What it is
Durant’s is a steakhouse on Central Avenue in midtown Phoenix that opened in 1950 and has declined, for seventy-five years, to become anything else. The room is red: red leather booths, red flocked wallpaper, red carpet, a dark wood bar under low light, framed photographs of the politicians, ballplayers and actors who have eaten here. The menu is a classic American steakhouse menu, hand-cut steaks, prime rib, shrimp cocktail, a baked potato, a martini made properly, and a wine list much longer than you expect. Jack Durant, who opened it, had been a minor-league ballplayer and a Las Vegas pit boss, and the room still has something of both.
The thing everyone tells you about is the door. Regulars park in the lot behind the building and come in through the kitchen, walking a red floor mat past the broiler line and the dish pit to the host stand. It began as a shortcut from the lot and became the way you prove you have been before. There is a front door on Central. Nobody who knows uses it.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale is a steakhouse town, and the steakhouse note ranks a dozen of them, several of which cook a better piece of beef than Durant’s does on a given night. None of them is seventy-five years old. Mastro’s City Hall and its siblings are the Scottsdale version of this idea, and they are very good at it, but they were built to look like a place with history; this is the place. A visitor who wants to eat one dinner in old Phoenix eats it here.
The practical version
Twenty-two minutes from Old Town, Camelback or Indian School west to Central, south to Virginia, lot in the back. Dinner nightly from 4; lunch on Fridays only. Reserve on weekends and in high season. The check is a full level four for two with a martini, a steak and a bottle; the shrimp cocktail is the one starter you need. Dress is whatever you like, but you will feel better in a jacket.
When to go
A weeknight in high season, January through April, when the room is full of people who live here and the booths turn at a civilized pace. Friday lunch is the other Durant’s, the midtown business crowd’s standing appointment, and the only lunch the restaurant serves; if you want to see what Central Avenue looked like when it ran Arizona, go at noon on a Friday. Summer is quiet and the room is dark and cold, which is its own argument.
Holidays and the big downtown weekends fill it; book ahead for anything near the Phoenix Open, spring training weekends or the Final Four kind of event.
What to order
- A martini. The bar has been making them since 1950 and they are the size they used to be.
- Shrimp cocktail. Big, cold, horseradish in the sauce. The appetizer this room was built for.
- Prime rib on a Friday or Saturday, when it has been roasting all afternoon, or a hand-cut steak otherwise; the New York strip and the bone-in cuts are what the regulars order.
- A baked potato and nothing clever on the side.
- Something from the wine list, which runs deeper into California cabernet than the room suggests, with help from a server who has worked here longer than most Scottsdale restaurants have existed.
Dessert exists; the bar is the better finish.
The room
Ask for a booth in the bar room rather than the main dining room. The bar room is darker, the photographs are closer, and the bartenders have been here long enough to remember your drink by the second visit. Look at the walls: governors, senators, a few presidents passing through, and the ballplayers and fighters Jack Durant counted as friends.
Making a night of it
The Heard Museum is a mile south and closes at 4; an afternoon there, then Durant’s at 5:30 when the room opens, is a complete midtown evening. Lux Central, the coffeehouse and bar at Central and Campbell, is a mile and a half north for a nightcap, and the Phoenix Art Museum is open until 8 on Wednesdays and Fridays if you want the order reversed.
The story
Jack Durant arrived in Phoenix with a résumé that explained the restaurant: a minor-league ballplayer, a pit boss in Las Vegas, a man who knew how a room should be lit and how a regular should be treated. He opened Durant’s on Central Avenue in 1950, when Central was becoming the city’s office street and midtown Phoenix was the place to be seen, and he ran it as a club that happened to serve the public. The booths filled with the people who ran the state: legislators, bankers, lawyers, the newspaper men from the Republic, visiting ballplayers in spring, actors from the Westerns being shot in the desert. Durant himself held court at the bar. The stories about him, the gambling, the temper, the generosity, the unexplained money, are a genre of Phoenix folklore and some of them are true.
He died in 1987 and the restaurant did what very few founder’s rooms manage: it kept going without changing. The wallpaper stayed red. The kitchen door stayed open. The Friday lunch stayed on the calendar. The menu added a few things and dropped nothing that mattered. Central Avenue around it rose into towers and emptied and refilled, and the one-story red building with the parking lot in back went on serving prime rib. Other owners have held it since; the room has not noticed.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s steakhouse tradition came in two waves, and Durant’s predates both. The cowboy steakhouses of the 1950s and 1960s, Pinnacle Peak Patio and Reata Pass out in the desert, were the tourist’s version, mesquite and tie-cutting and a view. The modern wave began when the Mastro family opened the original Mastro’s in Scottsdale in 1999 and made the dark-wood, big-cut, big-check steakhouse the city’s signature restaurant form, a form that owes more to rooms like Durant’s than to anything in Scottsdale’s own past. The Scottsdale steakhouses are the children; this is the parent.
Getting there
From Old Town, Camelback Road or Indian School Road west to Central Avenue, then south a few blocks to Virginia; the restaurant is on the west side of Central and the parking lot is behind it, reached from Virginia. Twenty-two minutes with no traffic, more at rush hour on Camelback. The Valley Metro light rail stops at Central and Thomas, three blocks south, which makes this a rideshare-or-train dinner if the martini count is going to be two; our getting around note covers both.