What was Cask 63?
Cask 63 American Eatery & Wine Bar was the restaurant that tried to follow Sam Fox at the front door of The Shops at Gainey Village, and lasted sixteen months. It opened in January 2012 at 8877 N Scottsdale Road, at the Scottsdale Road entrance to the center by Doubletree Ranch Road, in the room where Bloom, Fox Restaurant Concepts’ first Valley restaurant, had served its last dinner on November 26, 2011.
The partners came from the steak-and-seafood world. Jerry Tingle had been a general manager at Eddie V’s Prime Seafood and Wildfish Seafood Grille; chef Brian Feirstein had been executive chef for Eddie V’s and, most recently, The Capital Grille. Fox had sold Bloom’s lease, furnishings and equipment to a Tempe company, Highgrove Grill LLC, which announced an American eatery and wine bar for the space, and Cask 63 was it.
The name was a piece of arithmetic. It takes 31.5 gallons to fill a wine cask, Tingle told Arizona Foothills, “a generous amount that invites sharing,” and the partners doubled it as “a toast to us, two business partners who share the same vision.” The room was 6,500 square feet, with plush bar and lobby areas, an extended patio, wood finishes accented in steel blue, green and silver, and a custom stainless steel wine barrel at the entrance. Feirstein’s seasonal New American menu ran at lunch and dinner.
It was for Gainey Ranch and McCormick Ranch residents, nearby resort guests and the Doubletree Ranch offices. It closed in May 2013, when the landlord took the premises back for lease defaults. Our verdict: a sensible concept from experienced people that inherited a beloved predecessor’s room and never found the money to outlast it.
What the menu and the room were
The menu. The dishes announced before the opening and reported at the closing describe a steakhouse chef cooking lighter: a cornmeal oyster po-boy, goat cheese tortelli, a New York strip pepper steak, a sea bass of the day, a taco of the day, a pear salad and a crème brûlée trio. The menu was meant to change with the seasons around fresh local ingredients. The record we found gives no prices, and no critic’s full review of the restaurant turned up in our search.
The wine. The concept was in the name, an American eatery built around a wine bar, and the plush bar and lobby were the parts of the room the press singled out. Bloom had trained the neighborhood to drink by the glass at this address; its list had run to about 70 wines by the glass. What Cask 63 poured, and at what price, is not on the record.
The room. The suite is big, about 6,500 square feet by the measure New Times used for both Cask 63 and its successor, and it sits at the most visible spot in the center, the first building inside the Scottsdale Road entrance. Inside Bloom’s old footprint, the partners planned an expanded outdoor dining area and new finishes in wood with steel blue, green and silver accents.
How it ended. On a Monday in mid-May 2013, the doors stayed shut. New Times found a sign thanking customers for their patronage and, beside it, a memo from Main Street Real Estate Advisors stating that because of various defaults under the lease, the landlord had taken possession of the premises. It was a hard month for the corridor: the paper’s May closings list also included Pomo Pizzeria, which reopened inside Gainey Village in June, X-Tapa Joe’s, Davanti Enoteca and Indulge Burgers & More.
Three restaurants and a gut remodel in one suite
The suite at the front of Gainey Village has been a test of how hard it is to replace a restaurant people liked. Bloom opened there in 2001, ran a decade, and was sold off in 2011 as Fox concentrated on a dozen newer concepts. Cask 63 took over a room with a built-in clientele and an expensive lease, and the landlord’s memo is the only account of how the arithmetic went. The partners never explained in print.
Feirstein landed quickly. By November 2013, New Times reported, he was heading the kitchen at the coming Salty Señorita in Old Town. The same story announced the next tenant, Naya Mediterranean Cuisine, with a stated goal of “educating young people in the joys of real food” and a mezze menu of moussaka, Lebanese and Armenian sausage, fried kebbeh and, on weekends, kebbe nayeh, a Mediterranean steak tartare, plus lamb chops with Israeli couscous, kebabs and shish taouk. It hoped to open by the third week of November, with Pomo, Cuttlefish Ocean Kitchen and Notorious Burgers as neighbors. The record we found does not say when Naya closed.
The resolution took years. Lure Fish House, the Camarillo seafood chain of David and Patricia Cortina, leased the suite in 2018, gut-remodeled it, and opened on November 6, 2020; the record of that lease counts the room as previously Bloom, Cask 63 and Naya. Our guide to Lure Fish House covers the restaurant there now, which has outlasted Cask 63 several times over.
Honest assessment: Cask 63 left almost no trace beyond two closing notices and a pre-opening press release, and it would be dishonest to pretend we know whether the food was good. What the record shows is a familiar Scottsdale pattern from the early 2010s: capable people from big-company steakhouses going out on their own in a premium suite, with a concept that was sound and a lease that was not. The room needed a chain with a supply truck behind it, and eventually it got one.