What was Davanti Enoteca?
Davanti Enoteca was a Chicago wine bar that came to Scottsdale for nine months and left behind one of the most talked-about dishes of the decade.
It opened in early August 2012 at 6316 N Scottsdale Road, near the Lincoln Drive corner, in the building that had been the Quilted Bear, Dale Anderson’s ladies-lunch institution, from 1974 to 2009. The owner was Francesca’s Restaurants Group of Chicago, which had already brought its Mia Francesca chain to the Valley. New Times called Scottsdale the third Davanti location when it opened and the fourth when it closed; either way, it was a branch of an out-of-town concept, billed as a small-plates wine bar.
What made it local was the chef. Peter DeRuvo had cooked at Sassi below Pinnacle Peak, at Prado in the Montelucia resort and, briefly, at Cuoco Pazzo in Old Town, and by 2012 he was the Valley’s best-known Italian cook without a kitchen of his own. At Davanti he wrote a long list of shareable modern Italian plates: housemade pastas, seared octopus, crispy ribs with saba, truffle egg toast, and the focaccia di recco, a Ligurian cheese-filled flatbread served with local honeycomb that he nicknamed Scottsdale Crack. The wine list carried 30 wines by the glass, 30 whites and 48 reds by the bottle, heavy on Old World Italy.
The reviews were unusually warm. Phoenix New Times’ September 2012 First Taste was headlined “Believe the Buzz; It’s Sensational,” and told readers to get there fast before the place became everyone else’s favorite. They did not get the chance for long. On May 21, 2013, New Times reported that Davanti had shuttered after nine months, a week after the same group closed its Mia Francesca at DC Ranch. The address is now Fat Ox, chef Matt Carter’s Italian room, which opened there in 2017.
Our verdict: Davanti was a good restaurant that was built to fail on paper, and the dish people remember from it is still being made in Scottsdale.
What the menu and the room were
The focaccia came first. Every account of Davanti starts with the focaccia di recco: thin, baked golden and bubbly, filled with soft fresh cow’s-milk cheese, with a slab of local honeycomb melting on the side. PhoenixBites listed it at $16, plus $2 for the honeycomb; New Times paid $18 and said it was worth every cent. A PhoenixBites writer at an August 2012 media dinner thought it fell a little short of its nickname, which was the minority view in print.
Then the small plates. The New Times critic’s favorite was the polpo con rafano ($17), two seared octopus tentacles with fresh horseradish aioli over fingerling potatoes, celery root, Marcona almonds and cubes of finocchiona salami, which she wrote had no equal in the Valley. Roasted hearts of palm ($12) came with grilled tomatoes and lemon jam. Truffle egg toast ($12) had Fontina, asparagus and a yolk on top; crispy ribs ($12) came with saba, crushed hazelnuts and a Gorgonzola dolce slaw; and the pesce del giorno ($16) was sea bass with shaved fennel, grapefruit and Castelvetrano olives. The pasta to order was the housemade orecchiette ($15) with sausage, rapini, Pecorino and chiles. Dessert meant a dense goat cheesecake ($7) with salted caramel, or the Purple Pig panini of Nutella, banana and house-made marshmallow.
The drinks were serious. Beyond the wine list, the bar poured $12 cocktails such as the Cool Smoke (pisco, cucumber, egg white and mezcal), a jalapeño-tequila margarita and a watermelon caipifruta. Dave Johnson, who had built the all-Spanish wine list at Aaron May’s Sol y Sombra, ran the floor and the cellar.
The room surprised people. The old Quilted Bear turned out to be bigger inside than it looked from Scottsdale Road: several rooms of reclaimed wood, basket lamps, a wall of wine cases and leather booths, with denim-clad servers and a classic rock playlist.
The hours were generous. By February 2013, KTAR listed lunch on weekdays from 11 to 3, happy hour daily from 3 to 6, dinner every night until 10, and brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 3 with a make-your-own Bloody Mary bar.
The Chicago concept and the Scottsdale chef
Davanti’s story is a familiar Scottsdale one told unusually fast. An out-of-town group with a successful formula, here Francesca’s, whose Mia Francesca had opened at DC Ranch about fifteen months before Davanti closed, signs a well-known local chef, takes a famous address on Scottsdale Road and opens to the best press of the season. The rent and the build-out are set for a restaurant doing big numbers every week. When the numbers come in merely good, the out-of-town owner closes it.
DeRuvo later put figures to that. In a 2015 interview with New Times, after a year as Francesca’s corporate executive chef splitting time between the Valley and Chicago, he called Davanti underfunded. To make its numbers, he said, the restaurant needed $60,000 to $70,000 a week just to pay back the note; in nine months it did $1.5 million, and it still was not enough. The arithmetic works out to a little under $40,000 a week, which is a busy restaurant by most standards and a failing one by the terms it was built on. On the day it closed he told New Times only, “Sad stuff. We did good; great staff.”
The closing scattered the team in ways that show up elsewhere on this site. Johnson went straight to Aaron May’s Praying Monk on First Street as general manager and taught beer classes there that summer. DeRuvo went to Chicago and came back to Old Town in 2015 as chef at Evo, in the same Goldwater Boulevard room where his Cuoco Pazzo had failed four years earlier, and he brought the focaccia di recco with him under a plainer name.
The building moved on more slowly. The press we found records no tenant between May 2013 and 2017, when Matt Carter opened Fat Ox at 6316 N Scottsdale Road. That is the address’s third act in fifty years, after the Quilted Bear’s 35 years and Davanti’s nine months, and the corner at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive on the Paradise Valley border has been an expensive dining address the whole time.
Honest assessment: Davanti was one of the best new restaurants of the 2010s in Scottsdale, and it lasted a shorter time than some pop-ups. Nothing in the record suggests the food was the problem. It belongs on the list of Scottsdale restaurants that were reviewed as must-visits and closed before most people visited, and its focaccia with honeycomb is the rare dish from a closed Scottsdale restaurant that diners can still order.