Many craft beer bars carry local just to carry local. The Wandering Tortoise is different, curating a selection with a rigor that shows that the owners, Shay Gau and Justin Evans, have a more complete understanding of beer. The Tortoise's 22 taps flow with some of the best and rarest offerings from top Arizona breweries, including Wren House, Arizona Wilderness, and Pueblo Vida. But the owners go further, procuring treasured kegs and cans from intriguing far-off breweries like Omnipollo (Sweden) and Melvin Brewing (Wyoming). A stunning selection of to-go bottles and cans awaits you as well. The Tortoise also does cider, mead, and rollicking events.

Josh and Jason Duren usually keep about 15 ciders flowing in their Mesa taproom. They also have cider aging in barrels at one end of the large space, as well as icy cider spinning in a slushy machine. Where most cideries are content with apple-flavored beverages, the Durens shift into new gears. They have apple ciders flavored with mango, black tea, and peach; with bacon and maple syrup; with cascara and pea flowers that turn the cider deeply violet and funky. Not every cider is great, but, thanks to the sheer creativity, every visit to the Cider Corps taproom is.

One of the great jolts to our food scene in recent memory has been the rise of Arizona Sake. Since 2017, Atsuo Sakurai, a native of Yokohama, Japan, has brewed incandescent sake in his Holbrook garage. He makes Junmai ginjo, an old-school sake that allows only rice, water, yeast, and koji (a kind of fungus) in production. Some of the town's most lauded chefs revere Arizona Sake, which changes batch to batch, week to week. Sakurai doesn't pasteurize or filter. He does everything the hard way. What he gets in the end is a beautifully floral sake with distinct Arizona spirit.

It's hard to know where to point the camera to get the perfect shot at Pop 'N Tea. Do you focus on the dessert shop's trademark diamond-shaped gelato and sorbet bars chilling behind the glass, employees standing by to add chocolate drizzle and the toppings of your choice? Or do you pose in front of the restaurant's grass-covered wall, where a bright pink sign reads, "Today Was a Good Day"? (Perhaps an homage to Ice Cube?) When it comes to the restaurants occupying My Florist Plaza on McDowell Road, Pop 'N Tea is easily the hippest. The concept for the store originated with a trio of friends from Southern California. It's not just geometric bars, either: Pop 'N Tea also serves boba with your choice of milk, white, or green teas, plus a selection of smoothies and slushies. On a typical night, you can expect to find a cool crowd lounging inside — just be prepared to wait your turn before you grab your phone and dart in front of the neon wall.

Stunning food optics are on nightly display at this upscale restaurant at Mountain Shadows Resort. "Food is a composition," executive chef Charles Wiley said last fall. "Your eye moves around the plate like a painting." Wiley's plating style veers classic. More of the visual fireworks here come from the aesthetics of Alfred Muro, chef de cuisine. Hearth '61's plates of food have explosive color. They have texture and smoothness and three-dimensionality. They are done up without being overdone. Salads snake through canyons of jagged rice crisps, and scallops stud orange seas of romesco. And yes, taste matches appearance.

They say you eat with your eyes first, which is to say that merely seeing food that looks appealing can make you hungry. Which might explain why we always leave Ruze Cake House with a pile of treats. The Old Town Scottsdale bakery continues to make some of the loveliest goodies in town. On any given day, you might find smooth, perfectly round macarons topped with chocolate and nuts, adorned with icing, or painted with a design; flawlessly decorated cookies (the bakery's Instagram account reveals themes like floral, stars and stripes, and marbled with gold accents); and eye-popping cakes for special occasions. Ruze recently began offering a limited brunch menu, and it's no surprise they do beautiful meals just as well as they do gorgeous desserts. And don't worry: When it's time to dig in, everything we've encountered has tasted just as good as it looks.