What is Élephante Scottsdale?
Élephante is the restaurant that replaced a Crate & Barrel. On December 4, 2024, at 4 p.m., Wish You Were Here Group opened a 12,000-square-foot coastal Italian dining room at 7014 E Camelback Road, Suite 601, in the redeveloped south wing of Scottsdale Fashion Square, facing the porte-cochère on Camelback Road. It is the second Élephante. The first opened on a Santa Monica rooftop in 2018, built by the group’s founder Nick Mathers on the cooking of Pantelleria and the Aeolian Islands, and it became one of the Los Angeles rooms that people photograph more than they describe.
Mathers designed the Scottsdale version himself. You enter through an archway into an indoor-outdoor space planted with cacti and desert trees, hung with custom silk tapestries and macrame, anchored by a marble-topped bar, with a fold-away glass wall opening onto the patio and big banquettes for groups. The Arizona additions are a larger menu, with premium meats, sustainable seafood and family-style platters, and Bar Bambino, a cocktail lounge inside the restaurant with a curved bronze bar, a DJ and tableside cocktail carts, which opened three days after the dining room and exists nowhere else.
The kitchen belongs to chef Thomas Lim, a Zagat 30 Under 30 alumnus. The menu’s spine is the puccia, a baked-to-order puff-pastry bread with a hollow, steamy center, served with dips led by whipped eggplant; wood-fired pizzas on a long-fermented thin crust; house pastas from cacio e pepe to a fusilli pesto with pistachios; grilled octopus, diver scallops and whole lobster piccata; and, for Scottsdale, a 20-ounce dry-aged bone-in ribeye. Cocktails include an espresso martini flight, mezcal drinks and slushies.
The press treated it as the arrival it was meant to be. Phoenix Magazine named it 2025’s Best Import from Out of State and later used it, with Filthy Animal and SHIV, as a definition of vibe dining. Our verdict: the food is better than the concept requires, the room is the best-looking thing in the mall, and at dinner on a weekend you will not hear the person across the table.
How to use Élephante
Order the puccia first. It comes to the table puffed and golden, and the dips are the point: whipped eggplant is the signature (it was $15 at the Santa Monica opening), with a burrata and golden osetra version at $45 for people spending someone else’s money. Then a pizza; the opening coverage put the wood-fired pies at $20 to $24 and the pastas at $17 to $52 on the California menu, and the Scottsdale menu posts most prices only on the dessert and brunch pages. The margherita and soppressata are the standard pizzas, cacio e pepe and tortellini pomodoro the standard pastas, and the fusilli pesto with pistachio breadcrumbs is the one Phoenix Magazine singled out. Lobster can be added to the vodka-sauce pasta for $30.
Big plates for groups. The 20-ounce ribeye, the whole lobster piccata, grilled octopus and diver scallops with citrus butter are the family-style and splurge tier. Desserts are posted: tiramisu, chocolate torta and a pistachio sundae at $12, pavlova at $15, affogato and a prickly pear and lychee sorbet at $8.
Use the daytime menus. Lunch is Monday through Friday, noon to 3 p.m., with a three-course express lunch at $40 (branzino and grilled chicken carry small supplements) and, during Arizona Restaurant Week, a $55 three-course menu. Brunch is Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with garlic white shrimp ($20), burrata and stone fruit ($25), prosciutto and melon ($24) and a bottle of mimosas or Bellinis with a juice carafe for $48. These are the hours when the glass wall is open and the room is quiet.
Know the night. Dinner runs nightly; OpenTable listings close it at 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and midnight Friday and Saturday, with the kitchen starting at noon on weekdays and 10 a.m. on weekends, though the listings have shifted between snapshots, so check before you go. Bar Bambino runs a DJ on weekend nights and the whole room gets loud; reviewers who rate the food 4.7 stars on OpenTable say so repeatedly. Parties of 13 or more are booked as events.
Getting there. Use the south-side porte-cochère off Camelback, where there is valet and a garage, rather than the mall’s main decks. The restaurant shares the wing with Catch Scottsdale and Telefèric Barcelona, so the valet line on a Saturday is real. It is a short walk to the Fifth Avenue shops and the Waterfront, which makes it a dinner before an Old Town night rather than the night itself.
The Los Angeles invasion of Fashion Square
Élephante is one chapter in a plan. In 2019 Macerich rebuilt the north side of Fashion Square around luxury retail and two Los Angeles imports, Nobu and Zinqué, which opened into the pandemic and survived it. The south wing came next. On May 31, 2023, the mall and Wish You Were Here Group announced Élephante for the former Crate & Barrel, in the same wave as Catch Hospitality’s Catch Scottsdale and the Canadian chain Moxies, and Phoenix Magazine later described the whole migration as “an invasion of L.A. restaurants” that had dropped anchor at the mall.
The build-out took longer than promised. The listing said fall 2024; the doors opened on December 4, with dinner only from 4 to 11 p.m. and lunch and brunch to follow, which they did in 2025. Bar Bambino debuted on December 7. The timing was fine for Scottsdale, whose season starts with the holidays and peaks with the Phoenix Open, and by the following November the magazine’s Best New Restaurants list had made Élephante its out-of-state import of the year, praising the puccia and whipped eggplant, the long-fermented pizza crust, the pistachio pesto and the slushie cocktails.
What Élephante represents is the mall’s bet that Scottsdale’s dining dollars had moved from Old Town’s side streets to a porte-cochère with valet. The 2020s have proved the bet partly right: Catch opened next door in September 2025, Telefèric Barcelona in March 2026, and the magazine’s critics began using “virtually anything that’s opened at Scottsdale Fashion Square since 2019” as shorthand for vibe-driven dining, with Élephante, SHIV and Filthy Animal as the examples. That is a compliment to the room and a caution about the food’s place in the order of things.
What the record does not say is how the restaurant has changed since opening. Lim was named as chef at the opening, and we found no report of a change. Prices on the dinner menu are not published online, and OpenTable’s hour listings have moved between snapshots. We have reported what the group and the press put in print.
Honest assessment: Élephante is a very good version of a restaurant type Scottsdale did not have, the big coastal Italian room with a lounge attached, and it is the most pleasant place to eat inside the mall by a wide margin. The puccia is a trick that works, the pizzas are serious, and the daytime menus are a bargain against the dinner scene. The dinner scene is the product, though, and if you want to taste the food rather than attend it, come at noon.