What was Gabriella’s?
Gabriella’s Contemporary American Cuisine was a pandemic restaurant in the most literal sense: it existed because COVID-19 destroyed its owners’ previous business, and it closed before the pandemic was fully over.
It opened on August 28, 2020, at 10155 E Via Linda, Suite H134, in the Mercado at Scottsdale Ranch, the 1987 center at the east corner of Via Linda and Mountain View Road in Scottsdale Ranch. The owners were Anthony and Anna Barr, a married couple who had run two corporate catering and event companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, Fork & Spoon Productions and Above & Beyond Catering. When the spring of 2020 canceled every wedding and corporate event on their books, they laid off 50 employees. Anna proposed starting over somewhere else; they visited Scottsdale in April 2020, liked it, and moved that spring. By August they had a lease and a menu.
The room sat 40 inside, with a 60-seat patio that mattered more than the dining room in the first year, and it served 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day. Anthony cooked what Anna called upscale yet approachable cuisine: cheese-and-bacon-stuffed tater tots, a sweet corn and wild mushroom tamale with cumin crema and avocado salsa, a short rib grilled cheese on sourdough with white cheddar and crispy onions, a crispy chicken banh mi, a Dungeness crab and lobster roll that gave away where they came from, grilled New York steak, risotto, roasted half chicken, and praline crème brûlée. Tomahawk Tuesdays and Fried Chicken Fridays gave the neighborhood a reason to come on a schedule. There was a full bar with local beer and craft cocktails, a kids’ list, and a vegan and vegetarian section that Fabulous Arizona singled out in July 2021.
Who it was for: the Via Linda corridor, which had plenty of chains and a couple of family Italian rooms but almost nothing chef-driven between Mayo Clinic and the Mercado. The landlord thought so too; Whitestone REIT’s January 2021 release framed Gabriella’s as part of a migration of California restaurateurs to the center.
It did not last. The last coverage we found is from the end of 2021; by April 2023 La Fonda del Sol had moved into the suite. Our verdict: a sincere, better-than-average neighborhood bistro that arrived in the hardest year to open a restaurant and left without anyone writing it down.
What the menu and the room were
The sandwiches were the signature. The short rib grilled cheese ($16 on the online ordering menu that outlived the restaurant) was the dish every write-up led with: braised short rib, white cheddar, crispy onions, sourdough. The crispy chicken banh mi came with pickled vegetables and roasted jalapeños; the Dungeness crab and lobster roll was the Bay Area transplant’s calling card. Lunch on the patio with one of these was the way most of the neighborhood used the place.
The starters were the fun. Stuffed cheese-and-bacon tater tots, Impossible sloppy joe sliders, and the sweet corn and wild mushroom tamale, which New Times’ location page also flagged. Salads were an arugula and frisée and a Field of Greens; there was a chef’s soup daily. A sorrel chickpea cake with walnut pesto and red quinoa anchored the vegetarian side.
Dinner was steak nights and comfort. Grilled New York steak, seasonal risotto, grilled fresh catch, baked creamy pasta with baby scallops, pasta with lemon-sage grilled chicken, roasted half chicken with garlic jus and smashed potatoes. Google reviewers over the restaurant’s life also mention a beef Wellington, a chimichurri steak, a wedge salad with candied bacon and wings, and Fabulous Arizona’s 2021 feature praised the red wine-braised short ribs. The weekly hooks were Tomahawk Tuesdays and Fried Chicken Fridays. Desserts were praline and cream crème brûlée, strawberry shortcake and a hot fudge sundae.
The room and the rules. Forty seats inside, sixty on the patio, both reduced for distancing when it opened; dine-in and takeout from the first day, and an online ordering page that still lists a kids’ crustless PB&J. Hours were 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, unusually long for the corridor, and the phone was (480) 534-7625. Google’s aggregate when it closed was 4.4 stars across about 115 reviews, with complaints about flies through open patio doors and slow service during Arizona Restaurant Week, which it took part in.
The neighbors. The Mercado’s restaurant row at the time was Eggstasy for breakfast, Goldie’s Sports Cafe for the game and Voila French Bistro for dinner, all named in the same Whitestone release. Parking was the center’s own lot off Via Linda, never a problem.
The California migration that half happened
Gabriella’s arrived in a specific moment. In January 2021 Whitestone REIT, which had owned the Mercado at Scottsdale Ranch since 2013, put out a press release welcoming Gabriella’s and describing a migration of successful California restaurateurs to its Via Linda center: the Barrs from the Bay Area, alongside Eggstasy, Goldie’s and Voila. It was a real pattern in the 2020s. Arizona’s looser pandemic rules and cheaper rents pulled operators out of California, and landlords leaned on the story to fill space. The Mercado, a Spanish-style center from 1987 that had always lived on neighborhood trade, was 94.8 percent leased when Whitestone sold it to Ziff Real Estate Partners for $26.5 million a few years later.
The Barrs’ version of the story was personal rather than strategic. They had been married 18 years, had two children, and had built a 50-person company doing corporate events and weddings. The shutdown of March 2020 ended that in a month. “We take much pride in every dish that comes out of our kitchen,” Anna told AZ Big Media before the opening, and the coverage in the first year, AZ Big Media in August 2020, Mouth by Southwest and City Sun Times in September, Fabulous Arizona’s Restaurant of the Week in July 2021, reads like a neighborhood rooting for them. New Times listed the restaurant’s St. Patrick’s Day and Christmas specials in 2021.
Then the record goes quiet. There is no closing announcement, no last-day post that we could find, no line in the monthly openings-and-closings roundups. What exists is the suite’s next tenant: by April 2023, diners on Tripadvisor were describing La Fonda del Sol, the Shea Boulevard Mexican restaurant that had been at Scottsdale Road and Shea since 1978, as newly moved into the Mercado, and its Instagram gave the address as 10155 E Via Linda, Suite H134. The 3,043-square-foot space is the same one. The closing therefore fell between the end of 2021 and the spring of 2023, most likely in 2022, and that is as precise as honesty allows.
The epilogue is not kind to the suite. La Fonda del Sol lasted three years there, changed hands, and closed in May 2026, and the space went back on the leasing flyer. Of the four restaurants in the 2021 release, Eggstasy and Goldie’s remain; Voila and Gabriella’s do not.
Honest assessment: Gabriella’s was a good idea for Via Linda, a chef-owner cooking real food in a corridor that eats mostly at chains, and the short rib grilled cheese and the tamale were worth the drive from the Shea corridor. It opened at the worst possible time, in a center where the patio carried the business, and it closed without a word. It belongs in the lost column of our guide to what to eat in Scottsdale, among the pandemic-era rooms that deserved a second year.