Why he matters
Live-fire cooking is everywhere now. In 1997 it was Robert McGrath’s idea of what Scottsdale should eat. At Roaring Fork, on Scottsdale Road, he took the cowboy steakhouse the town had always had and put a serious kitchen behind it: wood fire, green chile, game and campfire flavors, cooked by a chef who had trained in France and run Four Seasons kitchens. He gave it a name, American Western, and in 2001 the James Beard Foundation named him Best Chef: Southwest, one of five Scottsdale chefs to win it.
His influence spread through his cooks as much as his restaurant. Patrick Boll, who later ran Spotted Donkey Cantina II, worked under him for 15 years, and Doug Robson of Gallo Blanco came up in his kitchen.
Where to find his mark today
Roaring Fork. Still open at 4800 N Scottsdale Road, still built on his menu, though he sold out in the mid-2000s.
The James Beard roll. His 2001 award is part of the case that Scottsdale’s restaurant record is better than its reputation.
Roaring Fork and after
McGrath was born in Kentucky, raised in Texas, and headed for medicine until a professor talked him out of it. He trained in France, was chef de cuisine at the Four Seasons in Austin and executive chef at the Four Seasons in Houston, owned Sierra Grill in Houston and Brio Vista in Austin, and cooked at the Phoenician before opening Roaring Fork in 1997. In 2003 he opened a second Roaring Fork in Austin with Larry Foles and Guy Villavaso, who also ran Z’Tejas in Scottsdale, and for a while split his time between the two cities.
He sold his Roaring Fork interests around 2006, and the next few years were harder. A revamped Pischke’s on First Street was short-lived; a barbecue place called First Street Ice House and a fine-dining room called REM never opened. In 2010 he took over the kitchen at Renegade Canteen on Shea Boulevard without putting in his own money. He left in the fall of 2011 after what the Arizona Republic described as a dispute with the owners, saying he had been pushed to lower the quality of the food, which they disputed. He moved to Spotted Donkey Cantina as executive chef that October and was gone in under three months. In September 2012 Market Street Kitchen opened at DC Ranch with McGrath shaping the concept.
The full story
For many Valley viewers McGrath is the host of Check, Please! Arizona, the Arizona PBS show on Eight that debuted in January 2011, in which three ordinary diners review each other’s favorite restaurants. He led the roundtable for six seasons, and in September 2016 Arizona PBS announced Mark Tarbell as his successor for the season that began in January 2017.
Roaring Fork outlasted his ownership. As of October 2026 the Scottsdale restaurant and two Austin locations, downtown on Congress Avenue and at Stonelake, carry the credit of Guy and Larry Restaurants, an Austin group established in 1989; Foles and Villavaso, his Austin partners, are presumably the Larry and Guy of the name, though the group’s site does not spell it out. The restaurant’s own site calls Scottsdale “our original” location, and the menu still runs on the ideas he wrote down in American Western Cooking: From the Roaring Fork, later reissued with recipes from Renegade Canteen.
The record on McGrath gets thin after the mid-2010s, and this page does not guess. It found no reliable reporting on a restaurant role after Market Street Kitchen, which its owners rebranded in 2018, and none of the sources it checked give his birth year. The resort-metropolis era gave Scottsdale its first nationally decorated chefs; he was the one who cooked like the place was the West.