Chef and owner Cory Oppold brings delicious choices to his classy but comfortable Central Scottsdale restaurant, where diners may select a five-course prix fixe menu with options for each course ($135 per person) or a 10-course, chef’s-choice tasting menu ($190 per person). Each plate is a study in Modernist cuisine, featuring foams, powders and deconstructed dishes. On Sunday, the restaurant takes the name Morning Would and offers a seven-course tasting menu for $75 per person.

Created by Dom and Holly Ruggiero of Hush Public House, Fire at Will is the best thing to happen to the dining desert around Shea and Tatum Boulevards in North Phoenix. Like Hush, it specializes in sophisticated comfort food, but the menu here is broader and more eclectic, featuring influences from Spain, Italy, and the Middle East. The clean-lined space is dimly lit and moody, while still maintaining a sense of irreverence. This is a neighborhood hangout, after all, offering good cocktails and the straightforward Hush burger, as well as less conventional selections such as lamb tartare and soba noodles with gochujang.

Billed as a Parisian steakhouse, this well-appointed but somewhat casual French restaurant, housed in The Global Ambassador (Sam Fox’s luxe new hotel), offers the French classics Americans know and love: quiche, salade Nicoise, French onion soup, steak tartare, beef Bourguignon, and steak frites. And because Fox wanted it, there’s a short list of Jewish classics such as a pastrami sandwich and matzo ball soup.

This smaller, sexier-looking sibling to the original Shimogamo in Chandler is not just a second location but rather a different and slightly more casual version, offering creative sushi rolls, bite-size, taco-like hand rolls, okonomiyaki, robatayaki, and yakitori in many splendored permutations, including skewered chicken thighs, wings, meatballs, hearts, and soft bones. The dinner menu also features a few favorites from the Chandler location such as udon carbonara, hirame usuzukuri (a sashimi presentation), and A5 Miyazaki Wagyu steak.

The buzziest Phoenix-area restaurant of the year thus far is Austin-based chef-owner Tyson Cole’s seventh rendition of Uchi (“home” in Japanese), a high-end Japanese restaurant whose cozy space is softened by curving wood-paneled walls and hanging lamps. The extensive menu features cool tastings (think crudo, carpaccio, and usuzukuri), hot tastings (wagyu beef hot rock, oak-grilled escolar), daily specials, rare fish specialties from Japan’s famed Toyosu Market, nigiri and sashimi, and a 10-course, ultra-seaonal omakase menu (market price).

After working for an international food import company for over a year, 2007 James Beard Award winner Nobuo Fukuda is back in the kitchen, presiding over an intimate, 60s-era space that feels more like a bar than a restaurant, but never fear. Fukuda’s extraordinary East-meets-West version of Japanese cuisine, including his signature sashimi spoons, is as brilliant as ever — and remarkably affordable. Sip on Japanese-influenced cocktails, make a meal of share plates such as panko-fried tofu skewers and pork belly bao buns, and get ready for the exceptional omakase Fukuda will begin to offer in the months to come. 

Alex and Yotaka (“Sunny”) Martin, the couple who got their start by hosting pop-up style dinner parties in recent years, moved into a Roosevelt Row restaurant in spring 2022. The dimly lit, sophisticated space makes a fitting backdrop for Thai food that doesn’t feel like the same old, same old. Sunny and crew hand-pound Thai red chiles to make various curries and squeeze their own coconut milk rather than open a can. Each dish is light and fresh tasting, as much as it is herbal and complex. The emphasis here is on texture and flavor, not necessarily heat; get the meal off to a brilliant start with a less sweet Thai-style pina colada.

T.J. Culp and Esther Noh of Restaurant Progress opened this French-style bistro and wine bar in a vintage bungalow in Roosevelt Row in 2021, and it’s been packed ever since. One draw is the small, farmhouse-chic space equipped with an old-school stereo and plenty of vinyl, another is the global wine list, and a third is a French menu, which hews to bistro classics such as pate, escargot, steak tartare, and croque-madames. Get there early to snag a seat on the front porch overlooking a verdant lawn.

Lawrence Smith and Aseret Arroyo moved from their popular food truck to this adorably kitschy, light-filled space in the rehabbed Egyptian Motor Hotel, where they’re cranking out new wave street food. His frequently changing menu delves into the heart of Mexico yet represents a thoroughly modern viewpoint, incorporating delicacies such as roasted grasshoppers, Oaxacan ants and mushroom-like corn smut (huitlacoche). Sip cocktails on the patio overlooking Grand Avenue, and if the pan de elote cheesecake is available, order it. 

Explore the culinary connections among Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South at this modern African restaurant, which honors the African diaspora via food. Owner Evelia Davis, and GM/barman Will Brazil fuel this lively place with Afrobeats, wildly colorful cocktails and positive energy, while Digby Stridiron dishes out his own brand of fun via piri piri chicken wings, pimiento cheese with coconut bread rolls, and shrimp escabeche. 

When it comes to offbeat decor, this bougie new venue from Teddy and Katie Meyers (who also own Chico Malo in CityScape) corners the market. To some, the cavernous, dimly lit space is gorgeous, to others a bit bizarre, given that every nook and cranny is filled with taxidermied wolves, exotic stuffed birds, and otherworldly murals of those same creatures. It’s a cool downtown haven for whiling away the time over excellent cocktails (devised by consulting mixologists Libby Lingua and Mitch Lyons) and on-trend dishes such as beef carpaccio, ceviche, hiramasa crudo, and a three-pound hunk of bone marrow that brings dinosaurs to mind. For a splurge, try A5 wagyu, cooked on Japanese charcoal at a table-side hibachi, which ranges in price from $125 to $210, or a 16-ounce beef Wellington for two that requires 24-hours notice.

Feringhee, which means “foreigner” in Hindi, catches attention with its blinged out bar and its beautiful and sophisticated food, which celebrates India’s many regions and culinary traditions. This is Indian fine dining, replete with tuiles, foams, flowers, and other haute-cuisine touches. It’s the delicious handiwork of chef Karan Mittal, who makes the ordinary extraordinary. For proof, try the chaat — India’s favorite snack food — elevated by glistening yogurt mousse foam, dried raspberry powder, and crisp-fried shiso leaves.