Campari Melon Salad

Name: Campari Melon Salad
Yield: 4 to 6
Ingredients: 1 honeydew melon, peeled and cut in 1/2-inch dice; 1 cantaloupe, peeled and cut in 1/2-inch dice; 1 tablespoon Campari; 3 tablespoons julienned basil leaves

Aldo Baldo Ristorante

7014 East Camelback Road
Scottsdale, Arizona

1990 – 1998

Aldo Baldo Ristorante began as a figment of Lee Cohn’s imagination.

As “concept restaurants” hit it really big in the 1980s and 1990s, Cohn, the founder of Scottsdale-based Big 4 Restaurant Group, Inc., was cooking up new ones like there was no tomorrow: The American Grill. Arizona Terrace. Bigoli. Bssghetti. Cafe 66. Gill’s Grill. Kowabunga! Leo Restaurant & Bar. Lunt Avenue Marble Club. Oscar Taylor Butcher, Bakery, and Bar. The Oyster Grill. Stanley’s Grille. Steamers Genuine Seafood. Tom’s Tavern.

And, Aldo Baldo Ristorante.

This 135-seat, full-service restaurant, sited just outside the Palm Court of Scottsdale Fashion Square (an upscale shopping center), opened in 1990 and was described by the company as an “Italian food concept centered on a fictitious futurist inventor.” The imaginary Signore Baldo, said to be from the 1920s, was further described as having created practically everything useful as well as a certain number of not-so-useful things. Think of it as Leonardo da Vinci meets Back to the Future.

Cohn’s design team installed lots of black wood, polished metal, multilevel customer seating. A length-of-the-restaurant exhibition kitchen was intended to represent order, and sculptures of “Baldo’s” failed inventions were intended to represent chaos. “We wanted our own identity,” Cohn explained. “We didn’t want to be stuck in Northern Italy or Southern Italy. So we took the theme from the early 1900s and the futurist movement in Italy and expanded it to include everything.”

The concept worked quite well for a while, but by 1996 Cohn had decided to restyle Aldo Baldo as an Italian seafood restaurant. Though it played to positive reviews, the restaurant’s days were numbered.

Aldo Baldo closed in 1998. Its space at Scottsdale Fashion Square was taken over by Kona Grill, which still occupies it today.

Here is the recipe for the utterly simple—and utterly delightful—Campari Melon Salad that was served at Aldo Baldo.