What was BLT Steak?
In 2008, Scottsdale’s resorts decided in near-unison that the future of dinner was a steakhouse with a famous name on it. The Camelback Inn’s version was BLT Steak, and for eight years it did the job with a basket of cheese bread.
BLT — Bistro Laurent Tourondel, after the French-born chef who built a small empire of BLT restaurants in New York — opened at the JW Marriott Camelback Inn in October 2008, in the space that had been the Chaparral Room since 1967. The Chaparral Room’s retirement was a genuine loss — tuxedoed captains, chateaubriand carved beside your chair — and it was folded into a $50 million resort renovation that wanted something livelier. BLT was the answer: a Manhattan steakhouse template transplanted whole, with Camelback Mountain in the windows instead of Park Avenue.
The template worked. Every table got the Gruyère popovers — enormous, hot, free, with a recipe card — and they became the most talked-about bread in the Valley. Phoenix New Times credited BLT with reinventing the steakhouse via sashimi appetizers and cheese popovers, which was the whole pitch: a raw bar and a French chef’s touches on top of dry-aged beef, a choice of sauces, and the big American sides the genre demands. It arrived the same year Bourbon Steak opened at the Princess and J&G Steakhouse took Mary Elaine’s rooftop at the Phoenician. In one season, the resort belt swapped formality for steak.
BLT served its last dinner on September 9, 2016. The resort replaced it within a month with Lincoln Restaurant & Bar 1936, which became Lincoln Steakhouse a year later. The honest verdict: BLT was a good licensed steakhouse, not a great restaurant — but the popovers earned every word written about them, and the room they were served in has the best mountain view on Lincoln Drive.
Dinner at BLT, in the right order
The popovers set the terms. They arrived before you ordered — towering, Gruyère-laced, steaming when torn — and they were free. First-timers made the classic error of eating two and then ordering as if they had not. Regulars ate one, asked for a second basket to take home, and ordered lighter than instinct suggested.
The menu was the New York menu. BLT’s format was consistent across its outposts: a raw bar and sashimi-style starters up front, then dry-aged steaks by cut and weight — porterhouse for two, ribeye, filet — with a choice of sauces (béarnaise, peppercorn, blue cheese) and a sides list that ran to creamed spinach, onion rings, and potato gratin. Tourondel’s French training showed in the sauces and the seafood; the beef was the American steakhouse standard, done properly and priced like Manhattan. Level four, without apology.
The room sold the view. The Chaparral Room’s old footprint faced Camelback Mountain, and BLT’s renovation kept the orientation. Sunset reservations were the ones to fight for, and in winter the patio fire pits made the outdoor tables the best seats on the Paradise Valley border. Logistics. Resort valet, a walk through the Inn’s 1936 adobe core, and a reservation that mattered from January through April, when the resort ran full and the Phoenix Open crowd spilled across Lincoln Drive.
The steak wave and what it swept away
BLT Steak was a symptom before it was a restaurant. Through the mid-2000s, the grand resort dining room — the Chaparral Room, Mary Elaine’s, the Golden Swan — collapsed as a category, and hotel operators nationwide reached for the same replacement: a licensed steakhouse with a celebrity chef’s name, because steak sells to conventioneers, families, and expense accounts alike, and a name on the door does the marketing. In Scottsdale that meant 2008 was the year of the steakhouse. Michael Mina’s Bourbon Steak at the Fairmont Princess, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s J&G at the Phoenician, and Tourondel’s BLT at the Camelback Inn all opened within months, and Scottsdale’s own Mastro’s empire was expanding in parallel. The city went from tuxedoed continental to dry-aged porterhouse in a single season.
BLT’s particular contribution was the idea that a steakhouse could be a little bit French and a little bit fun — sashimi to start, cheese popovers as a gift, a chef’s sauces instead of a bottle of A.1. It was a lighter touch than the Vegas-style steak palaces, and it suited the Camelback Inn, a resort whose whole identity is understated 1936 adobe rather than marble. For eight years it was the Inn’s dinner, and the popovers became local shorthand for the place.
The end was quiet and structural. In August 2016 the resort announced BLT would close September 9, with a new restaurant to follow by early October. No reason was given, and none was needed: licensed concepts run on contracts, and a JW Marriott flagship had reasons to want a brand it owned. Lincoln Restaurant & Bar 1936 opened on schedule as a desert-to-table bistro, then relaunched in November 2017 as Lincoln, a JW Steakhouse — Marriott’s own steak template, with a Josper charcoal oven in place of Tourondel’s name. The room had gone from Chaparral to BLT to Lincoln, from continental to celebrity to corporate, in under a decade.
Honest assessment: BLT Steak was never Scottsdale’s best steakhouse — Mastro’s and the Princess’s Bourbon Steak both outcooked it — and it was, at bottom, a franchise. But it managed the Camelback Inn’s hardest transition with grace, gave the Valley a bread it still talks about, and proved that the Chaparral Room’s window could survive the Chaparral Room. Lincoln inherited the view. Nobody inherited the popovers.