About Top of Phoenix.

The same handful of marquee rooms with publicists get covered to exhaustion, while the neighborhood spots locals drive across town for on a Tuesday night stay buried under sponsored listings on the platforms most people search.

Phoenix gets covered like a Scottsdale resort itinerary. Old Town gets the ink; the neighborhoods and strip malls that actually feed the Valley do not. The Sonoran Mexican tradition anchored along Calle 16, the Central Texas-style BBQ near Sky Harbor, the James Beard talent quietly working in Craftsman Court, none of that surfaces in the generic 'top restaurants in Phoenix' roundup that could have been written from a laptop in another state. We built this site because the Valley's best food has always been decentralized, and the coverage never caught up.

We track 2,300-plus restaurants across the full metro: Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Glendale, Peoria, Goodyear, and Surprise. That means Sonoran and regional Mexican across South Phoenix and Mesa, the Asian District along Dobson Road, the West Valley Vietnamese corridor, BBQ, steakhouses, East Valley independents in Gilbert's Heritage District, and the resort-corridor rooms in Old Town worth separating from the noise. If it is in the Valley, we cover it, and we call it by the city it is actually in. We track 93+ restaurants across the metro against the same methodology; the full method is laid out at How We Work.

Top of Phoenix is published by Top Rated Network LLC, an independent, veteran-owned Las Vegas media company that runs city dining guides on the same methodology across the country. The rankings and the writing are produced by this site’s own desk.

The site is small by design. No investors, no growth pressure, no quarterly board meeting that needs engagement numbers to keep climbing. The rankings answer to the data; the data answers to the city.

The methodology (Bayesian-weighted ratings, weekly recalculation) is the same one Top Rated Network uses across its other city guides. The editorial voice is local to Phoenix. The sites themselves are built and maintained by WebIgniter, our in-house web studio.