What was arboleda?
arboleda, spelled in lower case by its owners, was the Mediterranean restaurant that Björn Kock and brothers Mitchell and Steven Rosenthal opened in early 2023 at 15345 N Scottsdale Road, Suite K1-100, in the building at the northeast end of Scottsdale Quarter that had been a Kona Grill. The three were Bay Area restaurateurs with more than thirty years in the trade, it was their first project in Arizona, and Kock told the press they meant it to be their only location anywhere. The name, he said, means “grove of trees” in Spanish, and the room was built to match: a 14-foot olive tree at the center, a deep gray barrel-vaulted ceiling, floor-to-ceiling windows that opened onto the patio, all by designer Mark Zeff, with seating for 240.
The chef was Evan Gotanda, who had worked with the three founders for eight years and before that with Ludo Lefebvre at Bastide, the Patina Group and Celestino Drago in Los Angeles. His menu was the coast of the Mediterranean read clockwise, Spain to Morocco, with Arizona produce where it fit: a whipped foie gras cone, charred Portuguese octopus, gambas pil pil with red royal shrimp, Iberico pork pluma, a butternut squash ravioli, and the dish the room was known for, a 32-ounce Flannery 28-day aged ribeye called “el Jorge,” for two. The bar poured a Sueño of Niepoort white port, Malfy rosa gin, juniper and Fever-Tree Mediterranean tonic, and the list ran to nearly thirty wines by the glass from the Mediterranean, South America and California.
It served dinner nightly from 5, a weekday happy hour from 3 to 5, and from April 8, 2023, a weekend brunch, and it was the most ambitious new room in the Kierland and Quarter district that year. AZ Big Media called it a “Mediterranean masterpiece” that October.
Nineteen months after it opened it was gone. arboleda stopped taking reservations and closed in October 2024, and the owners gave no reason that reached print. Our verdict: a beautiful, expensive room that opened with every advantage except the one the Quarter rewards, which is a reason to come back on a weeknight.
What the menu and the room were
The room first. arboleda was the rare Scottsdale restaurant where the design was the most memorable dish. Mark Zeff gave the old Kona Grill box an organic, open plan under a vaulted ceiling painted deep gray, put the olive tree where every table could see it, and opened the whole long wall to the patio so that the indoor and outdoor rooms read as one. Kock’s stated goal was that guests be “engrossed in the whole experience, not just what is on their plate.” At 240 seats it was large for fine dining, roughly the size of the Quarter’s steakhouses, and it needed to fill.
The food. Mitchell Rosenthal described the aim as “fresh, product-focused food,” and the published menu bears that out. Starters were the whipped foie gras cone, the charred Portuguese octopus, gambas pil pil, hamachi and garlic chili shrimp; pasta was a butternut squash ravioli; the mains were the Iberico pluma (the loin-end cut the trade calls the wagyu of pork), a 10-ounce prime filet and the 32-ounce “el Jorge” ribeye from Flannery. The press printed no prices, and the restaurant’s own site never did; the cuts and the sourcing put it at the top of the Quarter’s range, with Dominick’s rather than True Food.
The drinks. The Sueño was the signature, and the rest of the opening list was the Palomita Latina, the Up-Beet and the Sure Thing. Nearly thirty wines by the glass was the real argument for the bar, and the weekday happy hour, 3 to 5 p.m., discounted cocktails, beer, wine and small bites in a room that was otherwise priced for occasions.
Hours and the week. Dinner was Sunday through Thursday 5 to 9 and Friday and Saturday 5 to 10, by the website; brunch ran Saturdays and Sundays 11 to 3 from April 2023; lunch was promised for mid-April 2023, and we found no record of whether it lasted. Reservations were on OpenTable. The website still shows these hours and a 2023 copyright, which is why people still call the number.
What regulars did. The crowd the room drew, from the reviews that survive on the listing sites, was the district’s own: Kierland and Quarter residents on anniversaries, the hotel guests from the Westin Kierland a few blocks west, and a happy-hour crowd that came for the wines by the glass and the patio and left before the dining room filled. The weeknight dining room, by the same accounts, often did not.
Nineteen months in the old Kona Grill
The building arboleda took had a lineage. Kona Grill, the Scottsdale-born chain whose original Fashion Square store opened in 1998, put a location at the Quarter on the corner of Scottsdale Road and the Greenway-Hayden Loop, and it was that store’s closing that freed the space. In fall 2022 What Now Phoenix reported a liquor-license filing from the new owners, “inspired Mediterranean cuisine coming soon,” with a December target. Like every Quarter opening, it ran late: Mouth by Southwest reported the restaurant open on February 28, 2023, Experience Scottsdale’s release and AZ Big Media’s profile followed on April 13, and some coverage gave April 4 as the formal opening. Brunch began April 8.
What the owners brought was experience and a plan to stay small. Kock and the Rosenthals had run Bay Area restaurants for three decades (the Arizona press never named them), had worked with Gotanda for eight years, and said arboleda would be their only location. That is the opposite of the Quarter’s usual tenant, a brand with a dozen rooms, and for a season it looked like the better bet: AZ Big Media’s October 2023 review was a rave, and the happy hour filled the patio.
The closing came without a press release. Sometime in the early fall of 2024 the restaurant stopped taking reservations, and on October 24, 2024, Mouth by Southwest reported that it had closed after nineteen months, that no reason had been given, and that The Restaurant Brokers were marketing the 240-seat space. Phoenix New Times, in a roundup of closed Valley restaurants, wrote that it “quietly stopped taking reservations and closed after a year and a half.” We found no statement from the owners, no reported dispute with the landlord and no bankruptcy filing, which usually means the plainest explanation: the numbers did not work.
The context helps. arboleda opened into a Quarter that was about to turn over at the top. etta, in the building across the center, was sold and remodeled in the summer of 2024 and became The Guest House in January 2026; the landlord announced a “major facelift” and new tenants for the center’s fifteenth anniversary; Jeni’s arrived and Sweetgreen was announced. A 240-seat independent with a Michelin-trained chef and no second location had the least margin of anyone on the property, and the 2020s have not been kind to that model anywhere in the city. As of October 2026 the Quarter’s own directory lists no tenant for the building, and the arboleda website, copyright 2023, still invites you to book.
Honest assessment: arboleda was the best-looking restaurant the Quarter has had and the shortest-lived of its ambitious ones, and those two facts are related. The food, by every published account, was very good; the room was built for a crowd that comes three nights a week, and the district supplies that crowd for steakhouses and DJ rooms, not for pluma and white-port cocktails. It deserved longer. It sits in the lost column next to the Kona Grill chain’s original Fashion Square store, which at least got twenty-five years.