What it’s actually like
Arizona grows dates the way it grows citrus — as a leftover from the era when this valley was farmland with a few resorts, before it was resorts with a few orange trees. Most of the groves are gone. Sphinx is the Scottsdale name that survived, and its shop on Scottsdale Road is a small, bright, well-edited room that smells faintly of caramel.
The dates are the center: Medjools in various grades, other varieties as the season allows, and — when you’re lucky — Black Sphinx, the Phoenix-born date that regulars ask about first. Around them the shelves hold the pantry: Arizona honey, prickly-pear everything, salsas and chiles, local coffee, date-based sweets and baking goods, gift boxes assembled for shipping. There’s a counter for date shakes and coffee. That’s it. It takes ten minutes to see and you’ll spend thirty.
The clientele is a nice mix of locals restocking, visitors buying a box for the flight home, and a steady trade in people sending gifts to relatives who have never seen a date palm. The staff know their fruit and will let you taste.
What to buy
Medjools. Big, soft, sweet, and Arizona-grown. A pound is the default; a gift box is the version that survives the mail.
Black Sphinx, if they have them. Smaller, darker, softer, more complex — the variety that makes date people go quiet. Seasonal and scarce. If they’re in, that’s the purchase.
A date shake. Dates blended into a thick milkshake, the desert’s own ice-cream ritual, and the reason the shop has a counter. Drink it before it hits the car seat.
The pantry. Local honey and a jar of something with chiles in it make the gift box feel like Arizona rather than like a generic fruit basket. The staff assemble boxes well; let them.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The shop is on Scottsdale Road a few minutes south of the Old Town core, with its own small lot — none of the downtown parking drama. It keeps daytime store hours, so treat it as a morning or afternoon stop rather than an evening one. The busiest stretch is the run-up to the holidays, when gift shipping peaks; dates are harvested in the fall, so late fall is when the new crop is freshest and the shelves are fullest.
For the full local-food morning, pair it with the Old Town Farmers Market on a cool-season Saturday: growers and makers in the Brown Avenue lot first, then a drive down Scottsdale Road for dates and a shake. That sequence covers most of what Arizona actually grows.
Eat while you’re there
Goldwater Brewing on Scottsdale Road is the neighborhood taproom between the shop and downtown. Grimaldi’s up at Scottsdale Road and Main is coal-oven pizza for a family. And the Sugar Bowl, pink since 1958, is the correct place to argue about whether a date shake beats a hot fudge sundae. It doesn’t, but it’s close.
How it got here
Scottsdale in 1951 was a farm town making a decision. It incorporated that July with about two thousand residents and one square mile, and the 1950s would spend the rest of the decade turning it into a resort city — Motorola, the Valley Ho, the Western-themed Main Street. But the ground the town sat on was still agricultural: alfalfa, cotton, citrus, dairies, and date palms, which the Valley had grown since early in the century when the federal government and local growers imported offshoots from North Africa and the Middle East and found that the Salt River Valley’s heat suited them.
The Sphinx Date Ranch was planted into that world in 1951 — named, like the era’s date brands generally, for the fruit’s Old World origins — and for decades it worked like a farm with a store attached, selling to the winter visitors who discovered the fruit at roadside stands the way they discovered citrus. The Black Sphinx variety, a chance seedling found in the Phoenix area in the 1920s, became the local connoisseur’s date, and small Arizona groves have kept it going ever since.
Then the farmland went. Scottsdale’s fields disappeared under subdivisions through the 1970s and 1980s, and a date ranch inside the city limits became an anachronism. Sphinx did what the smart Valley farm businesses did — it stopped being a farm and became a brand, sourcing Arizona dates from growers who still had groves and selling them to a national mail-order audience. The later rebrand to Sphinx Date Co. Palm & Pantry added the curated local-food shelf and the shake counter, turning a date stand into a small Arizona general store.
The result is a business as old as the city that still sells the city’s original product. Almost nothing else in Scottsdale can say that.