The Best Places to Eat and Do in Arcadia

1. USA Today Restaurants of the Year
2. AZ Central The 100 Best Metro Phoenix Restaurants
3. Phoenix New Times 2025 · Best Milkshakes · Best of Phoenix

The Arcadia Burger, topped with grilled onions, guacamole, and the house sauce, is the one to order at this drive-thru-only burger shoppe with no indoor seating whatsoever. The double-stacked patties are properly juicy, the fries are the obvious companion, and the milkshakes invite mixing flavors in combinations you'll immediately claim were your idea. Phoenix New Times put it in the top ten burger joints in town, and the neighborhood regulars roll through like they know something.

1. AZ Central The 100 Best Metro Phoenix Restaurants
2. Phoenix New Times The top 10 burger joints in Phoenix

The communal high-top near the entrance is the first thing you notice, and on social hour nights it's the last thing you want to leave. Beckett's Table is a neighborhood restaurant in Arcadia doing Southwestern comfort food with the kind of ease that comes from a chef who's been cooking since childhood. The fork-tender short ribs and a fig-and-pecan pie that the city seems to have adopted as its own keep regulars coming back without much deliberation.

1. Phoenix New Times The top 50 restaurants in Phoenix right now

The fried chicken biscuit comes with a wooden skewer through it just to hold the whole thing together, which tells you something about the kitchen's ambitions. This Southern-Southwestern brunch spot from the family behind Lo-Lo's Chicken and Waffles leans into the occasion: tableside bananas Foster, a full cocktail menu you can nurse past noon, and a cheerful indoor-outdoor room that has enough energy to feel like a party without scaring off anyone's parents.

1. Phoenix New Times The 10 best brunch restaurants in Phoenix

1. AZ Central The 100 Best Metro Phoenix Restaurants

1. Foodist Awards 2023 · Winner: Barter & Shake · Outstanding Hospitality Group
2. Spirited Awards 2024 · Top 4 Finalist · Best U.S. Bar Team
3. Foodist Awards 2023 · Winner · Most Creative Handcrafted Cocktail

The smell of aging paper hits you before you've found a shelf to browse. Book Gallery is an antiquarian bookshop stacked floor to ceiling with rare volumes, first editions, and signed works, some behind glass. A Harper Lee-signed "To Kill a Mockingbird" and a first printing of "Naked Lunch" give a sense of the range. If the specific thing you're hunting isn't here, the owner can usually track it down.

1. Phoenix New Times 2025 · Best Collectible and Antique Books · Best of Phoenix

Removing a glove with your teeth turns out to be a teachable skill, and Spellbound Burlesque is the troupe doing the teaching. They run nearly monthly shows around Phoenix, with local regulars sharing the bill alongside national headliners, and a standing residency every second Wednesday at Century Grand. The whole enterprise leans body-positive and inclusive, which in practice means the performances are less Vegas showroom and more genuinely weird and fun.

1. Phoenix New Times 2024 · Best Burlesque · Best of Phoenix