What was Acacia?
Acacia was the restaurant the Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North opened with in December 1999, the fine-dining room of a 210-casita resort built at 10600 E Crescent Moon Drive, in the boulder country below Pinnacle Peak where Troon North runs out of golf and Scottsdale runs out of streetlights. For eight years it was the most expensive dinner at the far end of the city. In January 2008 it was overhauled and renamed Talavera, which is the name on the door today.
It was built to impress. Phoenix New Times’ critic Carey Sweet, visiting five months after the opening in May 2000, described polished wood floors, wood rib-and-beam ceilings and a massive two-way fireplace, cushy leather chairs, a wine list of nearly 200 selections and a staff hired with at least four years’ experience, most of them on board since opening day. The chef was Daniel Mules, the pastry chef Anthony Patafio, and the menu promised “artistry for every palate: fresh and original interpretations of the tastes of the Southwest.” Dinner was nightly from 6 to 10 p.m., later on weekends, and entrées ran $28 to $32.
The food did not match the room at first. Sweet called it hit and miss: a $10 tortilla lobster soup and a $12 roasted squab were winners, a $28 blue nose snapper was mushy and a $31 veal tenderloin drowned in port. By 2002 the resort had won a Mobil Four-Star award, a new executive chef, Simon Purvis, had turned the kitchen toward a steakhouse, and Sweet came back to write “High five to the new, improved Four Seasons.” For the rest of its life Acacia was a resort steakhouse with Southwestern accents, and what the city loved about it was the patio: New Times gave it Best Twilight Drink in 2001 and Best View in 2003 and 2004 for the sunset behind Pinnacle Peak.
This guide also covers its sibling. Crescent Moon, the resort’s casual three-meal room, opened the same month, took its name from the Crescent Moon Ranch finishing school that once occupied the land, got a modern Mexican menu from Mel Mecinas in 2010, and was gutted for Proof in November 2012. The record on Crescent Moon is thinner than Acacia’s, so the two lost rooms share one guide. Our verdict: Acacia was a room and a view in search of a kitchen, and it found one just in time to be renamed.
What the menu and the room were
The 2000 menu. Sweet’s review is the most detailed record Acacia left. Appetizers were $10 to $14: a slow-cooked tuna loin ($14, tough), jumbo scallops with wild mushroom ravioli ($14), the roasted Californian squab ($12, “fabulous”) and the tortilla lobster soup ($10, “another winner”). Entrées were grilled Pacific blue nose snapper ($28), dry-rubbed double lamb chops ($32), a petite filet with foie gras ($30), organic veal tenderloin ($31) and a cinnamon-chile-rubbed pork loin ($29), the dish she liked best. Desserts were $8: a dark chocolate fondant called Pinnacle of Chocolate, a champagne soup with raspberries and a soufflé that collapsed. Pinot grigio was $5 a glass, an Acacia chardonnay (no relation) $15.50, and a 1995 Château Margaux $683.
The 2002 menu. Purvis kept the elegance and added what Sweet called honest favorites. Starters were ahi tartare with latkes, spiced venison chops and a red bell pepper soup. The center of the menu became 28-day dry-aged USDA Prime and Angus beef: an 18-ounce bone-in ribeye, an 8-ounce filet, a 12-ounce New York strip, double-cut lamb chops with a Vidalia onion glaze, a 16-ounce veal chop and Alaskan halibut, with creamed spinach and double-baked potatoes on the side. Dessert was crème brûlée or the signature soufflé with house ice cream. A guitarist played in the room. Sweet gave no prices but wrote that the resort was expensive and, for the first time, worth it.
The patio was the point. Inside, casitas and concrete blocked most of the desert view, and Sweet found the patio so dark the staff carried flashlights. The Best Of writers saw it differently: a semi-private Spanish-style balcony with votive candles, 40 acres of saguaro, ocotillo and sagebrush, and the sun going down behind Pinnacle Peak in rose and violet while you held a glass of champagne. Day visitors paid a few dollars to get onto the grounds, and the writers thought it worth it.
Crescent Moon. The casual room ran breakfast and lunch daily and, by 2010, dinner Wednesday through Sunday. The only menu we found is the November 2010 tasting Mecinas cooked for food bloggers: tempura avocado with sweet chili sauce, camarones al mojo with a huitlacoche empanada and mango-habanero sauce, Chilean sea bass with squash blossom, queso fresco and corn sauce, a strip loin with chorizo and scallop called mar y tierra, lime-scented sopapillas with dulce de leche, and a sangria made with Arizona Stronghold’s Nachise. See our best steakhouses list for where Talavera sits now.
The resort that outgrew its own restaurants
The Four Seasons arrived at the end of Scottsdale’s 1990s luxury boom, after the Phoenician, the Princess and the Boulders, and it chose the most remote site of all: the old Crescent Moon Ranch beside the Troon North courses, on land that had been Hohokam before it was a Kellogg family finishing school. Hill Glazier Architects designed the 210 rooms. Acacia and Crescent Moon were the resort’s two answers to dinner, one formal and one not, and the formal one carried the brand’s reputation. That is why Sweet’s first review mattered: a Four Seasons with a critic who would not come back as a paying customer was a problem, and the resort fixed it within two years with a Mobil Four-Star award, a new chef and a steakhouse menu.
The steakhouse turn was the pattern of the decade. Through the 2000s the Valley’s resorts replaced their haute dining rooms with beef: the Phoenician closed Mary Elaine’s in 2008, the Hyatt retired the Golden Swan, the Fairmont brought in Bourbon Steak. Acacia got there early, in 2002, and never went back; by the 2004 Best View award the food was described in one line, “steak house cuisine,” and the view got the paragraph.
Then the resort renovated everything. In July 2007 work began on all 210 rooms, and in November 2007 New Times reported that Acacia would be overhauled and renamed Talavera, with dramatic colors evoking a Sonoran desert in bloom, tableside presentations, a private dining room, a private wine cellar with a communal table, and, next door, a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired lounge called Onyx. Talavera opened in the last week of January 2008 under Mel Mecinas, a Oaxacan-born chef whose opening menu ran from Maine lobster parfait to Arizona grass-fed tenderloin with chorizo bread pudding. The room did not close so much as change its name, which is why Acacia has no closing date: the last Acacia dinner was simply the one before the renovation.
Crescent Moon outlived it by four years and then went the same way. Mecinas gave it a modern Mexican menu in 2010, and in 2012 the resort gutted the room and reopened it in November as Proof, an American canteen with a railroad track through the floor and a soda fountain. New Times’ first taste found the food “barely notable,” but the concept held. The two lost names survive only in the address, Crescent Moon Drive, and in the Best Of archives.
Honest assessment: Acacia was never a great restaurant, and the record is honest about that. It was an expensive, beautiful room whose kitchen took two years to earn its rating and then settled for being a steakhouse with the best patio in north Scottsdale. Crescent Moon left even less behind, a street name and one bloggers’ dinner. What they prove is that the Four Seasons’ real asset was the view, and every restaurant the resort has run since, Talavera and Proof included, has been built to sell it.