Cowboy Ciao, 7133 East Stetson, Scottsdale, 946-3111. Hours: Dinner, 5 p.m. to midnight, seven days a week. Looking for a new restaurant experience? These days, Scottsdale’s the place. Looking for an old restaurant experience? Scottsdale’s still the place. If you’re prowling for new culinary kicks, put Cowboy Ciao on your…

Pierre Today, Gone Tomorrow: It’s a pity, but the Valley’s premier French-pastry craftsman is saying au revoir to Arizona. Pierre Fauvet and his wife, Joni, have operated Pierre’s Pastry Cafe for the past seven years. But the work is grueling, and the place hasn’t been as wildly successful financially as…

Summer in the City: Gershwin wrote that in summertime, the living is easy. Obviously, the man never spent July in Phoenix checking out restaurants for a living. I’m nearing the end of my annual Best of Phoenix explorations, panning for restaurant gold to put on this year’s list. As usual,…

6th Avenue Petit Marche, 7146 East Sixth Avenue, Scottsdale, 947-7172. Hours: Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Remember the good old days, when mom would go shopping in the morning to pick up the groceries for the family dinner? After…

Edible Art: Ever been to a museum restaurant? If you have, you’ve probably noticed that you can almost always count on the food to be 1) overpriced and 2) mediocre. That’s why I was so startled after a visit to the Phoenix Art Museum. Looking over the collection, you won’t…

Chez Bubbas Caribbean and Creole House, 801 North First Street, Phoenix, 254-0040. Lunch, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. You don’t need to see the new multiplex-cinema construction at Arizona Center, the new apartment complexes filling in the empty lots north of Van Buren, the newly restored Orpheum…

Cajun House, 7117 East Third Avenue, Scottsdale, 945-5150. Hours: Dinner, 5 to 11 p.m., seven days a week. What has Louisiana got that Arizona hasn’t? You want crooked politicians? We’ve got them. You want summers so uncomfortable that you can sweat while taking a cold shower? We’ve got them. You…

L.A. The prevailing winds in Phoenix generally come slowly from the West, culturally as well as meteorologically. We get movies six months after they’ve opened in Hollywood; touring shows a year after they’ve played the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; and food trends two years after they’ve swept through West L.A. The…

Lagerfields Micropub, 12601 North Paradise Village Parkway, Phoenix, 765-0059. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Sunday and Monday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Want to cool off this monsoon season? Going to San Diego is always an option. But not too many of us…

Commode to Joy: Being a restaurant critic isn’t always a delight. But after almost six years of eating out four or five times a week, I can take the downs with the ups. Overpriced meals? Bad food? Surly servers? I’ve seen them all. One thing I still haven’t gotten used…

Caffe Boa, 5063 East Elliot, Ahwatukee, 893-3331. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Why do people confuse money with class? Ted Kennedy and Fife Symington, for instance, are both dripping with wealth, acknowledged or not. But…

Magic Chef: It’s easy to get stale after you’ve been at a job for some time. Believe it or not, there are actually some Mondays when I don’t bound out of bed, race happily to a blank computer screen and try to meet a Friday deadline. It’s no different for…

Korean Restaurant, 1414 North Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale, 994-5995. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Dinner, Monday through Wednesday, 5 to 10 p.m. These are the times that try men’s Seouls. The Valley’s Asian community is growing at a phenomenal rate. Chinese, Japanese, Thai and…

Over and Haute: A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran an intriguing piece on the declining significance of French cuisine, “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?” Author Adam Gopnik discovered, to his horror, that the French are no longer on the cutting edge of gastronomy. Instead, they seem…

Dahl & Di Luca, 2321 West Highway 89A, Sedona, 1-520-282-5219. Hours: Dinner, 5 p.m. to close, seven nights a week. This is not a pleasant time of year to live in the Valley of the Perpetual Sun, unless you’re a lizard or a water-park operator. For the next several months,…

Eat the High Country: The Valley isn’t the only area of Arizona exploding with restaurants. The Sedona/Flagstaff region (see this week’s Cafe column) is also booming. One reader has alerted me to a couple of offbeat restaurants that local weekend travelers may want to try. The first, in Flagstaff, is…

Deja Revu: It’s rerun time on television, so I thought this might be a good time to do some restaurant-food reruns, too. I returned to several places I’d enjoyed in the past to see if they still lived up to my plaudits. These three do: Centro Cafe & Bakery, 15820…

Sir Charles Bar-B-Q Pit, 1231 East Northern, Phoenix, 997-6663. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Civilization has done a good job suppressing most of our basic, primitive urges. We modern men and women don’t satisfy our…

Word Is Out: Some restaurant critics, I suppose, know everything. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. I have a shelf full of reference works to help me overcome my ignorance. The latest aid: Webster’s New World Dictionary of Culinary Arts, compiled by Steven Labensky, Gaye Ingram and Sarah Labensky (Prentice…

Bistro Panino, 4139 West Bell, Phoenix, 978-8500. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Dinner, Monday through Thursday, 4:30 to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. Not too many years ago, there were only two plausible explanations for venturing west of Central Avenue in…

Welcome to the New Times Cafe swimsuit issue. Unfortunately, the editors have nixed my suggestion to run a photo spread of me and several models lolling on a breezy, sun-dappled tropical-island paradise, cavorting in designer bathing suits. How could they be so shortsighted? Right about now, most of us start…

Inn Crowd: It’s not easy to put your finger on just what it is that boosts a very good restaurant into the ranks of the very best. But whatever it is, it appears to be happening at Lon’s. The exceptional meal I had here left me transfixed with admiration for…