What was Fog City Diner?
Fog City Diner was the Scottsdale outpost of one of the most copied restaurants in America, and it arrived about a decade too late to matter.
The original opened in San Francisco in 1985: a sleek, sharp diner for the sleek, sharp 1980s, as New Times put it, serving updated diner favorites alongside more inventive fare. Its menu headings, Small Plates and Large Plates, spread to restaurants all over the country. In the late 1990s the California group behind it, which also ran Mustards Grill and Betelnut, brought it to Scottsdale Fashion Square at 7014 E Camelback Rd. New Times counted the move as coming 13 years after the original, which puts the opening in 1998.
It did not come alone. In October 1998 the same group opened Bistecca next door, an Italian-accented steakhouse meant to be the first unit of a national chain. The two rooms shared a restaurant court in the mall, the same season Kona Grill opened its first location in Fashion Square, five years after the original P.F. Chang’s had proved that a Scottsdale mall could launch a concept.
Fog City Diner’s room looked the part: swivel stools along the counter, comfortable leather booths, vintage photographs of the Cliff House and the Golden Gate Bridge, a seafood case with oysters and crab legs, and a $29.95 souvenir sweatshirt. The menu ran all day, from jalapeno corn bread to a tamarind-sauced pork chop. Phoenix New Times reviewed it on April 1, 1999, under the headline “San Francisco Trite,” and said the diner was no longer a cool, cutting-edge destination but a place for shoppers to rest their Nordstrom bags.
By October 2002 both rooms were gone: Bar Louie had the diner’s space and Nick & Tony’s had Bistecca’s.
Our verdict: Fog City Diner was a competent copy of a famous original, placed where nobody could find it, at the exact moment its idea had become everyone’s.
What the menu was, and what to order
Start small. The best dish on the 1999 menu, by New Times’ account, was the grilled poblano chile ($5.95), stuffed with five cheeses, pine nuts, polenta and avocado, which the critic said suggested that somebody in the company once had an active culinary imagination. The jalapeno corn bread with sweet-hot pepper jelly beat the $2.95 garlic, leek and basil sourdough loaf. The seafood chowder ($5.95) was excellent and small. The rest of the Small Plates, a sesame chicken skewer and a thin moo shu pork, were not.
Then the Large Plates. This was where the kitchen earned its money: a grilled pork chop in a tamarind-accented tomato sauce ($14.95), a well-marinated skirt steak ($15.95) let down by prefabricated fries, a thick veal meatloaf with chile sauce and garlic mashed potatoes, and a moist sea bass oddly served in broth. Skip the $18 shellfish tray of five oysters, six shrimp and two king crab legs, the Titanic Iceberg Wedge, the reddened snapper poor boy and the $7.75 burger. Finish with the chocolate fudge pie ($5.50) or the crème brûlée with a chewy cookie.
Know the hours and the pace. The diner served lunch and dinner from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 11 on Friday and Saturday; the phone was 874-2300. At peak hours plates arrived with startling speed and busers cleared them the moment a fork went down. It was built for turnover, not lingering.
Steak went next door. Bistecca opened in October 1998 with an open kitchen under a copper-hooded grill and four cuts of beef. The porterhouse for two ($39.90) was 32 ounces, carved tableside as bistecca alla Fiorentina with a choice of sea salt, wild oregano, grilled lemon and parsley, or balsamic. The rib eye for two was $37.90 and a 12-ounce filet $16.95, with $3.95 sides like Parmesan mashed potatoes and haystack potatoes. New Times called it the moderately priced steakhouse it had been hunting for. Four months later the porterhouse was $50, the rib eye $48 and the filet $21.95, and the paper said so. For where the city eats steak now, see our Scottsdale steakhouse guide.
The concept that came 13 years late
New Times framed Fog City Diner as a story about the Valley’s place in the national pecking order. Some Oscar-nominated films reached Phoenix eight months after Los Angeles, its April 1999 review said, Broadway shows three years after their runs, and a wildly successful Bay Area restaurant had waited 13 years to open a branch. Had it come in 1985, the critic wrote, the locals would have been stunned; by 1999 its imitators had already fed everyone the same food. The operators seemed to know it, the review suggested, which is why they put the diner in Fashion Square rather than a freestanding building on Camelback Road. A reader called the critic’s voice mail to say he had missed the boat. In May the critic answered in print: no second thoughts.
Bistecca was the more ambitious bet and, at first, the better restaurant. The company planned to roll it out across America if the Scottsdale unit worked. By April 1999 its prices had climbed toward Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris, and the record of the next three years is thin: in December 2000 it was still open, the setting for a New Times lunch with the mall’s Santa Claus.
The ending is documented only from the other side. On October 31, 2002, New Times reviewed Nick & Tony’s, which it described as a newcomer to the space abandoned by Bistecca, and noted that its owner, Chicago’s Restaurant Development Group, also ran Bar Louie next door in the former Fog City Diner location. The paper blamed the building. The restaurants were buried in a tiny cubby off a valet turnaround that looked like a delivery bay, and that layout had been blamed for the failure of the first restaurants in the space: “the fine Bistecca, Fog City Diner, and Hops!” The press we found does not say when either of the first two closed, or what reasons their owners gave.
Honest assessment: this is a 1990s story about chains discovering Scottsdale, and the Fashion Square restaurant court as a place where concepts went to be tested. P.F. Chang’s and Kona Grill left that mall as national companies. Fog City Diner and Bistecca left no trace but two New Times reviews and a complaint about the driveway, and the San Francisco original outlived its Scottsdale branch by more than two decades.