room dining menu costs. Both groups look relieved.
What to buy
Dinner from the prepared-foods counter. This is the play. A rotisserie chicken, two sides and a salad, or whatever the hot bar is doing, is the resort corridor’s best-value meal by a wide margin.
A bottle picked by the wine staff. Tell them what you bought and what you’re paying; they are good at this, and the cellar has depth at every price.
Cheese, charcuterie and bakery bread. The picnic-on-the-patio kit, assembled in one lap. Add fruit from the produce section and you have handled tomorrow’s breakfast too.
The gift-basket stuff. Arizona-made products, local honey and chile, good chocolate — the host gift for the Paradise Valley dinner you were invited to, bought ten minutes away.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Hilton Village has its own surface lot and none of the Old Town or Fashion Square parking drama; it is one of the easiest good stores in the city to get into and out of. Late afternoon is the crush — resort guests and locals converging on the prepared-foods counter at the same hour — so shop before four or after seven if you want the aisles to yourself. The counter is best stocked at midday and picked over by evening on busy weekends in the cool season.
It is a full grocery store with full grocery hours, so it also covers the unglamorous needs of a resort stay — sunscreen, a phone charger, the good sparkling water — without a drive.
Eat while you’re there
You don’t have to cook at all. Hilton Village itself holds one of the corridor’s best benches of long-tenured locals’ restaurants a two-minute walk from the store: Veneto Trattoria, the Venetian room that has held down the complex since 1997, is the standout. Across Scottsdale Road, Hillstone is the polished all-purpose dinner, and Fat Ox up the block is the corridor’s serious modern Italian.
How it got here
The Bashas’ family has sold groceries in Arizona since the 1930s, growing from a couple of small-town stores into the state’s homegrown supermarket company. By the 1980s the Valley had changed around them: the resort corridor along Camelback and Lincoln had matured, Paradise Valley had filled with large houses, and a class of shopper had emerged who wanted the specialty foods and wine they were used to from the coasts. AJ’s was the family’s answer — a gourmet banner separate from the everyday stores, aimed squarely at the neighborhoods with money.
Hilton Village was the right address for the flagship because of what the complex itself was. Built beside the Hilton at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln, it was one of the city’s early experiments in giving a resort its own walkable shopping-and-restaurant street, decades before the lifestyle centers made that idea standard. A gourmet grocer anchored to a resort at the busiest crossroads of the resort belt, on the seam between Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, was as close to a guaranteed audience as retail gets — and it has held that audience through every cycle since, as the Camelback Corridor resorts renovated, the Borgata across the way rose and fell and rose again, and national gourmet chains arrived in the Valley and found the position already taken.
The deeper point is that AJ’s is Arizona’s. In a state whose retail is dominated by national banners, a family-owned Arizona grocer running the resort corridor’s most polished store is a small, stubborn local fact, and locals treat it that way. Ask a Paradise Valley host where the cheese came from and you will get the same one-syllable answer every time.