Restaurant Progress owners opening 2 new concepts in downtown Phoenix azcentral.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from azcentral.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Melrose, known as Phoenix’s ‘gayborhood,’ might only be a mile-long, but its vibrance and cultural significance can’t be underestimated. Located on 7th Avenue between Indian School Road and Camelback Road, this neighborhood brings color, vitality, and a feeling of inclusivity to downtown Phoenix with its iconic Melrose arch, rainbow crosswalk, and LGBTQ+ friendly businesses.
To help you enjoy the very best of this one-of-a-kind neighborhood, we talked Piper M’Shay, the first-ever Miss Gay Melrose America, and a Melrose resident of three years. You can find her at one of the neighborhood’s best-loved bars, Charlie’s, five nights a week performing show-stopping drag shows.
Chris Malloy
Sauvage Bottle Shop 901 North First Street, #109
Sauvage Bottle Shop is Chris Lingua s wine store inside The Churchill, and it s great. It contains the most thrilling selection of wine and wine-adjacent bottles in town. Lingua sells low-intervention wines, meaning natural-leaning bottles. This is progressive stuff, the opposite of your sleepy industrial cab from Napa. Lingua stocks biodynamic ciders, orange wines from the Puglia avant-garde producer Valentina Passalacqua, and experimental cocktails canned by alums of the groundbreaking Danish restaurant Noma.
The Montecito Bottle Shop 704 West Montecito Avenue Last fall, The Montecito Bottle Shop opened inside a middle suite in the Wagon Wheel Building in the Melrose District. The wine, beer, and cider shop is right next door to Restaurant Progress, which is convenient since it s run by the same small team. That means it carries the same simple, elegant vibe as its neighbor. Current picks include Florèz Wines Sa
Jackie Mercandetti Photo
Anhelo 628 East Adams Street One of the more romantic-looking spots in town is the 1900-built Silva House, home to Anhelo. Ivan Jacobo is the executive chef at this contemporary restaurant at Heritage Square, and he seems to have a keen sense for the ol Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra. As we reported after our first visit, “Rather than junking old wine, he uses it for braising. He trades carefully managed kitchen compost to Grace Farms in Chandler and gets microgreens in return. In a warming world, this is the kind of mindset a young chef needs to have. The menu also supports local and organic farming and uses Arizona-based Alaskan Pride Seafoods. You’ll also want to take a gander at that cocktail menu. Anhelo’s tequila drinks are incredible.
More than a dozen businesses will set up shop inside The Pemberton PHX, as it will be called, according to a December 10 announcement sent to
Phoenix New Times, which describes the project as “a new outdoor playground.” It s set to open in January.
The collective includes several culinary partners, including Bitch on the Run (Breakfast Bitch Express), Dino’s Pizza Napoletana (the operation that used to be behind Thunderbird Lounge and Restaurant Progress), and Saint Pasta (the Italian eatery that used to operate out of Linger Longer Lounge). The latter was launched by Joe Cetrulo and Racan Alhoch in 2019; the