🍝 Three years ago, Brandon Gioffre was pulling fresh mozzarella under a pop-up tent at the Uptown Farmers Market, selling sandwiches and zeppole to a line that kept getting longer every Saturday.
Today, he’s the chef-owner behind DiMaggio’s, the old-school Italian restaurant that’s become one of the toughest tables in Scottsdale. Now, DiMaggio’s is quietly preparing to open a second location in Phoenix, in the former Lou Malnati’s space at Uptown Plaza this fall.
Gioffre grew up in an all-Italian family and says he learned to cook before he learned to ride a bike. He spent his career in finance before he and his wife moved to Scottsdale from New York in 2019 – and quickly ran into a problem: they couldn’t find the Italian food, or the hospitality, they’d grown up with.
‘‘We went to every Italian restaurant, and it just wasn’t the type of Italian that we were used to,’’ Gioffre said.
So the family – Gioffre, his wife, and their three daughters – started showing up at the Uptown Farmers Market instead, first as customers, then as vendors. Under the name Little Italy of Scottsdale, they began pulling fresh mozzarella on site and selling sauces, focaccia, panini, pestos, fresh-filled cannoli, and zeppole. It went viral almost immediately.
‘‘No one had ever really seen that stuff, especially at a farmers market out here,’’ Gioffre said. Food bloggers showed up. Then came Italian festivals, then full-scale catering – everything from drop-and-go trays to white-glove, seven-to-10-course weddings at estates around Scottsdale and Paradise Valley.
By September 2022, the family opened their first brick-and-mortar: a small Italian-inspired brunch spot called The Blind Pig. It sold out within its first week, with lines running one to two hours deep for dishes like lemon ricotta pancakes and an Italian riff on eggs Benedict. When Gioffre quietly added dinner service with zero marketing, it took off even faster than brunch had – so fast that he eventually had to drop brunch entirely just to keep up.
‘‘I’d get in at 4 or 5 in the morning,’’ Gioffre said. ‘‘We’d be packed for brunch, and I remember taking a bag of the white towels, putting a napkin over it, and sleeping for 45 minutes – then getting back up and starting prep for dinner. This is no joke.‘‘
The Blind Pig sat just 19 tables. By the time it closed, Gioffre’s small crew was turning out a couple hundred covers a night, elbow to elbow, in a kitchen he describes as barely big enough to move in.
The night Frank DiMaggio walked in
The restaurant’s next chapter started with a table request. One busy night, a server told Gioffre that the couple at table 12 wanted him to come say hello. It was Frank and Lauren DiMaggio.
‘‘He’s like, ‘Hey, I played pro baseball in New York. I played pro baseball in Italy. I lived in both places. I’ve eaten all over the best Italian restaurants, and this is the best Italian I’ve ever had,’’’ Gioffre recalled.
DiMaggio, a professional baseball player turned real estate developer – he owns one of the Valley’s most successful real estate agencies and builds luxury homes in Paradise Valley – came back with his parents soon after, then booked four or five full restaurant buyouts for private events.
He and Gioffre became friends. DiMaggio (a distant cousin of the more-famous baseball-playing DiMaggio), it turned out, had been trying to open his own Italian restaurant for four or five years and hadn’t found the food to justify it.
‘‘I’ve been to what I felt was the mecca of Italian food,’’ DiMaggio said, referencing the roughly four months he lived in Italy playing in the country’s top professional league. ‘‘And I felt like what Brandon had was better than everything I had eaten anywhere.’’
The partnership – and the rebrand – came together fast. DiMaggio’s wife, an interior designer, offered to redo the space. Gioffre, meanwhile, had been looking for a new name; the Blind Pig’s graffiti-and-Brooklyn-Bridge decor no longer matched the old-school, New York-style Italian coming out of the kitchen.
Somewhere in the conversation, the obvious name emerged.
‘‘We were both like, why don’t we rename it DiMaggio’s,’’ Gioffre said. ‘‘The stars were aligned.’’
DiMaggio’s team gutted and redesigned the restaurant in about a week, working around the clock. What emerged, Gioffre said, looked like it had been serving Little Italy for a hundred years. One writer later compared it to where Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack would hang out if they lived in Scottsdale today – a line Gioffre calls one of the best compliments the restaurant has ever received.
The food itself runs on non-negotiable rules: no seed oils, no farm-raised fish, and roughly 90% of ingredients sourced directly from Italy. It’s a scratch kitchen, Gioffre said, made fresh every single day – the same standard he holds for what he feeds his own kids at home.
‘‘Italian restaurants are the first restaurants to fail in this industry,’’ Gioffre said. ‘‘We’ve been very blessed – from the second we opened the doors, we’ve been out-the-door busy.’’
Outgrowing The Blind Pig – again
The DiMaggio’s rebrand supercharged a restaurant that was already busting at the seams. Within about a year, the partners moved to a larger space in The Grove, roughly doubling their seating to 24 tables – though DiMaggio says the new restaurant ‘‘feels just as small as the first spot’’ given demand.
DiMaggio points to one moment that convinced him it was time to move: a couple in their 70s or 80s drove in from North Scottsdale, were told the wait was 45 minutes, and sat outside in the summer heat to wait for it anyway because the old space had no indoor lobby.
‘‘We can’t have Arizona residents sitting outside in the middle of summer waiting for a table,’’ DiMaggio said. ‘‘That was the indicator that I was like, it’s time.’’
The current Grove location came together almost by accident – DiMaggio spotted the empty space on his regular drive to the gym before a broker ever flagged it for him.
Day to day, Gioffre still runs the kitchen and signs off on every special, even as the operation has grown well past what he and one line cook used to handle alone – including, as of recently, dropping the restaurant’s biggest self-imposed rule: for months, the wildly popular 34-layer, two-day-process lasagna was only served Friday and Saturday because it was too labor-intensive to make every night. Customer demand, and a bigger kitchen staff, changed that. It’s now on the menu seven nights a week.
A second location in the works
DiMaggio’s isn’t done growing. Frank DiMaggio confirmed the restaurant is working on a second location, taking over the former Lou Malnati’s space at Uptown Plaza in Phoenix – just two blocks from the same Uptown Farmers Market where Gioffre first started selling mozzarella and zeppole out of a tent.
‘‘It’s pretty wild,’’ Gioffre said of the symmetry.
Beyond the walls, the strategy for location No. 2 is to change as little as possible: same dark wood floors, same booth colors, a slightly darker curtain as the only real design tweak, and – critically – the same core menu.
‘‘Once you have something that’s so well (received) – to be able to have a successful restaurant is like lightning in a bottle as it is,’’ DiMaggio said. ‘‘We don’t want to deviate from it. We want people to know that they’re going to get the consistency. When we want to change things up, we do it with specials.’’
Happy hour and lunch service are both under discussion for one or both locations, though DiMaggio said neither is likely to launch on day one.
Don’t expect a pizza oven at the new spot, either – the wood-burning oven at the Grove location came with the building, and while it’s turned out standout specials like branzino and double-cut pork chops, the partners are intentionally keeping those as occasional specials rather than menu staples.
A third location is also on the radar. DiMaggio said the restaurant has been approached by a developer about a future spot, and conversations are ongoing, but the partners are deliberately holding off.
‘‘We’re so laser-focused on making sure location two is perfect in every way – execution, design, everything,’’ DiMaggio said. ‘‘We don’t want to lose focus.’’
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