What was Fred’s at Barneys New York?
Fred’s was the restaurant upstairs at Barneys New York, the luxury department store that opened at Scottsdale Fashion Square, 7014 E Camelback Road, on October 15, 2009. It sat on the second floor of a 60,000-square-foot store that anchored the mall’s new 100,000-square-foot east wing, the far end of Old Town where Fashion Square meets Scottsdale Road.
It was the third Fred’s, after the restaurants in Barneys’ Madison Avenue and Chicago stores, and it was named for Fred Pressman, the late son of Barneys founder Barney Pressman. The formula traveled intact: a white-tablecloth dining room inside a fashion store, a stylish bar, and a menu built for people who had come to look at Balenciaga boots and wanted lunch before the shoe department.
Phoenix New Times critic Michele Laudig described the cooking as mostly Mediterranean-inspired and the crowd as the ladies who lunch, with a twist: the menu also fed the hungry, with hearty pastas, pizzas and entrées, so that Fred’s, as a friend of hers put it, caters not only to the lady who lunches but to her pool boy too. The room felt, she wrote, like a chic, retro airplane hangar, with smooth wooden panels running down a curved ceiling and booths along the windows looking over palm trees and rooftops to the mountains.
It lasted less than two years. Fred’s closed on September 9, 2011, in the same month as Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, which had opened in the same expansion, and the store that housed it closed in 2016. Our verdict: Fred’s was the most polished department-store restaurant Scottsdale ever had, and its short life says more about the economics of a second-floor dining room in a mall than about the food.
What the menu and the room were
The view was the reservation. The dining room ran the length of the store’s second floor, with tables down the middle and booths along the windows. Laudig called the booths the place to be: a second-story view of palm trees, rooftops and jagged mountains, with the traffic of Scottsdale Road just below and quietly far away. It did not feel like the mall, she wrote, and it felt almost like a private club.
Brunch was the deal. Sunday brunch was a generous prix fixe: a soft drink, sparkling wine, mimosa or Bloody Mary (top-shelf vodka, she noted), an entrée with a side salad, freshly baked pastries, scones and bread, dessert and coffee. The kitchen made its own bagels, served as a bagel club with smoked wild salmon and whipped cream cheese, and poached eggs alla campagna came on rustic bread in a garlicky tomato sauce. Crème brûlée with berries and profiteroles with chocolate sauce were the safe endings; a blueberry panna cotta with key lime mousse and an apple cobbler were not.
Order the seafood. The kitchen did its best work with fish. Enormous seared sea scallops came with roasted potatoes and sautéed peppers, and a special of halibut, scallops and large macaroni in spicy tomato sauce had Laudig’s table jousting with their forks. The niçoise, with fingerling potatoes, olives, egg and seared rare tuna crowned with an anchovy, was one of the better versions in town. Grilled hen of the woods mushrooms with Parmesan and arugula arrived, unannounced, on a blanket of prosciutto.
The rest was competent. Entrée salads were what the shoppers ordered, and the chopped chicken salad with pear and haricots verts came overdressed. The pizzas had a thin, crisp Neapolitan crust that deserved a simple Margherita more than the prosciutto-and-arugula version. Chicken balsamico with broccoli rabe and mashed potatoes was well prepared and forgettable. The review’s honest bottom line was that nobody needed to drive across the Valley for Fred’s, but anyone already in the store, or near Camelback Road, had a lovely, classy place to sit.
Who went. Shoppers, the lunch crowd from the offices around the mall, and a happy-hour trade at a good-looking, well-stocked bar placed, as Laudig observed, a few steps from the designer handbags. The press we found does not name the Scottsdale kitchen’s chef or publish its prices.
A New York idea on the second floor of an Arizona mall
Fred’s arrived at the top of a bet. Fashion Square broke ground on its east wing in December 2007, before anyone in Scottsdale was using the word recession, and opened it in October 2009 into the worst of one. The wing came with a full dining program: Barneys and Fred’s, Marcella’s Italian Kitchen from Columbus restaurateur Cameron Mitchell, and Modern Steak, all set to open with the wing. New Times’ preview that September promised shopaholics they could splurge on sandwiches, entrée salads, pastas, pizza and seafood after drooling over Martin Margiela jackets.
The concept was sound and old. Dining in a department store, as Laudig wrote, keeps shoppers on the premises to refuel, and Fred’s had made that work inside Barneys in New York and Chicago. Our read is that a Scottsdale mall is a different animal: people drive in, shop and drive out, and a second-floor dining room has to give them a reason to stay. When Fred’s closed on September 9, 2011, Laura Hahnefeld of New Times found a Barneys associate who could not divulge any reason. Marcella’s closed downstairs the same month, and Modern Steak, the expansion’s third restaurant, followed in 2012.
The store lasted longer and ended the same way. New Times noted that rumors of a Barneys exit had circulated in recent years, and in February 2016 the Phoenix Business Journal reported that the store would close that May, which the company confirmed; there were no plans to relocate. On September 29, 2018, Apple opened its Fashion Square store in the former Barneys space on the southeast side of the mall, facing Scottsdale Road, which is the clearest possible statement of what that corner of the mall is for now.
What the record does not say is who cooked in Scottsdale, what the dishes cost, or how many seats the room held; the reviews we found give the food and the view and nothing about the business. The New York Fred’s is associated with chef Mark Strausman, whom the Pressman family brought in to build it, but the press we found does not connect him to the Scottsdale kitchen.
Honest assessment: Fred’s was a good restaurant in the wrong building. It brought a real New York house style to the 2010s Scottsdale mall and executed it well enough that its critic liked it and regulars loved the Sunday brunch, but a dining room on the second floor of a department store depends on the store, and Barneys never became the destination in Arizona that it was in Manhattan. It belongs in the lost column next to its expansion-mates, a short, well-dressed chapter of Fashion Square’s long history.