Park once on Stetson Drive on a Thursday night this month and you can eat dinner, order a second round somewhere else, and end the night on a rooftop without touching your car keys again. That has not been true in Old Town for years. The restaurants were always good. They were just never this close together.
What changed is not that Scottsdale suddenly built more restaurants. It is that four storefronts within a few blocks of each other turned over inside the same twelve months, and a handful of unrelated operators, none of them coordinating with each other, all decided the same small pocket of Old Town was worth betting on.
One Building, Two Restaurants
Start with the strangest detail in the whole story. The old STK steakhouse space at 7134 E. Stetson Drive, inside the Southbridge development along the canal, did not become one new restaurant. It became two. STK moved a few blocks away, and its old building split: the ground floor is becoming BOA Steakhouse, the Los Angeles-born concept from Innovative Dining Group making its long-awaited return to Arizona after running Sushi Roku at the W Scottsdale for fifteen years, while the second-floor rooftop is becoming Above All Else, a 6,000-square-foot lounge with its own kitchen, its own bar, and its own reason to come upstairs after dinner downstairs.
Above All Else, run by Above All Hospitality CEO Austin Walter, is building a modern American menu around wagyu tartare, lobster tostada, and a grilled peach salad, with a rooftop patio looking back over Downtown Scottsdale. BOA's kitchen will be led by Executive Chef Brendan Collins, and the Scottsdale menu is set to feature a partnership with Four Sixes Ranch, the Texas cattle operation known for its role in Yellowstone, anchored by an 18-ounce dry-aged ribeye.
BOA was originally announced for a first-half-2026 debut, a window that has already closed by the time of this writing, so it is worth calling ahead before you plan a night around it. Above All Else, as of the most recent reporting this summer, had not yet opened to the public either. Both are still the missing pieces on a block where everything else has already turned over.
The Block That Turned Over in a Year
Walk one block within the same Southbridge complex and the story keeps repeating. 40 LOVE opened its Scottsdale flagship at 7117 E. 6th Avenue on December 13, 2025, taking over the former Kelly's, on the southeast corner of Stetson Drive and Sixth Avenue. The restaurant is backed by 40 Love Group co-founders Sean Mulholland and Avery Johnson Jr. in partnership with singer Niall Horan and former Arizona Cardinals wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, with a menu from chef Ryan Pitt that blends American, French, and Japanese technique inside a country-club-inspired lounge. The opening night drew Devin Booker and rapper Gunna, and the restaurant has settled into a regular dinner and weekend brunch service since.
A few doors down, Ari & Lloyd opened in late July 2026 in a building that was not a restaurant at all a year ago. It used to be a cabinetry showroom. Now it is an upscale casual American bistro with a cocktail-focused lounge, named after the owners' dogs, doing the quieter work of becoming a neighborhood spot rather than a scene.
And a few blocks over on Scottsdale Road, Drake's Hollywood is taking the old Buca di Beppo space at 3828 N. Scottsdale Road, its fourth U.S. location after Dallas, Houston, and West Hollywood, arriving in the same late-July wave with red leather booths, Art Deco chandeliers, and a valet-only entrance that tells you exactly what kind of night the room is built for.
The Corridor, Mapped
Here is where everything sits, and what shape it was in as of August 2026.
| Location | What's There Now | What It Replaced | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7134 E. Stetson Dr., ground floor | BOA Steakhouse | Part of the former STK | Originally targeted first half of 2026; confirm before you go |
| 7134 E. Stetson Dr., 2nd floor rooftop | Above All Else | The rest of the former STK | Not yet open as of the most recent reporting |
| 7117 E. 6th Ave. | 40 LOVE | Former Kelly's at Southbridge | Open since Dec. 13, 2025 |
| Near Stetson Dr. & 6th Ave. | Ari & Lloyd | A former cabinetry showroom | Opened late July 2026 |
| 3828 N. Scottsdale Rd. | Drake's Hollywood | Former Buca di Beppo | Opened late July 2026 |
| AC Hotel Old Town, rooftop | Cielito | New hotel construction | Open since February 2026 |
| Caesars Republic Scottsdale, 7th floor | Wolf by Vanderpump | Existing anchor | Already open |
That is seven restaurants inside a footprint you can cover on foot in normal shoes. Six of them are new to this stretch of Old Town within the past year. Four are already seating guests, and two, BOA and Above All Else, are still finishing out.
Why Nobody Had to Drive
The old pattern in Old Town was scattered by design. A good dinner meant one plaza off Scottsdale Road, a good rooftop meant a different hotel a mile away, and a good late-night lounge meant circling back for parking a third time. Wolf by Vanderpump, on the seventh and eighth floors of Caesars Republic Scottsdale with 6,500 square feet of rooftop space and direct Camelback Mountain views from its veranda, has been the one rooftop in the district worth driving for, mostly because nothing else nearby came close.
What is different this year is that the new wave landed close enough to change the math. Cielito, on the AC Hotel's rooftop, draws its menu from the coastal and highland flavors of Northwest Mexico with Camelback Mountain views from a sixth-floor terrace, and it works best as a daylight stop for the pool deck rather than a dinner reservation. Save the dinner slot for later in the evening, a short walk away, once Above All Else opens its own rooftop on Stetson.
Four storefronts changed hands within a few blocks of each other in under a year. Nobody planned it that way as a district. It just happened that way, one lease at a time.
The Weeks Before It Gets Hard to Get a Table
Scottsdale's dining calendar has a predictable rhythm. Snowbirds return in October, Art Week and the Waste Management stretch pull in visitors from across the state, and reservations at anything with buzz get harder to land from November through spring. Right now, in August and September, that crowd has not arrived yet.
That timing matters here specifically because so much of this corridor opened or is opening during the exact months when demand is lightest. Ari & Lloyd and Drake's Hollywood both landed in late July, which means the next six to eight weeks are the stretch where a resident can walk in on a Tuesday and actually get seated before the fall reservation crush sets in. The same logic applies once Above All Else and BOA open their doors on Stetson. A restaurant that opens into a quiet summer gets its staffing, sourcing, and service tempo worked out against a forgiving crowd, so the version you get in September is often smoother than the version a visitor gets in December.
A Few Notes If You're Making the Rounds
- Drake's Hollywood runs a valet-only entrance on Scottsdale Road, which is a clear signal about the kind of night it wants. Give it a few weeks past opening before trying it on a weekend.
- Ari & Lloyd rewards regulars faster than it rewards a single weekend visit. Treat it as a weeknight spot you return to, not a one-time destination.
- Cielito's pool deck is built for late afternoon, not a dinner reservation. Go for the view before sunset.
- BOA's Four Sixes Ranch ribeye is the one dish worth planning a visit around once the Waterfront location opens.
- Above All Else is worth checking on before you plan around it. As of this writing it had not opened, so call ahead rather than showing up expecting a table.
What This Actually Changes
None of this is really about the food, even though the food is good. It is about what happens to a neighborhood when its restaurant inventory stops being spread across a mile of Scottsdale Road and starts sitting inside a few connected blocks instead. For the first time in a long while, a night out in Old Town does not require deciding in advance where you will park twice. You decide once, and the rest of the evening follows on foot.
That is the kind of shift that only shows up if you are paying attention to which storefronts are turning over and who is moving into them, which is exactly the kind of detail Jaime Fernandez tracks block by block across Scottsdale, not because every new restaurant matters to a home sale, but because the neighborhoods that are changing fastest tend to be the ones worth understanding before everyone else catches on. If you're curious what a shift like this means for property values within walking distance of Stetson Drive, or you just want a second set of eyes on what your own home is worth in today's market, reach out anytime to request your free home valuation.
