What was Canal?
Canal was the restaurant that made SouthBridge famous before it was finished. Developer Fred Unger opened it on October 16, 2007, on the second floor of his new complex at 7144 E Stetson Drive, on the south bank of the Arizona Canal in Old Town, facing the Scottsdale Waterfront across the water. It was the second of the seven restaurants Unger’s development had promised, after the sandwich shop Foodbar, and the first one built to be seen, by diners and by the people walking the canal bridge from the Waterfront.
It was a fashion restaurant in the literal sense. The plans called for 30 feet of high-definition projection screens along a runway; the finished room had a translucent, color-shifting catwalk swerving through the middle of the dining room, glossy images of haute couture, and a DJ booth in the corner playing high-decibel dance tracks. The back of the restaurant opened directly into The Mix, a warren of high-end boutiques. Its critic, Phoenix New Times’ Michele Laudig, described tables full of tipsy cougars in fur and Manolos and advised readers to bring a sense of humor.
The kitchen was the surprise. Chef Justin Beckett, a former sous chef at Roy’s, cooked a globetrotting menu of Asian- and Latin-inspired plates and sophisticated American food, and his 30 Dollar Sandwich, a lobster tail sandwich with chanterelles and Boursin cheese, became the most discussed dish in the city two months before Canal opened.
Canal lasted about two years. By December 2008 it was empty at the height of the holiday season, and it closed in 2009, when Beckett left to build Beckett’s Table. Our verdict: Canal was the purest expression of pre-recession Scottsdale dining, a runway with a kitchen attached, and the kitchen was better than the runway deserved.
What the menu and the catwalk were
Order around the sandwich. The 30 Dollar Sandwich was the headline: lobster tail with chanterelles and creamy Boursin, embellished with watercress and avocado by opening week. Laudig enjoyed it and was put over the edge only by the tomato bisque that came with it, a tiny, shallow dish of soup, enough for a few dips. The sandwich list also had a grilled cheese of aged cheddar, fontina and Manchego with crisp pancetta and tomato bisque, and a Canal chop salad of romaine and butter lettuces with dried cherries, aged cheddar and pine nuts.
The small plates were the best of it. There were no appetizers on the menu, only a dozen salads and small plates. Sweet corn cakes with avocado salad, cotija, arugula and red pepper purée were soft and mashed-potatoey inside; roasted meatballs came slathered in mushroom gravy with arugula and fennel; and duck confit tostadas, grilled artichoke with Manchego, chicken samosas, slender Canal crab rolls and an ahi three ways (peppercorn-seared, sashimi with avocado and mango, and poke) filled out the list.
The mains were dinner-party food. Grilled Sonoma Valley lamb chops with minted couscous, spiced tomato jelly and herb jus, and braised pork belly with fennel-leek sauté, stone fruit chutney and a Maui onion black pepper reduction were the entrées New Times flagged at opening. Canal was pricey, the critic wrote, but not everything broke the bank: eight different salads could serve as entrées, from a niçoise with grilled ahi to a Tuscan bread salad with fresh mozzarella.
Save room for dessert. The s’mores crème brûlée, with a graham cracker crust, milk chocolate crème and a homemade marshmallow garnished with a flame-shaped cracker, was completely over the top, and Laudig said food like that just made her smile.
Take the room as a joke. The restaurant sometimes seemed to be in on it: one night it screened Zoolander beside the model photographs, and a busboy’s T-shirt read Paparazzi. A later critic remembered the gratuitous fashion shows on the raised catwalk. Lunch ran from October 30, 2007; the press we found does not record Canal’s hours or reservation policy.
The runway on Stetson Drive and the crash that ended it
Canal was conceived at the peak. In April 2007 New Times announced that SouthBridge, Unger’s condo, shopping and dining complex on Stetson Drive, would hold seven high-profile restaurants, and Unger, the developer behind Lon’s at the Hermosa and T. Cook’s at the Royal Palms, set out to open several himself. Foodbar came first in the spring; Canal followed in October; The Estate House opened next door in February 2008; and Foodbar was turned into Metro Brasserie that fall. On the same stretch of Stetson, Peter Kasperski’s Cowboy Ciao and Sea Saw had already made the street a destination.
The timing could not have been worse. In December 2008, New Times’ anonymous waiter-columnist walked SouthBridge at seven on a holiday-season evening and found Canal in virtual dry dock: a cordial hostess, an empty dining room and a bartender too sullen and bored to be good company. He compared the Waterfront’s restaurant row to the Scottsdale Galleria. In January 2010, New Times’ year-end roll call listed Canal among the Valley’s 2009 closings, a year in which more than twice as many restaurants closed as the hundred-plus that opened.
The space did not sit empty. The same roll call listed a new restaurant called Acua among 2009’s openings, and when New Times reviewed The Herb Box in March 2011, it named Canal and its successor, spelled Aqua, among the SouthBridge restaurants that had turned over in the development’s first three years. Beckett’s career went the other way. A 2010 review of his next restaurant called Canal downtown Scottsdale’s pre-Great Recession shrine to restaurant frivolity and said that the shrine had become a tomb, but not because of the food, which it credited with keeping Canal afloat longer than expected. Beckett’s Table opened in Arcadia in October 2010.
What the record does not say is the month Canal closed, how many seats it had, or what became of Acua.
Honest assessment: Canal was a period piece, a room designed around projection screens and a catwalk in the last months when Scottsdale believed in that sort of thing, and it would be a footnote except that its chef was very good. It belongs in the story of the 2000s as the moment SouthBridge was at its most glamorous, and in the story of Valley dining as the place Justin Beckett learned what he wanted to cook next.