Phoenix for foodies

Best restaurants

Phoenix eats wider than its reputation suggests. The dozen restaurants below sit inside a tight downtown-and-near-north radius — Adams Street, Washington, Roosevelt Row, the stretch up Central — and between them they cover Hawaiian plate lunch, Thai, Cornish pasties, red-sauce Italian, two very different pizzas, a breakfast counter that has outlasted three downtown construction cycles, a French room that only opens at night, Mediterranean, Japanese teriyaki built for the lunch crowd, third-generation Sonoran Mexican on the east side, and a north-Phoenix Indian kitchen that runs six days a week. None of these are destination-dining trophy rooms; they are places where the cooking, the hours, and the street address have to line up for the meal to make sense. The list is organised for someone who wants to eat well in this city without driving thirty miles between meals — most of the addresses cluster between the 85003 and 85004 ZIPs, with two outliers that are worth the cab. Every claim that follows — every street number, every service window, every cuisine label — is verifiable; the opinions are mine.