Why he matters
Scottsdale’s restaurant history remembers its spectacles: the necktie-snipping steakhouse, the costumed waiters, the celebrity saloon. Dale Anderson ran the other kind of place, the one where the same families ate every week for thirty years. The Other Place on Lincoln Drive and The Quilted Bear on Scottsdale Road were dependable rather than famous, and both lasted decades.
He was also one of the town’s civic regulars. Anderson served as president of the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce, the Scottsdale Rotary Club, the Arizona Restaurant Association and the Scottsdale Charros, and the Boy Scouts named him Scottsdale’s Distinguished Citizen for 1987.
Where to find his mark today
The Quilted Bear. Gone since 2009, but the corner is still a restaurant: Fat Ox now occupies the space.
The Other Place. It stood at the front of the Smoke Tree Resort on Lincoln Drive, a Paradise Valley dinner habit for about three decades.
Lulu Belle. The Main Street saloon in Old Town where he learned the trade as a manager.
The restaurant named by its customers
Anderson’s first restaurant under his own name, Dale Anderson’s, stood at First Avenue and Marshall Way downtown and was on postcards by the 1960s. When he opened a second place in 1969, at the Smoke Tree Resort on Lincoln Drive, his regulars were already calling it “the other place,” and he made the nickname the name. It served prime rib to Paradise Valley neighbors and resort guests until the 1990s.
The Quilted Bear followed in 1974 near the Lincoln Drive corner of Scottsdale Road: stained glass, a big salad bar, and informal fashion shows at lunch. It ran for 35 years without changing much, which was the point. The 1970s chapter covers the town that ate there.
The civic side
Anderson treated the restaurant business as a way into the town’s public life. He led the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club, served as president of the Arizona Restaurant Association, and was president of the Scottsdale Charros. The Boy Scouts named him Scottsdale’s Distinguished Citizen for 1987, the Chamber put him in its History Hall of Fame in 1996, and he was inducted into the Phoenix Foodies Hall of Fame.
The full story
Dale Anderson was born in Minnesota on August 25, 1923, grew up in St. James, and attended Gustavus Adolphus College. He joined the Marine Corps in 1943, saw action in the Pacific, and was discharged in 1946. In 1947 he moved to Arizona and went into hospitality as the postwar 1940s brought winter visitors back to the Valley.
The first job his obituary names is manager of Lulu Belle, the Main Street saloon that opened in 1953 and drew celebrities through the 1950s. From there he went on to open Dale Anderson’s downtown, then The Other Place in 1969 and The Quilted Bear in 1974. His obituary lists The Anderson House among his restaurants too, and a group that reached into California.
Anderson also invested in the town’s growth north. In 1977 and 1978 he bought ten acres of relocated Stillman ranch land on Scottsdale Road, just north of the Registry Resort, from Guy Stillman, and built the Scottsdale Centre, a complex of restaurant and office space. Alongside the restaurants ran a long civic résumé: president of the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, the Arizona Restaurant Association and the Charros, the service club whose name is on the carousel at McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park. The Chamber inducted him into its History Hall of Fame in 1996.
Dale Anderson died on February 6, 2009, at 85. The Quilted Bear closed by August, ending a 35-year run in the same recession that took the Pink Pony. Anderson belongs to the boomtown era generation that built Scottsdale’s everyday dining, rooms that locals kept going back to for decades.