What was Coyote Cafe?
Coyote Cafe was the restaurant that brought the 1980s Southwestern moment to the Civic Center Mall, and for about five years it was one of the best reasons to eat downtown.
Moe and Laurie Vacha opened it on November 11, 1986, at 7373 E Scottsdale Mall, a storefront on the lawn of the Scottsdale Civic Center, in the same building where the Tuli family’s Jewel of the Crown opened that year. The timing mattered. Phoenix New Times later dated the arrival of Southwestern cuisine in the Valley to 1986, when Vincent Guerithault opened his restaurant on Camelback Road, and suddenly, in the paper’s phrase, blue corn chips and mango salsa were everywhere. In its 1989 list of the decade’s important openings, the paper called Coyote Cafe the spiritual heir to Steven Restaurant & Cafe, the 1981 Scottsdale room that had put hamburgers and Southwestern-slanted haute cuisine on one menu.
It was a cafe in the Old Town sense: lunch and dinner most of the week, a late start on Sundays, tables a short walk from the arts center, and a menu with creative daily additions on top of the standards. By New Times’ account the flair in the kitchen was Laurie Vacha’s. When the couple divorced in 1991 she left to become executive chef of the Big Four restaurant group, and the paper’s November review was blunt: the menu had gone fixed, it read like every other trendy grill’s, and “the charisma’s kaput.”
The cafe did not last much longer. By December 1993 Laguna Cafe had moved into “the old Coyote Cafe spot,” the first of a run of tenants that made the storefront the most notorious address on the mall.
Our verdict: Coyote Cafe was a genuinely loved neighborhood room for its first five years, and its decline is the clearest local example of a restaurant that was, in the end, one cook.
What the menu and the room were
Southwestern, changing daily. The record of what Coyote Cafe served in its prime is thin. The press we found describes the early menu only as a list of creative daily additions with a true flair for Southwestern cooking, and it does not name dishes or prices from those years. What it praised was the habit of surprise: a cafe, the 1991 review said, that had consistently surprised and delighted the taste buds.
The 1991 menu is the one on the record. It is also the one New Times disliked. Southwestern won tons came stuffed with lentils and served with a spicy ranch-style dipping sauce, the only part the critic enjoyed. A three-pepper shrimp quesadilla had slightly more oomph. A fresh mozzarella-and-tomato sandwich on a grilled French-bread roll, with basil-pesto mayonnaise, came with steak fries and cantaloupe. Salmon with tomatillo sauce and snow peas was the low point. Dessert rescued the night: apple cobbler with homemade cinnamon ice cream and a homemade grapefruit-tequila sorbet.
The hours fit the mall. The 1991 listing had Coyote Cafe open for dinner only on Monday, 5 to 10 p.m.; for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Friday and Saturday until 11; and on Sunday from 2 to 9 p.m. The phone was 947-7081. That made it an easy dinner before a show at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts across the lawn.
The setting did half the work. New Times’ critics spent the 1990s calling this corner one of the loveliest in the Valley: grass, fountains, sculpture, strolling pedestrians and no cars, a place made for lingering. Coyote Cafe’s neighbors were the Backstage restaurant upstairs, known for its lahvosh pizza, AZ88 from 1988 and, from 1992, the Spanish restaurant Tapas Pepin next door.
The night the lights went out. The 1991 review ended in the dark. During dessert the whole Civic Center lost power, and the critic paid and walked out of a blacked-out Coyote Cafe, a coincidence the paper did not let pass.
The storefront that buried five restaurants
Coyote Cafe opened at the top of a trend and lived long enough to watch it cool. In November 1991 New Times was already asking whether Southwestern cuisine was passé, noting that the national eye had moved on to the Pacific Northwest and that most of the Valley’s imitators were cooking it badly. A cafe built on the daily inventions of one chef was exposed when that chef left, and the early 1990s were not forgiving downtown: the Scottsdale Galleria, the luxury mall on Scottsdale Road, opened in 1991 and was dead by 1993. The press we found does not record Coyote Cafe’s last night or the reason given, only that its storefront had a new tenant by December 1993.
What followed is better documented than the cafe itself. Laguna Cafe, reviewed on December 8, 1993, as recently installed in the old Coyote Cafe spot, was a dinner-only room with blond maple chairs, umbrella-shaped light fixtures and whale photographs, and a better kitchen than its happy-hour signs suggested. By October 1995 the Charcoal House had taken over with Buffalo wings and onion rings, and New Times noted that two restaurants had already folded in the space in two years. Tulupa arrived in October 1996; the next spring the paper wrote that the location had buried four restaurants in five years. The Mafia Factory, an Italian place, came next, and in July 1999 New Times devoted a column to the curse: the storefront next to Pepin and downstairs from Backstage, it said, had just lost its fifth venture in eight years. “Even the mob couldn’t wring a profit from this spot.”
The record goes quiet on the storefront after that. The 7373 building kept changing hands around it: a rock club called Static in 2003 and 2004, the Blue Moose sports bar by 2010, Orange Table until 2014, Jewel of the Crown until 2025, and a gelato shop that is still there. Which of those used Coyote Cafe’s room, the sources we found do not say.
Honest assessment: Coyote Cafe matters less for any dish than for what it shows about the 1980s in Scottsdale. It was the downtown, independent, chef-driven answer to the Southwestern craze that the resorts were monetizing, and it worked as long as the chef stayed. Its afterlife, a storefront that could not keep a tenant on one of the prettiest blocks in the city, is the more useful lesson for anyone signing a lease on the mall.