Phoenix for foodies

Best restaurants

Downtown Phoenix eats close to the grid. Inside the loop bounded by Van Buren, Jefferson, 7th Avenue, and 7th Street, the restaurants worth a visitor's hour are not the ones nearest the convention center; they are the ones that have held their addresses through a decade of construction cranes. This list works that footprint and its immediate edges: a Hawaiian plate lunch on West Adams, a Cornish pasty on West Monroe, an Italian dining room across from the ballpark, a Neapolitan pizzeria on North 1st Street, a French kitchen on North 3rd Street, a Mexican counter that has outlasted every restaurant boom on 7th Avenue, a soul-food landmark on South Central, and a teriyaki window on the north edge of the core. Twelve places, all mapped, all with published hours and a phone that answers. Skip the food halls chasing the tourist dollar and the branded chains that could be anywhere in the country; the addresses below give you Phoenix at street level, cited fact by fact, from OpenStreetMap and the venues' own sites so nothing on this page is a rumor.