{"id":9863,"date":"2023-04-05T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-05T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9863"},"modified":"2023-04-04T23:25:34","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T03:25:34","slug":"arizona-eats-march-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/05\/arizona-eats-march-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Arizona eats, March 2023."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Belly Kitchen & Bar<\/a>\u2019s downtown Phoenix location (they also have one in Gilbert) is easy to miss \u2013 it looks like a house and is located on a tiny lot on the southeast corner of 7th<\/sup> Ave & Camelback. The menu is influenced by Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese cuisines, and the dishes are all supposed to work with the wine & cocktail menu, although I admit that usually after one cocktail I\u2019m not ober enough to make that connection. Anyway, I ordered the bartender\u2019s two main suggestions, the crispy spring rolls and the pan-seared king trumpet mushrooms, as well as their rum and rye old fashioned. (Two of them, as it turned out.) The mushrooms were the more interesting of the two, tossed with some small cubes of tofu and served in a black bean and Sichuan peppercorn sauce that was faintly sweet, a little spicy, and very earthy with a ton of umami from the fermented beans. The spring rolls were a very good exemplar of their type, served with large lettuce leaves, mint sprigs, and nuoc cham sauce for dipping, although it was nothing I hadn\u2019t had before, just generally not this good. And, somewhat unfortunately for the purposes of this blog, that was all I could eat \u2013 I was full, and just left wistfully eyeing the plates my neighbors got. I really wish I\u2019d had room for the jackfruit and mustard green fried rice in particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pizzeria Virt\u00f9<\/a> is the second outpost from Chef Gio Osso of Virt\u00f9 Honest Craft, although he\u2019s also now opened a third place, Piccolo Virt\u00f9, so I\u2019m behind. The pizzeria is more than just a pizza outlet, with an assortment of fresh house-made pastas and traditional Italian plates as starters. I went with my longtime friend Bill Mitchell, whose words and photos you may have seen over at Baseball America<\/em>, and we did one item from each section \u2013 their insalata with arugula, grape tomatoes, red onion, shaved Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and a lemon-olive oil dressing; the pizza with \u2018nduja, a spicy sausage from the Calabria region of southern Italy; and their rigatoni with tomatoes, basil, prosciutto, and more Parmiggiano-Reggiano. The pasta was by far the best dish we got, cooked truly al dente with bright sweetness from the tomatoes and basil and exactly the right amount of salinity even with two very salty ingredients in the prosciutto and the cheese. The pizza was solid, more Neapolitan-adjacent than Neapolitan, without a ton of air in the outer ridge of the crust but saved by the high quality of the toppings. (They also misspelled \u2018nduja on the menu, writing \u201cn\u2019duja\u201d instead, which is only funny because it\u2019s an Italian term.) The salad was a good salad, nothing more or less, but I\u2019m also glad we didn\u2019t get something heavier. I can also vouch for the amaro viale cocktail, a combination of bourbon, three different amari<\/em> (potable bitters), and sweet vermouth that hits like a negroni but with the smoothness of the bourbon rather than the herbal notes of gin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sweet Dee\u2019s Bakeshop<\/a> is on East Stetson not too far from Old Town, focusing mostly on pastries and sweets. Their breakfast sandwich comes with a scrambled egg, bacon, avocado, and goat cheese on a croissant, and was solid to very good other than the common problem of the egg being cooked more than I like it. I usually stick to the classics when I have breakfast out there \u2013 Hillside Spot, Matt\u2019s, Cr\u00eape Bar, sometimes Snooze \u2013 but this was excellent for something faster when I had a morning game to hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Futuro Coffee<\/a> has been on my to-do list for Phoenix for years now, at least going back before the pandemic, as its adherents have argued it\u2019s the best espresso place in the Valley. They certainly do take their espresso seriously, with a single-origin option each day, and the standard options to take it with varying degrees of milk. The day I went, the single-origin was an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, which in my experience does not play well with dairy; I asked the barista his advice and he said he thought it was best black. It\u2019s served in a wide terra cotta cup, unlike any coffee vessel I\u2019ve ever tried, which did keep it warm for longer than ceramic would, along with some sparkling water. Futuro is located inside the Palabra art gallery and the space is very cool, weirdly sparse and yet comfortable enough to sit and write for a while. They\u2019ve used a number of top roasters from around the U.S. and Canada, including heart and 49th<\/sup> Parallel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fire at Will<\/a> is in a relative wasteland for good food, up at Shea and Tatum, an area that\u2019s mostly populated by chain restaurants. Their menu is eclectic, to put it mildly \u2013 I have a hard time seeing what the core idea is here, or finding any unifying theme among the dishes. I heard the folks sitting next to me ask the bartender if there were any must-try dishes on the menu, and the bartender recommended \u2026 the burger. That\u2019s not a great sign, at least in my experience. I tried just two things given how large the portions are \u2013 the fried Brussels sprouts and the Iberico ham croquettes. The Brussels were truly outstanding, served with nuoc cham<\/em> (fish sauce, lime juice, and sugar), chopped peanuts, and a little diced Asian pear; I\u2019ve had a lot of fried Brussels sprouts but this was among the very best, as there wasn\u2019t a single leaf that was overcooked and nothing was too undercooked to eat, while the sweet-sour sauce had the right balance to offset any lingering bitterness in the brassicas. The croquettes were also extremely well-cooked, very crispy on the outside but smooth and still soft on the interior, although I didn\u2019t taste the ham at all, which is a colossal waste if they used real jam\u00f3n iberico<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ate one meal down in Tucson after my game at Hi Corbett Field, stopping at El Taco Rustico<\/a> on N. Oracle on my back to I-10. It looks bare bones but the food is anything but \u2013 their carnitas is outstanding and the pollo asado has a ton of flavor, although it paled next to the pork since it\u2019s just inherently less fatty. They also offer four vegetarian options (nopales<\/em>, rajas con queso<\/em>, eggs, or summer squash) as well as the fifteen meat or meat-containing choices for fillings. The guacamole starter is pretty generous for $8, with house-made chips, probably not something I needed but I ordered it anyway for the sake of my readers. Chef-owner Juan Almanza opened the restaurant right as the pandemic hit and kept it open with the support of the community during that first year, although now it appears that he\u2019s built a strong following on his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had two bad meals on the trip, one unsurprising and one less so. I ate at Revolu Modern Taqueria near the Peoria Sports Complex, mostly due to time constraints, and it was exactly what I expected, a chain restaurant\u2019s facsimile of tacos, including \u201cdiablo\u201d spiced shrimp that a toddler could eat. I also went to my longtime favorite FnB and had by far the most disappointing meal I\u2019d ever had there, for reasons I can\u2019t even completely explain. I\u2019ll just note that the \u201csmoked\u201d salmon salad, which the server highlighted as a favorite, came with salmon so overcooked I couldn\u2019t eat it. I\u2019m not sure if it was smoked or poached, but it was beyond chewing. Maybe I just caught them on an off night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rest of my meals were at places I\u2019d tried before, like the breakfast spots mentioned above, plus Republica Empanada, Pane Bianco (which now serves New York-style pizza on some days), Cartel Coffee, Press Coffee, Lux, Frost Gelato, and Defalco\u2019s Italian Market. All lived up to previous standards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Belly Kitchen & Bar\u2019s downtown Phoenix location (they also have one in Gilbert) is easy to miss \u2013 it looks like a house and is located on a tiny lot on the southeast corner of 7th Ave & Camelback. The menu is influenced by Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese cuisines, and the dishes are all supposed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[566,65,84,235,240,270,292],"class_list":["post-9863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-arizona","tag-breakfast","tag-coffee","tag-phoenix","tag-pizza","tag-scottsdale","tag-tacos","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9864,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9863\/revisions\/9864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}